There are a couple things we avoid when we travel, namely, Segway tours and hop on/hop off bus tours.

I think we’re mostly trying to avoid activities where our tourist-status is obvious and unavoidable. Or we’re embarrassed to be those people. You know, now that I’m really thinking about it, maybe we’ve been too harsh in our avoidance, but this is the background from where we found ourselves, newly arrived tourists in Johannesburg.

Johannesburg, or Joburg, has a bit of a reputation.

Its violent history is well-documented and even today, it’s considered one of the more dangerous global cities. We didn’t experience cars not stopping at red lights at night, as we had read online, for fear of car jacking. In fact, we didn’t have any incidents or see anything particularly scary. However, safety and precaution is very evident in the city, as you’ll see very few people walking on sidewalks, especially at night, and in nice residential areas every house is surrounded by a huge, barbed-wire wall. Guards line the sidewalks outside restaurants at night, and people don’t stray too far from the crowds once the sun goes down. It’s a little unnerving.

At a funky boutique in 44 Stanley, an outdoor shopping and dining area with leafy courtyards filled with afternoon diners and shoppers, we spotted glass water bottles designed by a local artist. Etched on the glass was the phrase: “the safest thing about Joburg is the drinking water.” Again, not totally reassuring.

In general, we don’t hesitate to visit places that have a reputation for being dangerous. Usually, these reputations are leftover from old conflicts or wars, and we know that for most places, it takes a long time to recover such a tainted reputation. And of course, message boards and generic online articles tend to instil fear among tourists, which we normally go right ahead and ignore.

In Joburg, we kept coming across resistance to our apparently cavalier attitude.

Our hotel’s guard insisted that we wait inside the gate for our Uber at night, rather than on the sidewalk just a few feet away. “You don’t know who’s around at this time,” he warned us as we retreated behind the metal gate. Another Uber wouldn’t let us get out of the car on another very safe-looking sidewalk, instead driving us into a (guarded) parking area, closer to the door of the building.

So, with much trepidation and reservations of being those tourists, we bravely signed up for Joburg’s hop on hop off bus tour.

Maybe you’ll be unsurprised to hear, the bus tour is quite a popular attraction in Joburg. I think many people arrive looking for the most convenient way to see the city and with no public transportation so to speak, and heavy reliance on Uber, it’s actually cheaper and easier to scoot around town in a red and orange bus, as opposed to a walking tour or taking the subway, as we would typically do.

The tour covers most of the main attractions around the city, from the northern suburbs, through downtown, to the southern end of the city. Over the course of half a day, we explored the entire hop on hop off route, stopping to visit Joburg’s most famous sites. Among these include Constitution Hill, Carlton Tower (the tallest building in Africa), and the Apartheid Museum.

We also used the tour of the city to scope out interesting restaurants along the way and we eventually made our way back to Social Parkwood twice, confirming all previous evidence that one of our best skills in life is picking restaurants.

The audio tour, which played in the background, was similarly enjoyable, although it was more of a marketing spiel than a fully informative and objective overview of the city and its history. Fair enough. The bus is one of the ways tourists get to know the city so the audio tour can be as biased and rosy as it pleases. After passing through one particularly rough area of downtown, the guide recommended only visiting the area with an “experienced guide.” Rough translation: Don’t come here alone.

I’d say the highlight of the tour was simply driving around. We got a nice overview of the city, and drove by various famous buildings (including St. Johns Prep School, a converted monastery that goes down as the most beautiful high school we’ve ever seen) that wouldn’t find their way into any other tourism format. For our quick 24 hour stay, it was the most efficient way to get an overview of the city.

A lowlight of the day, no fault of the bus tour, was the Apartheid Museum.

We were really looking forward to visiting such an important museum, but it was poorly laid out and relied too heavily on text-dense posters, as opposed to multi-media or artifacts. I was so sick of reading poster after poster by the time we were out of there.

And, even though the museum is loosely organized chronologically, it was way too easy to read around the room in the wrong direction. By the end of exploring the museum, I had many more questions than answers, and spent the rest of the hop on hop off bus tour looking up some of the critical apartheid timeline and key players on my phone. The museum has so much potential and is such a critical part of South Africa’s history, that I’m sad it was not laid out better for visitors to gain a full perspective of the rise, impact, and collapse of Apartheid.

Disappointing museum aside, I’m here to say that I’m a somewhat reformed hop on hop off bus convert. I enjoyed the ease of the bus, and the prompt and convenient way to see a whole city in under a day. There is a hop on hop off bus that drives by our building in Singapore, and I’m kind of itching for a visitor so we can take another tour.

Now that we’ve bravely faced our bus fears, we only have one forbidden tour type, the dreaded Segway. We will let you know as soon as we bite the bullet and scoot away in a city near you soon.