On your bike! Soweto tour is a hit with football fans (Feature)

By Clare Byrne May 9, 2010, 3:06 GMT

Soweto, South Africa - Clattering down a rocky lane in Soweto on bicycles. Children scatter as the cyclists bumps and grind past tiny brick houses.

'Mlungu, mlungu,' (white person, white person), a little girl with spiky braids shouts excitedly.

A group of 30 American and European students are on a two-hour tour of South Africa's most famous township, and the blue-black storm clouds assembling overhead have spurred them into a sprint.

They've just come from a beer tasting in a local shebeen (tavern) but there's still some grilled cow's head to sample and a museum to visit on this Tour de Soweto, which is in demand among World Cup visitors.

'Hamba, hamba (go, go!),' a group of women in wrap skirts shout encouragingly as rain starts to bucket down, riddling the dusty ground like bullets.

On a scale of 1 to 10 of tourist experiences in South Africa, with one being the least authentic, taking a bike tour of this former hotbed of the anti-apartheid struggle scores at least an eight.

Most of the other 200,000 or so tourists who visit the suburb situated 25 kilometres south-west of Johannesburg each year roll in and out in tour buses.

But more and more are answering the call by Lebo's Soweto Backpackers, the country's first black hostel, to 'get out of the car' and discover township life on bike.

Since Lebo Malepa, 24, began running the tours with a few borrowed bikes five years ago, thousands of people have rolled up their trouser ends and seen Soweto from the saddle.

The tour starts at the Backpackers in Orlando West district - political and sporting hub of Soweto.

It was here that revered former president Nelson Mandela lived with his ex-wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela before his nearly three-decade imprisonment for resisting apartheid.

It was also here that thousands of youths staged an uprising against the white supremacist regime in 1976, in which scores of people and hundreds wounded by security forces.

The helmeted horde climbs through streets of shoebox houses, past gaggles of school children, who reach out to give them high fives.

Barber shops specialized in chiskop (shaved head) cuts and salons offering Dark 'n Lovely hair treatments for women are doing a brisk trade on this Friday afternoon.

So are the shebeens.

Discarding their bikes in a heap outside a drinking shack made of tin sheets in various stages of oxidation, the tourists stop to sample some home brew.

There are no beer taps or glasses here. Alcohol is served in plastic pails or scooped-out calabashes.

A man sets down a pail of umqombothi, a beer made of maize and sorghum, before the visitors. Despite its acidic odour, it proves surprisingly weak and drinkable. For the teetotallers, there's a banana-flavoured, non-alcoholic version.

Called Ezimhlophe (also meaning white), this part of Soweto derives its name from the colour of the houses built by the apartheid government here in the 1960s, when blacks were barred from living in 'whites-only' Johannesburg.

Next stop is a workers hostel, one of dozens built across the city in the past to house migrant workers from rural areas.

A path has been cleared in the lane running through what is now a family hostel as two boys gird up for a race.

'They're competing for a girl,' Phillip Malepa, our guide and younger brother of Lebo, tells us as the boys pound past in their bare feet.

The stakes are not that high, as it turns out. The panting winner walks away with a mere 10 rand (1.37 dollars).

As the rain worsens, the visit to Hector Pietersen Museum, a history museum named after a 12-year-old boy killed during the 1976 uprising, is called off by general consensus.

But there's still time for some cow's head, a township favourite served on stalls, with spices and a maize dish called puthu.

Splashing through mud puddles has given the group an appetite.

'This is exactly what I wanted, ' Sarah Stanton, a 29-year-old Michigan native, says as she dabs a piece of meat in spice as demonstrated by Phillip. 'I love the realness of it!'

For Rosie Hunerwadel, 22, a French and religion student from Hawaii, the tour is an initiation in more ways than one. Before Soweto, she had never been on a bike.

'I would definitely recommend it to any of my friends,' she says happily, dismounting from a tandem.

Lebo is bracing for a surge in demand in June and July, when hundreds of thousands of foreign football fans descend on South Africa for the football World Cup.

A number of groups have already booked tours, 'but we still have some bicycles,' he says.

A two-hour tour costs 500 rand (68 dollars); a four-hour version costs 700 rand (95 dollars). During the World Cup there's a 50 rand increment on both.

For more information, visit: www.sowetobackpackers.com