Category Archives: Travel

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.

Anticipation of packing (and hot)

Admin, Gear

It’s Friday, the weekend, and I should be looking forward to a two-day break. And I am. Except that this weekend will – must – be filled with one of my least favourite activities: packing. This time I’m packing for a two week trip in a country I’ve spent hardly any time, in another hemisphere and therefore season. And it’s hot there. It has been years since I worked in a properly hot summer (Korea doesn’t count – it wasn’t proper hot). I have been buying bits and pieces of clothing I might need on and off for weeks. I still need some shoes. I’ll have to get them today after work. I really hope I can find some that are nice and not too expensive but I’m sceptical – just a few weeks too early for the summer stock to be in.

Then of course there is the question of the bag. My small, cabin-luggage sized suitcase is in the Eastern Cape, so no chance to get that before I leave. I was thinking of taking a backpack, but it’s a US flight, so they’re particularly fussy about what you can put in your  carry-on luggage. I’d have to check it in. And the backpack doesn’t always stay closed. So, a big suitcase. But it feels so silly to pack into a big suitcase. This is the suitcase I packed my whole life in to go to Korea for a year. My life fitted in that suitcase, surely it is too big for two weeks.

So perhaps I will take it mostly empty. Plenty of space for souvenirs. At least, if I was someone else. I’m sure I won’t be able afford many souvenirs in dollars (sigh – third world currency). Plus, it’s a business trip. Not that I won’t do any exploring – I’m not going to waste a 20-hour flight – but most of the time will probably be spent in a hotel conference centre.

I hope not all of the time. As I frantically make lists of what I still need to buy and what I can’t forget to pack, I find myself pausing every now and then, with glee if I’m honest, in anticipation of nearly two weeks in the hot.

Limpopo in a week

Limpopo, rural areas, Travel,

A month or so back, I spent a week in Limpopo, South Africa’s northern-most and possibly most complex province, at least in terms of the number and diversity of languages and cultures, and the diversity of vegetation and environments.

We began the week leaving from Johannesburg (after a much-delayed flight from Durban). We headed north, past Bela-Bela, towards Mokopane. Through Mokopane and, just as we leave town, a sign for Mahwelereng. I’ve visited this province so seldom, but I have a lasting memory of roses in Mawhelereng.

The landscape is dry grassland. More trees than in the Eastern Cape, but still dry and wintery. Rocky hills seem disconnected from the flat land around them. The sweeps of distance are broken by these boulder-like extrusions.

A day or two later, we are driving through that part of the world where the farms give way to plantations. I always think of this as the edge of colonial Africa. It’s a strange and historically inaccurate thought. Colonialism extended right to the tip of the Cape of Good Hope and cattle farming and mining was just as much colonial occupation as anything else. But somehow, in my mind, rows and rows of banana and avocado trees, places to vast and sweeping and green to be the farms of my childhood, are more colonial. Perhaps because I grew up with the ordinariness of modern commercial farming but this, so far, so different, is a world away from my experience.

It is quite beautiful, actually. Mountains rising above sweeping fields of trees. So green, so lush, even in mid-winter. As we drive, I try to guess what each kind of tree is. The bananas are easy. Avocado, I can figure out. Eventually I ask about one I just cannot guess: Litchi. Welcome to the tropics. At some point during the week, we pass a sign indicating that we have now crossed the Tropic of Capricorn.

Further north, beyond Thoyandou, the world is even more foreign. We travel beyond the Red Line – the animal control boundry near the border with Zimbabwe. The soil is rusty red, dusty and bare and scattered with rocks. The chilly wind whirls the dust around us. Dark green trees, taller than people, scatter homesteads. In between, along the roads, in the middle of homesteads, are baobabs. Ancient, giant upside-down trees. The people who live here eat the flesh of the fruit, grinding it to a powder and mixing it with water to make a sweet paste. Some of them eat the fruit raw.

Beyond the village, we drive even further north. We stop at a shop on the edge of a mine and buy lunch. And then we head off to see the Big Tree – not the largest, now a pub, but a wild baobab in a nature park. I didn’t even know there was a big tree in Limpopo. There is another in the Tsitsikama forest that fairly well known. This one lies off a minor road somewhere in the north of Limpopo. We turn off the road into a park area, pay the entrance fee and follow a dirt track through thick vegetation. Around a corner we stop in front of a giant baobab tree. Along the road there have been many large baobabs. They all seem ancient and immense. There don’t seem to be any young trees. What does a baobab sapling look like?

This is a monster of a tree. The trunk is so huge that there is a cave in the middle of it, large enough for two or three people to stand up comfortably. The roots stretch out in all directions, their upper surface visible for metres along the ground. The trunk is carved with graffiti. Some branches are so huge, people could picnic on them. One branch has stretched out and reaches its fingers towards the ground, maybe 10 or 20m away from the trunk. We take pictures in front of the tree. Just the trunk dwarfs two adults standing finger-tip to finger-tip. It is an incredible tree. Some baobabs are thought to be over 3000 years old. Most are only 200 to 500 years old. This must be one of the older trees.

As we travel back south and east, the vegetation becomes more familiar, more like home. I start to see signs of the Highveld vegetation I’m used to. Even the language is more familiar – Tsonga closer to the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape, instead of the Venda further north. I think this is closer to where my maternal grandmother grew up. I am reminded of how little I know about my own history, my personal history, not the history of the country.

We fly home from Johannesburg on a Friday night, exhausted from a week of constant travel and project visits. The province has never been my favourite, perhaps because it is so different to the beauty I have grown up with, but this trip has reminded me of the diversity and difference of Limpopo. So many different places and sights and peoples all in one place. Such strange, foreign worlds.