The Apartheid Museum: much more than good © Getty Images

Curse this tournament for its format. It’s been loved by everyone for its brevity and sharpness, and professionally it makes sense. But it has been so hectic that only yesterday did I go to a place in South Africa that isn’t Sandton or Centurion.

The trip to the Apartheid Museum was completely unplanned, organised on the hoof early(ish) in the morning. Obviously it was worth it, because if the tale you’re documenting is itself so remarkable then it is difficult to not do a good job. Fortunately, it is much more than good. Anyway the material, the documents, artefacts, photograps and audio-visual footage is so compelling and painstakingly brought together that had you put it in a four-walled, bare, windowless cell, it still would’ve been worth visiting. But the conceptual beauty of the interior, the way the building is designed and winds round the history, is almost as breathtaking as the learning it holds inside.

The birth of the museum is interesting, because not many museums in the world, surely, can claim to be the collateral cost of a casino. The museum was built for approximately 80 million rand and opened in 2001, the costs paid for by a private consortium that had bid for a licence to build a casino. One of the stipulations laid down by the government in 1995, when granting licences, was for bidders to demonstrate how they would attract tourism to help the economy: the consortium committed to building a museum and once the bid was accepted, land adjacent to the casino was provided. Since then the museum has been run by a board of trustees, relying mostly on donations and sponsorships.

It is a must-visit, and a very cleansing one, in the way places where history in all its good and ugliness is not hidden or distorted, but instead cherished, generally are.

We stopped by in Fordsburg after the museum trip. Fordsburg is home to a large Indian and Pakistani-origin community. It reminded me not so much of home as exiled and displaced diaspora homes across the world, in areas of London, in Rusholme in Manchester, in Bradford, in Devon in Chicago, where an effort has been made to try and recreate home as it is remembered.

Home is thus remembered in the foods, the smells, the familiar names (Bismillah, Makkah, Usmaniya restaurant), the fashions, and in the simple bustle of life and humanity, walking around, chatting, loitering, getting in the way, gathering together, honking and so on. One of the things that struck me most on this trip is how cocooned and sanitised Sandton, where I am staying, is.

Where I live in Karachi is similarly bubbled from the rest of the city, so much so that you can go about life each day without needing to ever step out. Life as you see around you in Fordsburg in Johannesburg, or areas such as Nazimabad or Bahadarabad in Karachi, you don’t see in Sandton.

Much of Fordsburg, it seems, was preparing to head down to the Wanderers for the Pakistan-New Zealand semi-final. One restaurateur complained he wasn’t allowed to carry a flag that wasn’t either Pakistan's or New Zealand’s. No matter, for they made their way to the stadium as the game wore on and gave it by far the liveliest atmosphere of the tournament, even if it wasn’t enough for the result they wanted.

And as I end this entry, the electricity has just gone. Readers in Pakistan will know that is the best way to feel at home abroad.

Music often tells us more about a country than we imagine. Since landing, I’ve been itching to listen to some local sounds. Shamefully, I have managed to do so only very occasionally, though at least it has been on the radio, which brings with it the joyous, unmatched prospect of happening upon something beautiful randomly.

But even these brief encounters have confirmed one thing I kind of knew as soon as I arrived: beneath everything here, there is something, an unheard beat or rhythm. It isn’t obviously detectable or even easy to describe, but as with all good music, you feel it. Some of it comes in the way people talk, the way they move their heads, the way they walk, but it comes through.

As a visitor you are blessed in foreign lands when exploring their music. There is not the trap of cross-genre snobbery that you might fall into in countries where you spend more time. In England, for example, a country with possibly the freshest, most innovative music culture, different genres become different cultures altogether, looking down at each other. Those polished glamsters of house music sneer at the skinny folks of the indie scene, who sneer righteously right back; those rougher-edged ones of jungle, or garage or hip-hop, look down on everyone else. Those into reggae, or dub, mind their own business, the herb traditionally making love not war. So it goes, and often people will not dip into other genres over an entire existence.

