usizo lwenkosi soweto tours

We pre-booked a tour with Ntombi for the 2nd of February and she called me the day before to confirm and again on the morning to explain she was slightly delayed by the traffic (She was meeting us at our hotel). The original plan was to travel by taxi-bus but as there was a bus strike that day these were very busy so she had arranged a driver and car for the day (at no extra cost). We started off at the Apartheid Museum (you really need to allow a couple of hours for this), we were then taken to a local outdoor cafe for a delicious lunch of chicken, wors, pap and chips. We then continued to visit Regina Mundi church (scene of the 1976 uprising), Oppenheimers Tower and Hector Pieterson Museum. We were then running short on time as we had spent a lot of time on the earlier attractions but we managed to get around to have a quick look at Mandela & Tutu's houses and also Orlando East before being dropped off tired but happy at our hotel. Definitely a unique experience and Ntombi was an excellent of informative guide. Make sure you allow some extra frunds for admission and lunch and ask lots of questions.

If anyone is after a great personnel tour of Soweto, then contact Ntombi on the following link, no thrills but just a interesting informative walk around Soweto, visiting a couple of resident to see how the people of Soweto live and their facilities. Also get to visit amongst other great places Nelson Mandela's house, Arc Bishops Desmond Tutu's house, and the place where Hector Peterson was shot and died, and the museum. I was actually travelling by myself and was finding it difficult to find a tour that wouldn't charge me the same price as for 2 people, plus most of those were for larger impersonal groups, this is one on one, or more if you want, fantastic and Ntombi was a very beautiful person.....you really will enjoy, thanks Ntombi for the day USIZO LWENKOSI TOURS WEB; www.usizotours.bizgp.co.za

I booked a walking tour with Ntombi as we had family visit from the UK. I wasn't sure what to expect but we were all really keen to understand more about this Township and understand a bit more about the community. Ntombi gave us a great tour and shared some really interesting insights to the area and let us get a feel of life in SOWETO.I recommend visiting the Hector Pieterson Museum very moving and thought provoking. For those who want to eat whilst out there are quite a few restaurants we didn't try but I'm sure we will when our next visitors come over.

We booked with Ntombi after seeing a review on Lonely Planet and because my wife was keen to use a small local guide, having heard a few negatives about the larger organised tours. On the whole I found Ntombi to be a really nice lady; we were travelling with our toddler and she was very considerate of that and made sure she paced the walking trip and bits we included around us and our daughter. As they don't allow children in the Apartheid Museum, we visited the Hector Pieterson museum and given how little I knew in advance of this trip, I'm really glad we did. I liked the fact that Ntombi took us to vastly different parts of Soweto and I feel like we got more than a sanitised and stare out the window of the mega-bus day trip.My one piece of advice if you're using this tour company is to arrange your own transport to and from or, ideally for the whole day. Most firms will say the do their own tour but I think it's worth having the tour from Ntombi plus your own transport. We had Ntombi sort us a car and driver and it was a bit of a sweatbox banger and I'd rather not repeat that!

We spent about 7hrs. The guide was very nice and patient, knowing local people and always explaining everything in detail.The interesting tourist destinations that you can visit are Hector Peterson Museum, Regina Mundi and Mandela House. It was indeed a very nice experience, I loved it!

We booked a full day tour with Ntombi at Usizo Lwenkosi Soweto Tours. The booking went smoothly. We wanted very much to do a private walking tour with just my wife and I as we wanted to be able to readily interact with local people and have a flexible itinerary. Our guide was King who we had read good things about. He met us promptly at our hotel at 9am. We didn't have a car so all our transport was on local taxi vans (mini bus) - this took us a little by surprise at first but for us was quite a highlight. We got to Soweto around 10am - King guided us around Orlando East (his area) and we were able to see to see how people lived in various accommodations and the history of the area. We felt very comfortable there and people were very friendly and keen for us to understand their situation and simply talk to us. We then went to Orlando West which is a better part of Soweto. Here we saw the Hector Pieterson museum which is very good - allow an hour there however. We then went to Vilikazi Street which is famous for Nelson Mandela's house as well as Bishop Tutu's - there was very good street entertainment and local restaurants, but a bit too touristy for us. After this we caught a taxi bus to the Apartheid Museum and spent an hour here - you really need to spend an afternoon here if you are interested in the history - very impressive. We then returned to our hotel via taxi bus after a very good day getting to know the local people. King was a good guide and equally interested in learning from us as we were in learning from him. He appreciated the respect and interest that we showed and the more engaged you are the more you will get in return.

