Antipodal Odyssey, Part Vyf: In Photographs
Antipodal Odyssey, Part Vier: 36 Hours to Home
Back in the Kimberley Airport, 45 minutes before boarding, I had one priority: getting on the internet. The terminal, a building perhaps the size of a small supermarket, was split into roughly three equally sized parts — to the left of the entrance was the security checkpoint and the boarding area, directly ahead was the arrival gate and waiting area, and to the right was another large waiting area with a small refreshment bar-type thing. I got a big bottle of still water and sat down one of many empty tables. My phone connected to the internet immediately; AlwaysOn was here too, and it was actually on given the nearby wireless access point. However, the several hours of access I’d paid for at the hotel was inaccessible (I don’t know why) so I opted for a free half-hour of internet instead. That would suffice for our slightly longer wait.
So I sat there, did some browsing, opened up Outlook on my laptop and downloaded some work emails, elongated my Duolingo streak (over 500 days long by this point) and generally putzed around. It passed the time quickly.
Soon we were on our way through security, the shortest checkpoint ever. Well, scratch that, it was just about as lengthy as a standard airport checkpoint, it just took about 5 seconds to get through. Beyond was another waiting area, mostly empty and with a large set of floor to ceiling windows overlooking the tarmac. I sat down again to wait, browsing on the phone, and taking in the airport TV feed of some international news channel.
Our ride was already out there. From this point on, it would be three flights, two long layovers, and over a day of travel to get home. On the clock: 26 hours. In reality, 36. In no time we were outside in the blazing morning heat of Kimberley, striding along the pavement to the plane. I snapped some photos as I walked, after which I was promptly told not to do so. Whatever, photons be free.
This little skipper might have been the same aircraft that brought us to Kimberley the Tuesday before. It was the return flight of the round-trip we’d done half of, a shuttle that seems to go nowhere else outside of its circuit. Our departure time aligned with our previous arrival, so there’s a decent chance it was.
The ride back to Johannesburg was shorter than I remember the flight away being. I spent most of it shooting landscapes and clouds out the window. Again, I missed the skyline of Johannesburg as we approached from the same direction as we’d done from Frankfurt. Out of the plane, onto a bus, back to the terminal we went. Up the stairs into the domestic terminal, I spied a small boutique that offered some items I’d been looking for: postcards with icons of the country, safari animals, monuments, flags, cityscapes. See, we have a sort of tradition in my team at work — anytime anyone goes somewhere foreign or exotic, they bring back everyone postcards to put up in their cubes. I have ones from Spain, Bali, and Norway so far; now South Africa would be added to my collection, as well as those around the office.
After collecting a suitable amount and turning over one of my two remaining Rand notes (from which I received a few coins in return), we shifted on over to the international terminal. A lengthy wait in customs and security later and it was on to the South African Airways lounge. I really shouldn’t have gotten used to these business lounges. They’re way too nice for someone like me.
Immediately upon entering I was faced with a banquet of food: delicious tortellini, plentiful dinner rolls, Indian rice, baked goods, bottled water. It was a feast in there and all of it was free. Ahead, a second-floor view of the runways, of planes from far off lands coming in an out of gates, and of the green horizon meeting the hot summer sky.
Off to the side there was a work area, an elliptical room with a long table in the center, flanked by work stations along the two walled sides. I set my computer up, stowed my luggage next to me, plugged my power adaptors into the varied internationally flavored sockets, and… watched YouTube, maybe watched an episode or two of The Wire, did some work (sort of — it was Saturday) and basically just relaxed. This was a seven-hour layover in Johannesburg. Aside from the eleven hours I mostly slept through in Germany, it was the fastest long layover I’d experienced. It was almost over before I wanted it to be. On the way out, I stopped at a newsstand to grab a South African newspaper. In Germany the first time, I kept a copy of Die Welt. Now I had a copy of Beeld too!
I had a goal in mind to re-orient myself to California time that involved napping lightly, structuring meals to PST meal-time, and forcing myself awake for the rest. The layover was spent wide awake, the time in California still very early in the morning. I was ahead at least eight hours and it wasn’t looking good.
