Travel to Johannesburg

most commonly a simple transit night

Johannesburg is located in the central Gauteng province of South Africa.

This sprawling city is the commercial engine room for the whole region, a vast metropolis of over eight million people. It is on the one hand vibrant, innovative and cosmopolitan, whilst on the other being largely unattractive, disjointed and crime-ridden.

Founded in 1886 when an Auzzie prospector discovered what turned out to be the world’s largest gold seam, Johannesburg started life in a frenetic scramble for lucre.

The town developed in haphazard fashion, with various suburbs evolving on a racially divided basis. Since the end of apartheid these racial divisions have blurred slightly, with a diverse and fast-growing middle class, but divisions between rich and poor remain stark.

Most safari travellers try to get in and out of Johannesburg as quickly as possible, but there are some very interesting palaeontological sites at The Cradle of Mankind, as well as the usual museums and galleries.

If your flight connections through Johannesburg require you to overnight (which is particularly common for long haul arrivals from North America and connections between the safari areas and the tropical beaches of the Indian Ocean), then you may well choose to simply overnight out at the international airport, where there’s a number of large international hotels of the usual type.

If you fancy taking a little more of a look at the city, then you can brave the traffic and head in towards the nicer suburbs to the north of the centre, where there’s a good selection of higher quality hotels and some attractive smaller guest-houses.

Some of these options are sufficiently pleasant to make the prospect of staying longer and exploring the city actually quite alluring!

a couple of decent hotels in the airport