vertigo, chip rolls, ghosts and colour

Once my dirty shell toes are in the Cape we'll get to that contrast of cities that fuels this blog but for now we're setting tone, taping out the door frames and cutting in...building context. We'll get stuck in with the roller brush soon enough. Bear with me.

Johannesburg is a ghost and rock all at once. Or rather a specter and a highveld koppie. The one is real and solid. It just is, it glistens under rains, warms up in the sun, erodes and grows. Its just a place. The other is the fear of a place. The connotations. A certain ring in your ear and tweaking of your perception. This photo shows that beautifully. They say ghosts show up on film sometimes and you can see them here. Solid buildings and fluid vehicle lights. Nothing to fear, but an ominous feeling for some, an 'other worldliness' for others.

It's taken by Huw Mcdonald, a joburg photographer that knows a fair bit of both the city's rocks and ghosts. And its taken facing West along Market Street from the 50th floor of the Carlton Center, a 70's monolith in downtown Johannesburg. I went up there again today to show friends, an ozzie and a capie/namibian, both living in London. The Johannesburg in their heads and the one they walked through and looked over today are two very different places. I suppose that's true for any place but it seems so much more so here.

The mining and banking strip down Main street's like a baby Wall street. It's about 10 blocks long and three blocks wide. All water features, security guards and sidewalk cafes. People from Standard, FNB, Zurich, Anglo, Billiton, government and a hundred other companies big and small. You bump through crowds of suits with take away coffee in one hand and a cell phone in the other. If you don't believe me you have some ghosts to excise. Come down and see. "Man, this is a choice city", commented the capie. Up on Carlton later, reeling a little from vertigo and the lurching express lift, he was commenting on the colour of it all. He put it so simply and beautifully, I wish I could capture it here. He has that thick and interesting accent of a South African in London. Heavy with its Afrikaans roots but full of the questioning inflection of antipodean friends and words from London's own international lexicon. He stared out at the city in wonder, a good two feet from the thick glass and the 150m drop to the streets. In his head he had pictured it bleak and colourless. But in reality it was all bright colour. Perhaps, he wondered, it was the walk in the streets that had given context.

If you haven't been up the Carlton you really should go. It is a little adventure. From the heaving insides of the mall you wedge along escalators and look down on shoppers and lunch eaters and CD browsers. I remember walking around Sandton City as a kid, passages crammed like London subways. It still feels like that in the Carlton. And from the triple volume bowl of people the masses veer right to more lunch spots and deposit you at a quiet little glass booth. R 7.50 per ticket and you get to push the call button yourself. Standing at the door 50 floors of air swirls around before the door opens for you. The lift is pretty inside, face lifted, with only one button that lights up. 50.

And it is a childish rush to watch the red number click quickly up from 0 and feel the lift sway a little and accelerate. And stop. Getting out the lift is quite normal, it could be the 20th floor, or the second. But swing left and the light and view rush along the corridor from the floor to ceiling glass windows 15 meters away. That same view from Huw's picture but rushing at you, pushed along by clear blue sky squeezing up against the tower, and then that lovely feeling of vertigo as you walk across the polished floor to the glass and peer back along Main. Its cool as hell, you really should go.

My friend drove into town a little nervously and waited for me at the corner of Mclaren and Fox so I could jump in and show her cheap parking. In the two minutes she'd been double parked a metro cop had already blipped her and we edged through the traffic to the open lots where safe parking is cheap. Next to the Mag court there's a square of dirt attached to a motor mechanic's, a grumpy man called Luis. Parking is seven bucks in the sun but its safe. My friends shed valuables and stashed handbags in the boot and we began the 10 block walk to Carlton. The idea was to grab a cheap lunch and a few minutes on the viewing deck.

Between Anglo American's marble walls and prancing statues the renovated Main Street Mall and outdoor mining museum begins and runs the 10 blocks to Ghandi Square. We walked along it and then detoured a few blocks down Simmons to Al Baraqa. The best, and biggest chip rolls, bunnies and toasteds in the city. You have to sidle up the to line at the counter and your cash buys you a little paper number and gentle shove back onto the street where you wait for your bundle of wax paper and ton of slap chips. Freaken great!

We took those greasy packets all the way across Ghandi square, under the nose of young lawyer Ghandi's statue, between the hundreds of roaring double decker buses that snake out from there and into the consumer chaos of the Carlton Mall.

Its like a cable car to a concrete idol rather than a rock one. But the views still tug at me. A view on a world full of promise and working things. I know our land is creaking. From that mountain to this tower it is tripping up and struggling and we feel and see every vaulter. But standing on the top of Carlton, with a little of God's perspective, you can see so much work manifest. Clean streets, running buses, hundreds of working traffic lights, metro cops on honest patrol, offices 100% let and chock full with good people working.

It's an eye opening little walk across Ghandi and up the Carlton and I will think of it often on Loop and Long and the other Market....