There is a watering hole in Joburg’s bubble where people like to ease their troubles. These days, those cares might include rumination on the quality of the city’s water, when it flows.
The bar refuses to serve tap water on the grounds that its safety cannot be guaranteed. You could, of course, get gastro from the food or from a bad pint, but let’s not nitpick.
There are other establishments where the city’s finest vintage is off the wine list, such as Tortellino d’Oro, which recently declined to serve tap water to a colleague.
The first page of a basic web search turns up an observation on Tripadvisor from a now apparently long-gone Tortellino customer that he couldn’t get a glass of tapwater, but the nonpaying puppy at the next table could get a bowl of the stuff.
The brouhaha is back in the news after Italy’s supreme court rejected a tourist’s attempt to sue the five-star Hotel Sassongher in the Dolomites for refusing to serve her tap water, forcing her to buy a €7 bottle of water instead.
This is the same Italy whose drivers, travel writer Bill Bryson unforgettably noted, park as if someone had just poured hydrochloric acid on their laps, so it should not surprise you to learn that not only did the tourist lose the case, she is now on the hook for €3,200 in legal fees.
The elephant at the waterhole is the question of whether you trust your city enough to drink the water it pipes your way.
There has been much worldwide hysteria about this, helped along by a global bottled water industry that will, at its lunatic end, persuade other lunatics to spend R277 for a six-pack of flavoured water, or shell out thousands for “gently bottled” hand-curated mineral water from “their” billion-year-old aquifers of dinosaur tears.
When millions of people have neither running water nor even taps, this is the stuff of “let them eat cake” — and look how that ended.