But when you’re a stranger somewhere, as I am here, things are different. You don’t choose the music, the music chooses you. So Selaelo Selota chose me a few days back, suddenly, in a taxi, and immediately made all the hairs on my arms stand up. I’m not going to insult locals by writing about him, knowing almost nothing about him as I do, save to say that when you apply jazz to local grooves, the results are lush. His music apparently is influenced by the singing and dancing of workers in gold mines. More will have to be learnt and heard, and long live the internet.

A little prodding and digging reveals that South African music is open this way, to influences from within and outside the continent. Alongside the indigenous scene, many global genres are to be found, given local interpretations: rock, punk, reggae, jazz, soul and hip-hop, lots of hip-hop which is about right for what is currently music’s most global and easily exported phenomenon: it is a monster. Very little of it makes the ICC’s playlist for intervals, wickets and boundaries which is a shame. But they’ve done well to make it at least an eclectic mix of Bollywood, and anything else contemporary and popular.

Pakistan has always expressed itself best, and mixed with the world, musically. Great stuff is bubbling around currently, nowhere better heard than in the Coke Studio sessions, where young, modern, worldlier musicians have melded effortlessly with older, earthier folk and classical musicians. These sounds, and those from South Africa, need to be heard.

	Pakistan fans in Centurion © Getty Images

Of the many things I remember about the 1992 World Cup final, one is the flags that Pakistani fans waved in the MCG crowd. There was the green star and crescent obviously but almost as prominent were the big, broad red, green and white ones of the MQM, a leading, still-young political party in Pakistan, and Karachi in particular, a party supported mainly by Muhajirs: those who had moved to Pakistan on Partition.

Over the years the flag has been seen at various Pakistan games, home and abroad, and I don’t recall seeing anything like it anywhere else: nationalism in sporting contests I can understand but ethnicity? Perhaps in South America at football games, where fans are an equally interesting sociological study, but that’s only a guess.

I’ve always wanted to meet the men who waved those flags and in South Africa I may have my chance. The flags were out at yesterday’s India-Pakistan game in Centurion, though completely overshadowed by those of India and Pakistan. I went down to one of the grass banks just as Suresh Raina was pretending we were all at the IPL.

It was festive, in that kind of all-things-go way of melas. Chants were being traded between sets of supporters, none of them very witty or imaginative, but energetic all. Bollywood songs, classic and new, were being played between overs and boundaries, including that come-hither ditty of love, Asha Bhonsle’s "Chura liya". They also played the oft-overlooked bawdy, big-hall singalong "Jumma Chumma De De", and having registered the bizarreness of that tune at a cricket stadium, I came to the swift conclusion that it was in fact perfect for such things.

I saw the men with the flags at the very front but decided against going, partly intimidated (what to ask them and more importantly how to ask it), partly because it wasn’t the best place for conversation, and partly because there were just too many people between me and them. So I made small talk with some Pakistan fans who were being given unnecessary tension by Raina.

On leaving I bumped into a teenager with the red, green and white and asked him, in a rush, why he had it and not a Pakistan flag. I think he thought I was accusing him and so he said both flags were one and the same thing and that his friend also had a Pakistan flag; they are and they aren’t also. This will have to be pursued.

The game ended with a full-scale pitch invasion, which hasn’t been seen for a few years and was for a while the preserve of Asian fans. Of course it is a serious security concern and all, but it was also, in a selfish way, a bracing spectacle because it is such a liberating, momentous burst of joy: watching India and Pakistan slug it out for seven hours is tense business and release is inevitable.

	Such healthy living can sap the spirit of even the most well-meaning tourist © AFP

I have walked into a country-sized gym. I’ve always considered myself essentially a fit human being, even sporty. I jog, I go to the gym, I play cricket; even if the diet isn’t so well-controlled. But in Johannesburg I am a pygmy blimp of cholesterol and oil, fattened by a lifetime of sloth.

I noticed it first in the South African matches broadcast on TV, in shots of the crowd, a scarily large number of whom looked far too drunk to have ripped, lean biceps and such. Now I see it here, on streets, in stadiums, in malls. People look like they’ve walked fresh out of gyms, glowing, clean, healthy, athletic. Some days everyone looks like a professional sportsperson. It is intimidating, in the way that knowing someone will live longer and healthier than you can be. It is dispiriting also because you know it is a state achieved with great difficulty.

