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.