South Africa pt. 1 Johannesburg

South Africa is a very beautiful country that I was so lucky to get to travel to for 10 days with my best friend, Mr. Bugg, and Mrs. Anthony. Through a touring company called EF(Educational) tours, Fresno High takes a trip every two years. Mrs. Anthony and Mr. Bugg are the ones in charge of organizing these trips and taking students on them.  

The planning and fundraising for this trip started at the beginning of freshman year and continued until we went on the trip June 13-23, summer of 2024.  

21 hours on a plane there, and 21 more back, split up into a one-hour flight and two ten-hour flights, the ten-hour ones were like torture, honestly.  We landed in Johannesburg, South Africa, which was the first of three places we visited while there.  

The first day we were there we took a tour of Nelson Mandela's house that was converted into a miny museum, it was a very tiny house where he and his family lived but mostly where his second wife, Winnie Mandela, and children lived while he was a political prisoner on Robben Island for 27 years. People would come by the house at random times and just fire shots at the house even though he wasn't there. They knew children were there and fired with intent to injure Nelson Mandela’s family. Looking at the walls outside the house, you can still see the bullet holes in the brick. He was sent to Robben Island for opposing South Africa’s apartheid system when apartheid was happening, he refused to give up advocating for the people's rights and equality for all, even though the prison was made to break him. It was a good background for everything we would learn while being there. Then, after the museum, we ate a traditional African style buffet at the restaurant next door.  

The next day we went to a museum called “Cradle of Humankind” which was all about the evolution of earth and humans. Starting in one section about some of the first homo sapiens on earth from South Africa, then a boat ride going through and showing all the elements, and finally the last section with everything you could ever want to know about the history of humans. There were things about the history of earth, history of humans, evolution, statistics of things from recent times, just full of facts about almost everything it felt like. Then we went to the mall for a few hours, ate lunch, and shopped around. 

The last day we were in Johannesburg, we were technically on the way to Kruger which is about a 6-hour bus drive, and we stopped at places on the way. We stopped once to ride at a toboggan called Long Tom Toboggan, located at Misty Mountain. The views were beautiful on about a mile worth of track going down the mountain. The last stop before we reached Kruger was a beautiful gorge called Graskop Gorge, in Mpumalanga. We took a lift down into the gorge, hiked a small path that went in a circle looping around the bottom. The nature there is beautiful, the path was so nice temperature wise, and it was just gorgeous to witness.