I ask locals about it and they laugh and assure me that there are South Africans unfit enough to think I am fit. I don’t doubt it, but maybe there aren’t as many as in other parts of the world. Some tell me I should go see other areas of Johannesburg. I presume that meant the press box at the Wanderers or Supersport Park, the only public space I have been to so far where I have seen locals without washboard stomachs.

The thing is, why wouldn’t you be? There is such freshness in the air here and if the sky is so blue and the temperature so pleasant (at this time of the year anyway) the only right and proper way to celebrate it, to enjoy it and to fully feel it, is to be outside doing something energetic. The minute you land here you can feel it. It doesn’t seem a constructed thing in any way, or imposed; just a natural, inevitable outcome of the land and climate. Australia I imagine to be much the same.

All this despite the amount of meat that is consumed here; urban Pakistan is big on meat and you can go for days in Lahore and Peshawar without so much as seeing a vegetable. But we’re vegetarians in front of this lot.

	People walk by pillars composing the South African flag on a Johannesburg street © AFP

I received at least 20 personal travel advisories before coming to Johannesburg. Don't get mugged (do I have a choice?), don't be shot (thanks for that one, I'll try my best), don't stick your hand out of a moving car (okay), don't walk around outside after sunset (vampires?), don't go to an ATM alone, don't wear a watch, leather, smart shoes, nice shirts and shoes (am I travelling to the 17th annual Hobo World Summit?).

It's quite a feat because, coming from Karachi, theoretically there aren't many places in the world where you can go to and not feel safe. It got to me initially and my first day here I spent eyeing everyone a little furtively before the guilt sank me: it's a terrible way to be in a new country, especially one where the sky can be as big and as beautiful and as pure as here.

This security thing is a strange business and I'm not sure it's something we'll ever come to terms with. I can live happily in Pakistan with the Taliban and suicide bombings and growing urban crime and yet be nervous coming into Johannesburg. It is not something that has to be understood anymore, it is something that just has to be lived with.

*************

International isolation plays all kinds of tricks with the mind. For various reasons, it hasn't been easy for Pakistanis to travel in recent years, myself included in that honourable and burgeoning list. This is thus my first trip outside South Asia for many years and despite having previously lived abroad, I have felt out of sync.

We say in Pakistan that Karachi is so cosmopolitan, bursting with all kinds of Pakistanis, and in terms of the rest of the country, it is. But compared to Dubai or Johannesburg, Karachi is one person cloned 15 million times over. And to mingle among this mass of culture, dialect, language, colour, to interact, can be disorienting at first if you're not used to it. Slights are seen where none are intended, words are misheard, intent can be misunderstood, gestures and the nuances of those gestures are easily overlooked.

It's like learning how to be a person of the world again and to do this in a city like Johannesburg, which houses three to four entire worlds within one city, is altogether trickier. Globalisation hasn't yet fully come to Pakistan, and much as the country has hurried along over the last 20 years, the world seems still to be passing the country by. It's difficult to capture in a space like this, for it is seen largely in little things, like airports, or customer service at shops, or roads and public transport, or the size of malls and the number of global brands in them, or buying proper, not pirated, CDs, or grand cinemas, or skyscrapers.

On the plane over, two kids sat next to me, whizzing through the touch-screen TV on their seats as if they came out of their mothers' wombs holding just such a contraption. I meanwhile fumbled along, vainly searching for buttons, trying to make sense of all the symbols, amazed at all the options and at how far in-flight entertainment had come. I finally adjusted but until I had I felt like a pensioner, and I'm not even in my mid-30s. More relevantly, I felt as if from another world altogether, where you're lucky if you get a smile on the plane.

I can see why then so many expatriates don't try to overcome this, don't try to adjust, because it isn't easy. It is much easier to seek the comfort of your own and what you know. It is not the way ahead.

Pakistan's cricket team is also coming out of and battling isolation. It will not be easy.