I just read this great description of airport-hopping across Africa, which, of course, made me want to go and explore my own continent. Exploring Africa is a running theme in my life at the moment, partly because it’s just generally amazing and partly because of my amazing friend who is currently travelling from Cape Town to Cairo on public transport. He’s been a little quiet lately – presumably because the internet is not a mango. Rumour has it he has made it to Ethiopia and is still in one travel-happy piece.

Reading about travel always makes me think about airports. When I first started working, I plunged straight into a somewhat crazy job where I found myself spending 3-4 days each week travelling. Until that point, I had no memory of flying, although I apparently flew occassionally as a small child. Literally within 7 days of working, I was (rather nervously) on my first flight to Cape Town. From then on it became a regular part of most work-weeks. There were 7am flights to Durban, 6am flights to Uppington and flights at all sorts of times to Cape Town and East London and Joburg. I became one of those people who could pack for a week away in the space of 5 minutes and once in less when I suddenly and unexpectedly had to fly to Polokwane on a Friday afternoon.

I became familiar with many of the airports in South Africa. Richards Bay airport is teeny-tiny – or at least it was the last time I was there – with one luggage carousel and a little cafe counter, run by a little old lady, where you expected to see them serving tea in proper china cups. Upington for some reason struck me as more tourist-y. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they have, apparently, one of the longest runways in the the world – someone once told me that a space shuttle could land there if it wasn’t able to land in the Northern Hemisphere, but that may just be urban legend.

My least favourite airport in South Africa is Port Elizabeth. It is also the airport where I always, for some unknown reason, get stuck waiting for hours and hours. I once spent 6 hours there with a friend, this time due to poor planning on my part, and we were so bored we ended up sitting on a bench outside redoing the words of show-tunes to express our desperate longing one day to escape the PE airport. And that wasn’t even the last time I spent far too many hours there.

My second worst is Durban, purely because the design is horrible. I will never understand why anyone would put a security check-point, particularly at an airport where everyone in the family seems to feel the need to come along to see people off, in the middle of a crowded corridor. Durban has also been the site of far too many delays and problems. Yet another reason I’m not a fan of the city.

In the later years of working for a large organisation, most of my airport-travel was from Cape Town. At that stage, I was working between South Africa’s two largest cities, travelling up and down every 2 weeks or so. I think some part of my brain is still waiting every week for the 4:30am Monday wake up to catch an early plane so that I could make my meeting in Joburg. At one point, in the process of renovating the place, they removed about half of the chairs between the security check and the boarding gates. This airport is particularly busy on Monday mornings, so the choice was to stand around until someone finally decided that the plane was ready for boarding (an often-delayed event on those busy days) or to sit on the floor. I can’t count the number of times I sat near the boarding gates checking mail while I waited, with bleary-eyed tourists stealing bemused glances at the woman in business clothes sitting on the floor.

Apart from East London airport, which is special because it means going home – oh, and because they still have the light fittings in old-SAA colours from the 1970s – my favourite airport in South Africa is OR Tambo in Johannesburg. There are several reasons for this. The first is just that it’s a nice airport. It is spacious and modern, with good facilities and has necessities like a pharmacy, stationary shops and book stores, which are precious to find when you’re spending so much time in meetings and trainings that the only time to buy things is between flights.

It is also a fairly efficient airport. At least, I’ve always found it that way. Everything seems logical and well-designed, although possibly just because I’ve spent so much time there that I can find my way around while half-asleep purely on muscle-memory and instinct. The staff have generally been pleasant to me, too. And after a while, either because my name popped up in their computers as someone who flies an awful lot or just because I started to look like I knew what I was doing, I became one of those people who always gets the good seats and sometimes gets bumped up a class when they’re overbooked (although that only happened a couple of times).

The other reason I love Joburg airport is that it’s a great place to relax after a hectic day of work. Again, this may just be because I’ve spent so much time there. There is a bar near the domestic boarding gates, which became, for a time, my ‘local’ – the place I’d go after work on a Friday to have a quiet pint and calm down after the week. The Wimpy nearby has been the source of many quick meals. And I’ve spent many happy hours, when I arrived early or the plane was delayed, sitting reading or writing near my boarding gate. A friend of mine once pointed out that airports are a great place to write and to think. Joburg (OR Tambo) was that for me for a long time.

Of course, there are bad things too. At one point when I was (quite literally) commuting between Stutterheim (East London Airport) and Pretoria (OR Tambo), I  regularly dealt with Friday 5pm flights to one of the smaller airports, invariably involving a nightmare combination of crying children, irritable, demanding politician-types and far too many people who have never flown before.

But on the whole, Joburg airport is a little home-away-from-home. Coming here (to South Korea), when I was entirely terrified of everything, it was a comfort to be leaving from ‘my airport’. I think that – along with the much-needed hand-holding of a particularly sympathetic and amazing friend – is what actually got me on the plane. The trip here is a bit of a blur except for the moments of calm at each airport – Joburg, Dubai, Incheon and finally Daegu, each with its own peculiarities and atmosphere. Dubai, huge and glittering and with palm-trees. Incheon, a maze of escalators and underground trains and following signs to try to find the right check-in desk. Daegu, small and empty and mostly closed for the evening by the time I arrived.

In the 5 and a half months I’ve been here, I’ve only once been near the airport, and that was just on a bus-ride driving past. Among the many other things I miss, I kind of miss South African airports. I miss the early morning rush and the check-in staff trying to get everyone onto the plane while dealing with the idiots who can’t understand why their precious oversized wooden giraffe will not fit in the overhead luggage compartment. I miss the ease of slipping one item of check-in luggage onto the weighing-thingy, asking the smiling check-in person for a window seat and walking away with boarding pass in hand. I miss hot coffee from Wimpy and watching the early morning mist or the frost on the ground or the rising heat of the day through the huge windows at the boarding gates. I miss sitting on the floor with my laptop sending one last email before getting onto the plane. I miss the every-time thrill of take-off as the plane speeds down the runway and I lean back against the headrest and watch from the window as Joburg slips away and away below us.

I miss the going and the waiting to go, the ‘molweni‘ and the ‘totsiens‘, the anonymity and the calm-in-the-chaos of those moments. In the midst of a life of taxis buses and subways and cavernous airport-like KTX stations, I find myself missing, just a little, the way I feel when I’m sitting alone at an airport.