Car Rental in Johannesburg with Comfort Car Hire

JOHANNESBURG is where the money is. And the action. It's the most powerful commercial centre on the African continent. It is an African city that works: the phones dial, the lights switch on, you can drink the water, there are multi-lane freeways, skyscrapers, conference centres, golf courses. If you should get lost, ordinary people on the street speak English. Cellphones are everywhere. You can send e-mail from your hotel room, you can bank any foreign currency, you can watch CNN, and should you fall ill, the hospitals have world-class equipment and doctors who can be trusted with a scalpel.

Johannesburg generates 16% of South Africa's GDP and employs 12% of the national workforce. It has a financial, municipal, roads and telecommunications infrastructure that matches leading first world cities, yet the cost of living is far lower. The World Economic Forum rates the banking sector the sixth most sophisticated in the world.

Johannesburg hosts every form of commercial activity from financial services to heavy industries and mining. There's hardly a major international company doing serious business in sub-Saharan Africa that has not looked to Johannesburg as the gateway to the continent.

Provincial capital: Johannesburg is the capital of South Africa's smallest - and richest - province, called Gauteng, a Sesotho name meaning "Place of Gold". Gauteng makes up just 1,4% of South Africa's land area, but it is home to more than a fifth of the population and produces a third of the country's wealth. Gauteng is predominantly urban, consisting chiefly of industrial and mining satellite towns surrounding the twin cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital (the legislative capital is Cape Town) is itself merging into Johannesburg's outer suburbs.

Modern city: Johannesburg is the most densely populated and urbanised municipality in South Africa, home to 3 225 800 people in 1 006 900 households. And that population is growing swiftly: 218 600 households were added between 1996 and 2001. Some 97% of households have access to piped water (a high figure for Africa), 82% have flush toilets connected to the municipal sewerage system, and 85% have electric lightning in their homes.

Dry city: Johannesburg is one of the world's few large metropolitan areas to be based on neither an ocean port nor a major river. The sea is a six hour drive to the east. The nearest major river. the Vaal River, is a two hour drive to the south. Ironically, the city is ranked as the biggest port in southern Africa, thanks to an export/import railway freight facility called City Deep.

High city: Johannesburg sits on a high-altitude inland plateau 1 753 metres (6 000 feet) above sea level. This means it takes a minute longer to boil an egg here, and visiting athletes must arrive a week early to acclimatise. (Just ask Lennox Lewis, who lost his world heavyweight title to the Joburg altitude.) But the air's not so thin that the average person will notice the difference.

Warm city: The weather's balmy 10 months of the year, generally warm, but not as stiflingly hot as many other African cities. Nights however, can be chilly, particularly in winter. Seasons are the reverse of the northern hemisphere, with summer from October to March, and winter from June to August.

Young city: Johannesburg is, by city standards, a mere teenager. It started life in 1886 as a gold-rush shanty town, expected to last no more than a decade. But the gold proved so rich that disputes flared over who controlled Johannesburg, culminating in a war that changed military history - the Anglo-Boer war. By the nineteen twenties, the city had outpaced every rival to become Africa's major commercial centre.

Big city: Johannesburg's municipal area is BIG. It is often compared with Los Angeles, with which it shares a similar sprawling topography, linked by huge highway interchanges. Los Angeles covers more area, but it's a patchwork of independent local governments. Johannesburg is a single municipality that covers over 1 645 square kilometres. Sydney's central municipality, by comparison, covers 1 500 square kilometres. One recent study concluded that if a resident of the southern-most area, Orange Farm, were to walk to the inner city, the journey would take three days.

What does this mean for tourists? Because there are no mountains or estuaries to block growth, the city is a shapeless sprawl in which places of interest are often widely separated. There is no US-style city grid, but a ring of highways does provide some easily accessible points of reference for out-of-towners. The dominant forms of transport are the private car and the minibus taxi. Some 49% of road trips are made by private cars, 29% by taxis, 13% by buses.

Time zones: South Africa's time is two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. Johannesburg shares the same time zone as Cairo, Athens and much of Eastern Europe. When it is noon in Johannesburg, it is 2.00am in Los Angeles, 5.00am in New York, 10.00am in London, 6.00pm in Hong Kong, and 8.00pm in Sydney. Where is it? The precise answer is: 26° 08' S and 28° 14' E. If that doesn't mean much to you, Johannesburg is roughly a ten-hour flight away from most European cities, and a 14-hour flight away from the east coast of North America.

School holidays: During school holidays, large numbers of Johannesburgers flee to either the coast or the game parks, leaving the roads pleasantly snarl-free. The inner provinces and coastal provinces have different school holiday schedules, and private schools are free to choose their own timetables. The school holidays for government schools in Johannesburg during 2004 are 25 June to 19th July; 22 September to 4th October; and 3 December to the second week in January.
Cheap city: For a foreign visitor, Johannesburg is cheap. In 2002, an international survey of 22 leading cities found that Johannesburg was the cheapest to live in - less than half the price of London and a quarter the price of Tokyo. Prices are no longer quite as cheap, due to dollar weakness and the strengthening of the local currency, the rand. But visitors from Europe and the USA can rely on a rule of thumb that most locally produced goods will cost a little more than half what you would have expect to pay for the equivalent back at home.

Johannesburg or Joburg? Johannesburg is a bit of a mouthful, which is why South Africans invariably call the city "Joburg". The shorter name is creeping towards respectability: the municipality recently decided to use "Joburg" on all marketing and official stationery. There was talk at one point of giving the city an African name like Egoli, meaning "city of gold", until that name was hijacked by the country's longest-running television soap opera.

Languages: Johannesburg is South Africa's most cosmopolitan city, home to diverse population groups and to languages from throughout Africa. South Africa itself has 11 languages, all of them spoken in Johannesburg. But tourists will find that English is the predominant language of government, business and the media, and can be understood by most people. Road signs are mainly in English. South Africans speak British as opposed to American English, but the local variety has been influenced by African languages and some colloquialisms will require translation. The other principal tongues spoken in Johannesburg are the indigenous languages isiZulu, Afrikaans, Setswana and SeSotho. But there are significant numbers of Portuguese speakers from neighbouring Portuguese-speaking African countries, and growing numbers of French-speakers from West and central Africa. There are also large Asian minorities, including Indians and Chinese, who continue to speak their home languages.

Source: www.joburg.org.za