About an hour out of town are the Sterkfontein Caves, which are much more impressive than the guidebooks say. Really big – er - caverns worthy of Indiana Jones, with proper stalactites/gmites and the place where all sorts of paleological finds were made. There’s a very swish museum nearby with lots of interpretation etched on lots of glass, it’s all very us-South African, almost as if they’d plonked a lot of lottery money down here.
It's part of a National Pek called grandly The Cradle of Humankind, which has lots of places they've found fossils and which they are trying to whizz up into something relevant and with-it
Th centre of the cradle is an even more lottery type project, the Maropeng, a sort of trendy museum which even has a sort of Plop Forest water ride which I think is supposed to take you through the four elements, before you learn about the bits of skeleton and fossil they have found which they then argue about. It's all in a big barn with yakking screens and flashing lights, probably confuses the hell out of any kids that get taken there. Australopithecus (thank you, spellcheck) is mentioned quite a lot, though there’s loads of earnest guff about the future and 'sustainability'. But like hardly anything else her it’s had money lavished on it with gift shops, cafes, nicely designed seating and health and safety. It’s all very Oxford Services. They need a bit of that elsewhere here.
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A bit like that Element place we went to in Belgium in 2004 then?
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