Eventually we headed over to our gate (or should I say ‘gates’) just fifteen minutes before boarding. The reason I say ‘gates’ is deliberate: the plane we were launching back to Europe in was an Airbus A380. If you’ve never seen one before, you might be blown away when you do. It’s the largest commercial airliner in operation (and existence, for that matter). It’s two stories tall, 73 meters long, has a wingspan of almost 80 meters, and rises almost 25 meters above ground. It is amazingly large. To service its two floors, it requires two separate boarding gates. I was set to board at one, my colleague at the other. I thought the 747 was large; this was somehow even larger.
In the boarding tunnel was a newspaper case; I thought to add to my collection with a Süddeutsche Zeitung on my way in. Funny thing: carrying a German newspaper onto a German-crewed Lufthansa flight to Germany will cause all flight staff to default to German when speaking to you. It was awesome. I stepped on and the first woman said to me “Zweite rechts dann links für Sie,” the directions to my seat for those who don’t read German. As I went to the second aisle and bore right, another flight attendant spoke a very fast German sentence or command to me. I looked at him cross-eyed and he pointed to my newspaper curiously. I told him I can read German pretty well, but my verbal understanding is still mediocre. He laughed and I proceeded on down the aisle to my seat.
Then we flew away from Johannesburg into the night. This flight I don’t remember. I failed in my jetlag mission maybe an hour in after indulging in the freshly released debut episode of Invisibilia. I fell asleep hard, staying unconscious through all of the meals. I remember flying back over North Africa, watching the Mediterranean begin as Tunisia or Algeria ended. A short hazy memory later and we were approaching Frankfurt once again. I was glad for this flight to be over; my knees were killing me and my back was in distress. I needed to stand up and move. It seems my body can tolerate about two and a half 11 hour flights before it begins to break.
We descended into Frankfurt Flughafen from the northeast, the skyline to downtown Frankfurt out my window in the dead of night. The buildings were black, glowing yellow-orange street lights below, red aircraft lights on top. It was eerie, intimidating, almost Darco-like, and appropriately, in the colors of the German flag.
Disembarking was a pleasant mess. My legs twitched like they’d just spent eight hours sleeping in the back of a car, but it felt so good to get them moving. A river of people flowed out of the arrival gate down the long terminal walkway, completely empty like every other international arrival terminal. It led to another passport control checkpoint, which was passed quickly, and to another security line, through which I passed very slowly. I lost my colleague in the queue, reaching the international departures terminal alone after a half-hour wait. It was about 3am in Germany and most of the stores in the airport were closed, save for the shiny duty free shop through which the path to the terminal led. I bought a large pack of Tic-Tacs, since I’d not a chance to clean my mouth. I thought of buying a souvenir of some kind as well, but my real purpose was to split a 10 Euro note into a 5 and some change.
Out of the duty free, I got a bit lost in the terminal. I scouted all the way to the departure gate, following the wrong signs for the premium lounge, and ended up returning to the duty free store, where I stood and looked around confusedly. In the center of the atrium out front was a beautiful shiny white piano with a red felt bench. The sign beside read “Bitte nehmen Sie Platz und Spielen Sie Ihr Lieblingsleid,” or “Please have a seat and play your favorite song!” I shuffled around, internally debating whether or not I wanted to perform for a mostly empty airport in a far away land in the dead of night.
I didn’t. I couldn’t convince myself to. I might regret that decision a little bit. Next time I’m in Frankfurt though…
Finally, I entered the Lufthansa Lounge where my coworker had already made it. Surprise, more free food! More free drink! Lots of chairs, very comfortable and ripe for sitting in, and nobody around. I grabbed a crossaint, brewed a cup of fruity black tea, snatched another newspaper, Die Welt am Sonntag, and sat down. I wouldn’t move for three hours. I spent the entire time catching up on my YouTube backlog while the room around me filled up almost completely. It was glorious. The room was bright, clean, seemingly new. It was almost IKEA-model-like in its elegant simplicity. I made sure to take it all in and thoroughly enjoy the moments I had in its comfort. I felt like a world traveler, sitting there with my Zeitung on the table and cup of tea in hand, while the television over yonder spouted weather forecasts in German. It was a feeling I hope to live again in the near future.