I live in Cape Town and have never had the opportunity to visit Soweto, even while in Johannesburg on holiday. I decided that this year I would visit Soweto, December being a quiet time in Johannesburg would allow me to do so at my leisure.Sadly we arrived at Vilikazi Street with our tour guide barely a week after the passing of Nelson Mandela, people were still coming to pay tribute. While ultimately devastating, the number of people and the myriad of different races gathering, all to mourn the passing of a great South African leader, lent my tour of Soweto a different vibrancy to what I had been expecting. The tour also included visits to the Hector Peterson museum and the Apartheid Museum, their stories all the more poignant for the loss of Nelson Mandela. While there is a lot of history and the timing of my visit notwithstanding, my tour guide (Ntombi) did her best to show us that Soweto is a place of community and caring amongst it's residents. Soweto also has a rich and vibrant night life, which sometimes filters into the day. Jazz musicians abound and there are a number of 'spots' as the locals call them where you can experience township culture. If jazz is not your thing, there are those who will tell you that Soweto is where kwaito originated from.Ntombi did take us past the famous Orlando towers that can be seen from far and wide for all their bright colouring and offered to wait while we did a 'scad free fall' which is a kind of bunjee jump. No one took her up on her offer.All the while the streets are never quiet or still, people all seem to be going somewhere or meeting each other on the street.I really enjoyed my tour of Soweto thanks to Ntombi and Usizo Lwenkosi Tours.

Soweto and the Apartheid museum itself are amazing. This tour operator on the other hand, not so much. The day of the tour we were assigned a random, hardly qualified local guide by the owner Ntombi. The guide had no clue what she was doing and half of the day was spent with her trying to figure out what buses we needed to take. She was very nice, but the competency was terrible. Extremely unprofessional to conduct tours in this manner. At the end of the tour our guide couldn't even remember the name of the company she was working for that day. Ntombi followed up with me via email a few days later to see how everything went. When I expressed my honest feedback, I got no further replies from her. Definitely go see Soweto and the Apartheid museum. They are extremely worth it. Just do it with a more professionally run touring company.

When I was reading about the Soweto tours nearly every review was mentioning that it was "different". But what does this mean? It means that Soweto is not only a big slum (what probably most people - including me - expected), it is a real city with touristic attractions. And the main thing that you visit are the touristic attractions instead of shacks. So on one hand we have been a little bit disappointed not to linger around small shacks, but on the other hands we were very happy to see the interesting historic places, learn about the freedom charter and the public programme to build houses etc...Thanks again to our guide King who did not only introduce us into South African history, but also gave us an insight in his life and so in the life of Soweto.

The tour of Soweto was in a small group with a local driver and guide whose knowledge was excellent. The half day trip went by very quickly which meant that certain places did not have sufficient time to properly look at and therefore if you are really interested in the history of the place then I would recoommed the full day tour instead of the half day. The trip was not expensive and could be booked the day before the tour.

We had a Soweto tour with Ntombi on our recent trip to Johannesburg. I found her through her website and reviews on other travel sites. We drove our rental van. She met us in downtown Joburg and then took us through Soweto. She was knowledgeable and friendly. We liked it much better than a big bus tour. She has varying times, priices and plans for tours and communicates well in advance.

Super service, le guide vient vous chercher à votre logement et vous y reconduit le soir.Nous avons passé une journée entière à marcher dans les rues de Soweto avec King notre guide qui habite lui-même à Soweto. Ils nous a appris beaucoup de choses sur l'histoire du pays et de Johannesburg. La journée comprend la visite du musée de l'Apartheid ainsi que du musée Hector Pieterson.Très, très instructif, très riche humainement et émotionnellement.A FAIRE ABSOLUMENT.!!!