Category Archives: Airports

Layover, OR Tambo, Joburg

Airports, South Africa

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.

Botswana trip, part I: East London to Gaborone

Airports, Botswana,
Botswana trip, part I: East London to Gaborone
My trip to Botswana was largely unplanned. I had been thinking and talking about Namibia for months, but the subsequent Botswana trip was last-minute. It wasn’t going to be a trip with much travelling round and tourist travel – I’d be at an event at the university – but I imagined it would still be possible to get a sense of the country, so I jumped at the chance, booked a flight and started packing.
I left South African on the 26th of December, after Christmas with my family – a joy after being so far away the previous year, although I will admit to feeling some sense of nostalgia for the crazy international Christmas of 2009. East London airport is looking very new and shiny after the World Cup make-over, all except for the fact that not one of the flashy new information boards was working. I wondered if my flight would be on time. East London flights so often aren’t – both arrivals and departures. Just in case, I sky-checked my pack instead of checking it in. I normally check in my luggage. Yes, I’m one of those people who flies a lot but still checks in luggage. Why? Because it makes my life easier in two ways: firstly I don’t have to think about making sure I have no liquids or metal things in and secondly I get to get rid of my bag for the period of time between checking in and boarding the plane.
Sure enough, after a quick cup of coffee with the family and a rush through security, boarding was delayed. Luckily, it appears the airline has reached the point of simply accepting that East London flights will be delayed and now builds in extra time. This sounds bizarre but quite seriously, by the time I was supposed to land, according to my booking and the website, I was already in Johannesburg, through arrivals and heading for international check-in.
Air Botswana was checking in through Terminal A, so I still haven’t had the opportunity to go through Terminal B (the ‘Africa’ Terminal) at OR Tambo. I still have high hopes it’ll happen soon. For now, I breezed through check, security and passport-control and headed for the shops. I don’t normally shop on the international departures – past security, duty-free section – mostly because at this stage I cannot afford to add any more weight to my luggage. This time, however, I was in search of an adaptor. I found a very useful universal adaptor that was no help on this trip. In fact, it will be of limited help unless I can find a second adaptor to go from South Africa’s 3-round-pin to the kind of 2-pin plug that can actually go into the universal adaptor. Botswana uses 3-flat-pin plugs, for the record, of, I am told, the British type. This despite the fact that many of the appliances appear to imported from South Africa and therefore require an adaptor to plug into electrical outlets.
The flight to Gaborone departed from Gate A2. Gate A2 is a dark, secluded corner of international departures. By 5 minutes before boarding, there were still only about 10 people at the Gate. Not that I’m complaining – I’d prefer an empty flight to an overfull planeload of annoying people and small children, any day. The plane wasn’t that small – thankfully – I’d expected one of the tiny planes pictured on the Air Botswana website. The number of people was, in fact, small for the plane, so small that there wasn’t even assigned seating. It took about a minute and a half to find other people heading to the same event, with whom I spent the next 36 minutes – the whole flight to Botswana – chatting.

My trip to Botswana was largely unplanned. I had been thinking and talking about Namibia for months, but the subsequent Botswana trip was last-minute. It wasn’t going to be a trip with much travelling round and tourist travel – I’d be at an event at the university – but I imagined it would still be possible to get a sense of the country, so I jumped at the chance, booked a flight and started packing.

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Durban. September. Rain.

Adventures, Airports, South Africa

It’s raining in Durban. It’s September, of course it’s raining in Durban. This is my lasting memory of the town. Durban, which for everyone else is summer holidays and December sunshine, is September rain to me. Not that I mind. September rain in Durban is inextricably tangled in my mind with the reason for all of those visits – huge, unwieldy, intense events.

We fly into King Shaka International Airport. This is the new airport. What it lacks in convenient proximity (it’s about 40 minutes from town), it makes up for in atmosphere and practical design. It feels a lot like OR Tambo, but set in beautiful, rolling hills of sugar cane. We travel into town and check into the hotel. It occurs to me that it’s an awfully long time since I spent time in a South African hotel. Once upon a time, hotel rooms were as familiar to me as my own bedroom. Somehow I have travelled back to a point where hotels are a novel experience.

I won’t see much of the inside of the hotel this time around. Not unlike the last time around. Then, as now, I was here for an event. I have such clear memories from that time. I think the memories from those few weeks are clearer than any others from that phase of my life. It is amazing what the intensity of an event can do to my sense of time and space. I learnt so much. The learning curve was steep and I spent a lot of time feeling terrified and insecure. I think the confidence and strength I learnt during that event carried me through the next few years. So reassuring to be back in that eventing space, in Durban in September in the rain, all these years later.

We visit the same places: Suncoast for dinner, Wilson’s Wharf for drinks. Travelling back to the airport on the last day, past silver-sun-washed sea and the new Durban stadium, I am struck by the strange synchronicity of it all. After all these years and all I have seen, it is still Durban in September in the rain that reminds me what I’m capable of and pushes me to think seriously about the next step, the next option and all I’ve learnt from the amazing people I’ve worked with in this town.