Joburg

Anyone at home?

Flying into Johannesburg in the late afternoon, the view from the plane is of a huge sprawling city - ten million people live here in the metropolitan area - fortunately for us we're staying at our Mandy's only 20 minutes away from the airport. We're in a suburb called Edenvale and Mandy's place is in a large gated community, my training runs consisted of tortuous routes circling the estate.  Glad of a chance to escape from the Johannesburg suburbs we took a trip out to an area nicknamed the 'Cradle of Humankind' and we went down a hole in the ground. About an hour and a half into the veldt in a not very special area of countryside is a site that contains the largest concentration of remains of early hominids, wow! 

Mrs Pies or Mr Pies - who knows?

 They've found lots of  bits of Australopithecus  Africanus, who were  the predecessors to  Homo Erectus and  Homo Sapiens,  including this young  lady whose skull was  found not too long ago  in the Sterkfontein  Caves where we were  now standing down in  the murky depths of an  underground network.  She was  discovered in  the late  1940's and  identified as  a lady,  she became known as Mrs Pies for some odd reason, however more recent analysis of her teeth, or lack of them, indicates that she might have been a man! Notwithstanding all of this we spent a fascinating hour or so in the cool underground chambers away from the African noonday sun. It seems that part of the reason that there were so many intact bits of skeleton down here was that they belonged to folk who had fallen down some of the many potholes present at the surface of the limestone complex and they'd failed to make it back up. 

Flying tonight!

Despite Johannesburg's bustling residential suburbs and teeming townships and vast industrial estates there are, nonetheless, some good sized parks and we visited the 300 acre Johannesburg Botanical Gardens (now dedicated to Walter Sisulu one of Nelson Mandela's buddies.) And focussing my binoculars on a flurry of activity in a distant group of tall trees I spotted a huge eagle. This was a Verreaux's Eagle one of the largest birds of the prey in the world. My photos were a bit fuzzy so this impressive snapshot is courtesy of Wikipedia. A couple of pairs of Verreaux's Eagles live and breed in the park but sightings are apparently not easy to come by. These birds take sibling rivalry to the ultimate - two eggs are laid and hatched but within days the stronger of the chicks kills its brother or sister!

Hot running!

 Joburg has plenty of  parkruns and Vicky's  sister took us to her  favourite at Gilloolys, a  former farm (owned by  Mr Gillooly) which is  now an attractive and  extensive recreational  park. Event number  248  started at 8 am but  even by then the  temperature had  started to rise, what's  more this is at altitude -  we were getting on for  6000 feet above sea  level - so it was hard work! Nevertheless we sped round and I finished in 23 minutes exactly, beating the existing V70 record by nearly two minutes. 

(Postscript 1: So.....it's well known that elite athletes use altitude training to enhance their performances; well it didn't work for me, on our return to Wales I felt as if I was running through treacle for the following week or so!) 

(Postscript 2: Unfortunately the skull illustrated above is not that of Mrs (or Mr) PIES, it's Mrs (or Mr) PLES the name being derived from 'plesianthropus' which was the initial latin name applied to this poor creature. My mistake, I misread my research source. And by way of additional information the skull was intact until its discovery when it was blown into fragments by a stick of dynamite, the archeologists carefully put it back together again with that endless patience that archaeologists must have.