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Most of the streets [photo] are narrow and untarred, sandy and occasionally eroded enough to fear for your car’s safety.  Only the main ones are tarred.  Small four-walled houses are lined up next to the road with unkempt gardens, fences [photo] that are falling over and usually one or more small children [photo] staring at you as you walk by.  They’ll wave back if you wave at them.

Clothes are drying over fences, TV antennas stick out from above the roofs, like one of those stubborn branches too high to reach when trimming a hedge.  Huge roughly painted numbers on the wall next to the front door denotes each family’s administrative position.

Occasionally you come upon a really fancy house where the old structure was pulled down and a new, proper house was built.  These houses are usually surrounded by high fences. Burglar bars and security gates cover every window and door on the property – similar to the houses in the richer suburbs.

There are usually not people sitting out on the stoeps of these houses, but all around these areas people are walking [photo] the streets, sitting outside houses, kids are running around and kwaito and rap hammers on endlessly from the taverns.

During the day, these taverns are not particularly full compared to your usual bar in town.  There will be one or two drunk young men who would want to have their picture taken.  It is at night when these taverns really becomes the places to be with the beer flowing and the music pumping late into the night.

Moving towards the north, down the valley lie Zolani [photo], an informal settlement with corrugated iron shacks and dirt roads that turns into a muddy mess when it rains.  Right across the road from Zolani you can spot the nicely built houses of Lavender Valley with their tarred roads and cemented sidewalks.