You will be picked up from your hotel/closest pick-up point in either Sandton or Rosebank and taken in a luxury air-conditioned vehicle for a historical sightseeing tour to Soweto, South Africa's largest township. A professional English-speaking guide will accompany you on this tour.
This 'Rise to Freedom' combines the sightseeing tour of Soweto as well as the Apartheid Museum. See all the major points of interest that figured during the Soweto uprising against apartheid.
Your coach will drive you past African merchants of traditional medicines, a typical four-roomed dwelling, an informal settlement, affluent suburbs, a creche and an old-age home.
Drive past celebrity houses in a plush suburb called Beverly Hills, where Soweto's professionals live, from attorneys, doctors, journalists, teacher, social workers and musicians to sports personalities.
Some of the other highlights of this tour are:
Hector Pieterson Memorial: This memorial is a grim testimony to Hector Pieterson, who was just 13 and was one the first students to be killed during the 1976 Student Uprising in Soweto. He has since become a symbol of youth resistance to apartheid.
Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital: This is the largest hospital not just in Africa but in the world, occupying 173 acres, with 3200 beds and 6760 staff members. Various community development projects are run here and everyday, more than 2,000 patients check into Baragwanath Hospital.
Apartheid Museum: This is a guided tour. Discover racial segregation, the Soweto uprising, ANC history, solitary confinement, and birth of a new democratic country in this first of it’s kind, newly built museum. You will receive your entry cards based on your skin colour and only then enter through steel gates specifically allocated to you. Constricted by wire cages containing identity documents that define your racial superiority or inferiority, it teaches you how to live by rules. Move on and reach a room filled with white rope nooses, each one used for 121 ‘politicals’ hanged by the apartheid regime. Using film, text, audio and live accounts, the museum paints a vivid picture of the life under apartheid, and the struggle of Nelson Mandela and hundreds of South Africans for equality.
End your tour with a visit to a ‘shebeen’ (tavern) and you can enjoy some refreshments (own expenses).
At the end of the tour, you will be dropped back at your hotel/closest drop-off point.