Joburg airport. This place still feels a little like home. Not Joburg, just the airport. I have some time to kill, so I take it easy – wander through the food court in the domestic terminal, pop into CNA to buy a replacement for the highlighter I accidentally left at home, then head up to the third level, to my favourite spot in the airport.
Up the escalator, past the first of those tantalising international destinations boards – Amsterdam, Gabarone, Ouagadougou, Rome. Ok, not Ouagadougou, but wouldn’t it be fun to have the option of hopping a plane to a place called Ouagadougou?
I spend some time at the railing overlooking the huge, circular international arrivals area. I could spend ages in this spot. It is peaceful yet still in the midst of the business and there is no better spot for people-watching, even in the midst of the generally people-watching-friendly setting of an airport. People arriving, meeting, passing, chatting. A common point in a web of so many separate lives. A glimpse of what Hugh Grant’s character talks about at the start of Love Actually.
After a while, I head down to Cappello for some lunch. It’s four in the afternoon but it’s the only familiar stop between in-flight meals, so I take the chance for real food. This has become one of my staples at OR Tambo. It has a little outside area – next to the road, so not exactly quiet but without the air-conditioned, pop-music overlaid commercialism of the inside noise. I normally keep my headphones on in airports – they’re prettier with my own choice of soundtrack. But before a long flight some real noise is welcome. And real, unfiltered air. Even if it is the hazy, late-winter air of Joburg. Actually, especially the hazy, late-winter air of Joburg.
From where I sit, I can see the Gautrain station. I still find it strange, still somewhat disconcerting, that when I left for Korea – before my own first discovery of high-speed, high-tech train travel, South Africa’s first high-tech train system was only a promise. As I watch, a shiny Gautrain glides into the station. It’s gleamingly metallic shape is so similar to the Korail trains I got to know in South Korea.
In the pause between flights, I relax a little and remember all the other times I’ve been here in the past few months and years. Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever sat here with anyone else. A reminder, I guess, that the nature of my travelling has so often been solo. A hazy, half-remembered collection of precious memories never truly shared with anyone else.
As the Joburg sun edges towards the concrete horizon, I pay my bill and move off to the Delta desk to check in. Time to add another international carrier to my repertoire of experience and brace for a long, long flight. Perhaps that is the real reason I love this airport so much – it represents the gateway to the experiences of travel, good and bad, that are to come and to all the possible, exotic, much-anticipated places in the world where I have not yet travelled.