And then, again before I wanted it to be, it was over. I was going home to the United States. Back at the gate, I sat by the window looking out over another giant Airbus A380 beneath the rising sun whilst folks around chatted. I’d made a hobby of eavesdropping German and I began to understand how really anyone can pick up an unknown language via immersion. I wish I had more time there.
In a line blocking the terminal’s main walkway I stood for a few minutes before boarding. I assume its content was largely Americans, given the destination. I even saw a guy wearing a San Jose Sharks shirt. A little slice of home abroad. When I got on the plane, I made quick small talk with the flight attendants in German. My confidence was rising. When my seat neighbor sat down and began conversing with her other neighbor in German, I was again happy to eavesdrop. She spoke to me in German briefly, to which I didn’t respond, before she switched to flawless accent-less English. She was American, actually. I was intrigued by her bilingualism, but also too tired to form enough cohesive thoughts for a good conversation.
My window seat was a beautiful view … of the starboard side wing. The curved spline of the leading edge, lofting up into the sky, blocked almost the entirety of the horizon. I saw nothing but blue sky and shining white metal. After we took off, the plane did a quick loop of Frankfurt. As the plane banked right, the horizon rose enough to reveal a clean view of the Frankfurt skyline. I ducked down to grab my camera, only to find the sight had passed already when I returned seconds later. Bummer. Live in the moment, people.
When drink service came around, I asked for a “Wasser, bitte.” Mission accomplished. My German-speaking American neighbor was now intrigued by me, having displayed at least some knowledge of the language. I told her my brief story, sure to mention that my skills were in progress. Still, when that water came around to me, it felt real good.
This second flight wasn’t so bad on the body. I spent it watching more of The Wire, having almost finished off season two at this point. After all, I had no view out the window to distract me.
About halfway through the flight, according to the maps that displayed occasionally on the screens throughout the cabin, we flew north over Greenland. This was the coolest thing. I couldn’t see the terrain, which is apparently staggeringly beautiful, but the awesomeness of this occurrence was in the sky. See, when we took off from Germany in the early morning and headed on a great circle path to San Francisco, the sun rose in the east, which was on the right side of the north-headed plane. As we came closer and closer to our zenith, it grew dark; the sun set again… in the east. It was almost dusky outside, the dark northern horizon now out my window to the right of the plane.
A couple hours after that, the sun began to rise again, this time on the left side of the plane. We were descending on our arc back to the southwest and at this point, the west was now out my window. The sun, still in the east, was now on the opposite side of the plane. It was truly bizarre. My knowledge of solar positions, terrestrial coordinates, and our flight path made this occurrence understandable and expected. However, just think about this from the perspective of someone who was just sitting in their seat, who might be feeling as though the plane was just flying straight ahead (which it was, on the surface of a sphere). Sunrise on the right, then a sudden sunset, after which the sun eventually reappears on the left. I can barely imagine what that hypothetical person must have thought.
I glanced often at our flight map as we crossed North America. From Greenland we flew down over Alberta, British Columbia, and eventually Washington state. Mount Rainier was out my window, if only I’d had a view of something other than a wing. We jogged sharply around Mount Shasta for some reason before approaching the Bay from the north. We circled for some time. At SFO, the direction at which planes land varies by the weather, so you really never know which way you’ll approach. This time, it seemed like the pilot didn’t either. We did a figure eight around Santa Cruz, San Jose, and the peninsula before finally settling into a reasonable approach vector. The cabin screens switched over to a camera mounted on the tail of the aircraft, showing a very foggy landscape behind the giant plane, which was made smaller by a slight fish-eye effect.
Honestly, I got a little nervous as I watched the plane make course changes that clearly didn’t line up with SFO’s runways. Especially since I couldn’t visually make out the airport. As it happened, the pilots deserved my faith. We landed, many minutes behind schedule, but on the ground back in America nonetheless. The deceleration of the Airbus was awesome. I watched the lumbering beast pull to a crawl before turning to the terminal. Those 737s seem to break off the runway at 100 mph sometimes; this guy was barely moving as it turned its massive frame.
