Finally! Our African backpacking adventure is underway. Just a bit of background, my Mom and I have had plans to travel through Africa for several years. That plan materialised last summer when we booked flights to South Africa in August 2011. I flew out a week earlier to Cape Town to say hello to some special people and revisit the city that captivated me for a year and a half. When I arrived I called home to let Mom know I had arrived safe and I remember the feeling of being told that mom had pneumonia. Being 10,000 miles away at the bottom of Africa, with your mother in hospital with a life threatening virus, just before she was due to fly out to start a 5 week backpacker adventure was shattering for both of us. Petrified she could take a turn for the worse I bought a ticket from Cape Town and flew home as soon as I could. Luckily she recovered; however, she feared she would not cope with any hard-core travelling again. Once she regained her strength several months later she was determined to try again. By this time however, she had saved up enough Tesco air miles to buy two one-way First Class Tickets to Joburg with British Airways. We would be arriving in style!

We flew out of Heathrow in early August. Checking into the First Class Lounge was possibly the most novel way to start a gruelling backpacking trip through Africa. We arrived several hours earlier to take advantage of a free three course meal, a free back massage and best of all unlimited champagne! We were already tipsy when we boarded the flight to receive another three course meal and yet more champagne! Flying coach will never be the same again now I know how the 1% travel. I'm sure our overenthusiasm and excitement amused the other passengers and staff. It was like being upgraded from Butlins to Club Med! We met Sarah at the airport who had flown in straight from Beijing to join us on our adventure and spent the next few days catching up as we hadn't seen each other for 2 months.

Joburg has a reputation of being dull, dangerous and unattractive and I must say passing through several times, it has always lived up to its bad name. However, I did do two things I have wanted to do for years by visiting the incredible Apartheid Museum and Soweto. The Apartheid museum will leave you speechless, raw and emotional. A similar effect occurs in Nelson Mandela's old house and the Hector Piertson Museum, dedicated to one of the students killed in the Soweto uprising in 1976 who was protesting against Afrikaans being the main language which subjects were to be taught in, instead of English. Nowhere makes you feel quite as uneasy as South Africa does and the scars of the past are still very much there. Saying that, it is a beautiful country and generally full of wonderful people.

After returning from Soweto, we got our taxi driver to drop us off at a restaurant in Sandton, a wealthy, supposedly safe area in Northern Jo'burg, stupidly we didn't return to the hotel first to drop off our bags and take the bare minimum out with us, which is protocol in Joburg if you are going anywhere by foot. Sure enough we encountered a terrifying situation on our five minute walk home to the hotel. Two men approached us with knives and robbed us blind. Luckily they JUST robbed us because it's not uncommon to get killed for your iPhone. This all caused unnecessary stress and hours wasted cancelling cards and phone. The worst part of that experience was the confirmation of the negative publicity and images that surrounds Africa. I had convinced Sarah to fly from her safe haven of China and travel with us in Africa. She has no intention of travelling anywhere outside of Asia so I had to coax her into the idea of a fun African adventure. Two days into the trip we're robbed at knifepoint which just confirms the critic's scepticism of Africa. I felt personally responsible! But needless to say we were all shaken up but we were grateful we weren't physically hurt. The experience only confirmed my Cape Town bias that Jo'burg sucks! People from Jo'burg will criticise Cape Townians for being lazy hippies while Cape Townians will tease them for being materialistic and boring. I'm glad I fatefully ended up in Cape Town, saying that, Soweto and the Apartheid Museum were incredibly insightful.