Johannesburg

Jo’burg was never intended to be a destination in our trip. It enjoys a very poor reputation for tourists, indeed, as you try to make bookings you find yourself forced to consider alternatives like Pretoria. Further, my original intention was to arrive in Jo’burg at midday and fly out to Perth in the early evening. However, the Perth flight was full so an overnight stay was mandated. This turned out to be fortuitous as it was here that we discovered the fraud covered in another post, probably at least 24hours earlier than if we had flown on directly to Perth because our guest house in Margaret River did not have wi-fi so it would have been very difficult to have done all the things I had to do related to the fraud let alone discover the fraud in the first place.
We stayed at The Grace Hotel at Rosebank. This is perhaps more used to handling business travellers but it has the benefit of being in a relatively secure area. It is also connected to a very good shopping mall so shopping is also secure.
We had already decided that we would use Johannesburg as a rest day so we just anticipated using the time to catch up on blogging plus some telephone calls via Skype. In the event things turned out somewhat differently.
In the early afternoon we went round the mall which was sort of OK. On arriving back at our room I decided that I would follow up on my promise to the guy who had let us on to the train to Jo’burg to get as many details of our payment and forward them to him. This is when we discovered the fraud, which is covered in one or our other posts. Suffice it to say that I was on the phone for some considerable time. Thank heavens for Skype! If I had had to use my mobile or the hotel phone the costs would have been horrendous, I shudder to think. We pretty much got the fraud issue put to bed in a couple of hours. All I had to do was to wait for a fax, get both Marion and I to sign it and return it to our bank. This we got done before we went to dinner. What we did not complete was getting all the information on my payment to the train company. To do this we would have to go to the Jo’burg agent of the bank tomorrow and retrieve a fax with giving the required information, the bank not being allowed to fax it to me direct at the hotel.
In the meantime we decided to take evening dinner in the hotel. We went down to the restaurant only to discover we were the only guests, not a good omen we thought. However, no excuse for bad service at least and we quickly had our menus. The menu turned out to be one of those upmarket hotel pretentious menus which baffled you with what you were actually being offered by using an almost totally unknown vocabulary. Why is it that restaurants feel obliged to baffle the punter with obscure terms in a different language which when translated still do not make sense and often which their own waiters can not translate.
This was exacerbated by an overpriced wine list which was headed by a wine recently released and which I had tasted three days earlier and had found no great merit in. It cost R1,650 or Sterling 120 in real money. While this wine is being promoted by the winery that produced it as something stellar in my view it is reasonable but nothing spectacular. It is all very well a winemaker trying to do something new, in this case blend I think it is 9 grape types, some from the Bordeaux region and several more from the hotter Mediterranean regions. Perhaps I am wrong but at Sterling 120 a bottle and a very poor tasting I am not impressed
and I am a little surprised that any sommellier worth his salt is buying it. Wine makers should be allowed to experiment but sommelliers should protect the public from their less successful experiments.
Actually we ended up by having a pretty reasonable meal and with a good red wine whose name seems to have escaped my notes. And so to bed.
Next morning we caught up on some blogging and e-mails after which we had to go to the banks partner in Jo’burg to get my fax. I assumed I would need to be at the bank for a maximum of 30 minutes. Wrong! A bank seems incapable of doing anything in reasonable time. It turned out that the fax machines in the UK and Jo’burg were incompatible and so in the end e-mails had to be used which caused some security hiccups to start off with. Thirty minutes turned into about ninety,
We waited in a visitors room in one those very quiet visitor offices in a beautiful designer building in a landscaped environment. All the employees moved about quietly and with quiet intent written in their step and demeanour. The dress code was very business oriented and the young lady we were looked after by was the sole of discretion and efficiency. She kept us informed of what was happening and eventually triumphed having used her intelligence to produce a better solution to my problem than had originally been envisaged.
Back at the hotel we hurriedly faxed the bank details to the railway manager, we grabbed a quick late lunch, made a few necessary small purchases and got back to our rooms to collect our bags and book out. We were on our way to Perth.