This tuktuk tour in Johannesburg dares to go beyond the tourist trail

Either side of the broken dirt road are shacks of corrugated iron. Meat cooks on a barbecue, a young woman carries a water bucket and spray paint on a wall describes the business inside: "Hair cut". Here, in one of the poorest parts of South Africa's Soweto township, life unfolds modestly.

"Townships don't automatically mean poverty," says one of our local guides ... before he gestures around and adds, "but, yes, there is some." This is the misconception these guides are trying to dispel about their sprawling township of 3 million people on the edge of Johannesburg. They want to show it's not a shantytown, and to do that in the back streets of "the real Soweto", our guides are driving us around in tuktuks.

Our convoy of five yellow tuktuks rumbles beyond the metal shacks and into neighbourhoods of brick houses, along sealed roads with large homes, some with luxury cars. Shops are painted vibrantly and there's a mall with fast-food chains. Here in the Rainbow Nation, Soweto teems with diversity, of different cultures and different fortunes. Just like any city.

Little kids put out their hands for fist bumps and, as my driver Phyllies slows down, their faces beam. Older women wave at me and young men give a friendly smile. But I still worry that driving around like this is voyeuristic. No, Phyllies reassures me, "It's encouraging to see tourists come to your community because then you don't feel like you're in a forgotten slum."

The tours are run by Lebo's Soweto Backpackers and I've come with Intrepid Travel, which uses local businesses like this on its trips. In turn, the hostel supports the communities we visit, including only hiring guides from Soweto. Its founder, Lebo, got the idea for the company when he was a street vendor seeing people just come on big buses for the touristy sights.

What a load of tripe! ... is what we get served when we stop the tuktuks at a restaurant. To go with the tripe and boiled beef, there's a cornmeal mash called pap we eat with our hands to scoop up the meat. The tourists on the big buses don't see what we see and they certainly don't eat what we eat.

But to finish, we join them at Soweto's main landmarks, including the Hector Pieterson Memorial. It's only when we drive away that Phyllies points out that one of the older guides stayed outside. It's dedicated to the hundreds of students killed during an anti-Apartheid uprising in 1976. He was there and it's still too raw.

The writer was a guest of Intrepid Travel and South African Tourism