The early morning light is just shading the eastern sky a gentle pink when we get to the airport. The Gautrain sits, sleek and modern, waiting to swallow the busy people and rush off to disgorge them again in Sandton and Rosebank and town.

The airport is quiet. Not the dead quiet of 6am flights, but peaceful. This is how I like it; just waking up, just getting going. Two women wander past, carrying cardboard poster tubes. A family hurries two little girls with pink earmuffs. A man in a coat grips his coffee like a lifeline.

I drop my bags and the counter-person bids me a cheerful “Have a good flight”. “And a good day,” he adds.

I stop to take in the magical boards. The boards with all the destinations I’d like to be going to. Like the moment in that movie, Up in the Air. The movie about travelling for work. I was on a flight when I watched that for the first time. A flight from somewhere. Hong Kong? Dubai? Somewhere. Some people’s magic destinations are Samarkand or Singapore or Paris. For me, it’s Africa. There is a 9:45 flight to Luanda and a 10am departure to Antananarivo.

The smell of freshly baked croissants and freshly brewed coffee. An old man waits as his wife goes through security, waving her out of sight before he leaves.

The morning sun glints off the tail of an SAA 737. I put in my headphones and open my laptop. Everything is peaceful. This moment, this pause. Some people hate the airports, the waiting, the the long plane-rides, the long bus-trips. I love it. Perhaps more than the destination. I have slept in my own bed 6 hours in the past two weeks. Fest was amazing but most of that travelling was for work. Most of the travelling I do is for work. The destination is just another part of the job.

But the journey is mine. The quiet moments in the airport. The rush of speed as the plane takes off. The frost-white-painted world from the window of an old Toyota Condor. The rainforests of central Africa through a broken bus window. Zambia, Kenya, Rwanda from a landcruiser. The bridges, the mountains, the river from South Korean high-speed trains.

I land in Durban and it feels foreign, unfamiliar. This is a transient life we lead. Once again I find myself thinking about the concept of home and my mind drifts back the to airport. My airport. All the airports. The quiet pause in life before the next adventure.