We pulled into the gate at SFO 36 hours after the flight from Kimberley had departed. At the end of the international arrivals terminal was just what I wanted to see, a giant freakin’ line. Welcome to the United States, the signs read. In English. It felt so boring, too familiar. I chose my queue, poorly. It was clearly the slowest line. People at this checkpoint were being held up by gods know what. When I got there, I was in and out in about twenty seconds. No big deal.
I skipped through baggage claim, rushed up the stairs to where I’d left from a week earlier, and found a bus to the long term parking lot and my car. As soon as I got in my vehicle, it was like I’d never left. My odyssey across the planet felt like nothing more than a dream. Upon leaving the airport grounds, I was thrust into aggressive American traffic, bad even for a Sunday. Welcome home.
I was so tired and so jetlagged I didn’t have any time for any chicanery. I was irritable and impatient. I just wanted to get back to my apartment. When I did, my life got instantly more complicated. I couldn’t bear to do anything other than throw on some television, lay down on the couch and watch.
I woke up hours later. Surprise nap! I gave up and went to bed. I even made it to work the next day. Unfortunately, the week was a waste; my jetlag lingered until Friday and my productivity was low. My mood was unstable and my nights were wasted. It was a bad time.
However, the trip was incredible. I was more than willing to receive a week of miserable desynchronosis for a week abroad in distant lands among the vibrant unfamiliar cultures. There’s really not much left to say about it. I’m lucky this opportunity was sprung on me and I eagerly await the next one. Next time, I’m absolutely going to say yes, without hesitation.
I’d be foolish not to.
Antipodal Odyssey, Part Een: There And Back Again
On an almost regular Monday morning at work, one which just happened to be wedged between the Christmas and New Years holidays, a time of routine disruption, stilted productivity and general disorganization, a coworker wandered over to my desk and out-of-the-blue asked me an eight word question that instilled me with immediate and absolute terror: “Do you want to go to South Africa?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why?”
“Wait, WHAT?”
Like a bullet in the gut. My company was sending a team out there for a work assignment. As it were, my team needed representation and I was the most senior high-voltage expert available.
I use the words “senior” and “expert” carefully, as I am neither. But here I was. The prospect of having immense responsibility on a (very expensive) trip to a far far away place was considerably frightening. There’s a lot of pressure to perform, despite my relative lack of confidence in my expertise.
So I went to lunch. As soon as I stepped out of the office into a beautiful sunny December mid-day, the opportunity began to sharpen into focus. As I said before, I’d never been out of the country continent United States and Canada before. Suddenly, it was to be my reality in barely a week. So many more realizations entered my head as I walked to my car and drove to a nearby restaurant:
I wrote last summer that I’d never been to the Southern Hemisphere and had yet to experience the mind-blowing solar shift that is life underneath the equator. That was happening.
I’d never been to Europe. My connection to Johannesburg was to be Frankfurt, Germany. I guess all that German practice was finally of some practical use!
I was going somewhere no one in my family had yet been, the southern end of Africa. I feel rarely a trailblazer in my bloodline, so those chances I’m given I’m sure to take. It happened in 2011 in Seattle (sort of), among numerous other occasions.
In retrospect I couldn’t believe I was having doubts.
As the day of departure grew closer, I made sure to prepare for the experience as best as possible. I acquired myself multiple power outlet adaptors, since South Africa oddly uses their own standard, as well as purchased new work boots and safety gear for the site.
I was unsettled though. South Africa has a terrible reputation for crime, violent or otherwise. I interrogated those coworkers who’d made the same trip for tips and reassurance. What I got was a mixed bag, first-hand stories of uneventful days, others of petty crimes. I researched, hoping for the results to align with my pro-safety prejudices. Some of them were encouraging; it seemed to appear as though the most dangerous areas were elsewhere than our itinerary. Still, I am not one to take chances and made sure to remove all non-essential valuables from my wallet, work bag, and luggage.
On the morning of, I collected my passport, work equipment, lightened luggage, and headed off across the bay to San Francisco International Airport. I felt lost as I navigated the International Terminal. Merely acquiring my boarding pass seemed to be a chore, and my itinerary required official assistance from an agent, for some reason. Once with both passes to Frankfurt and Johannesburg in hand, I slowly progressed to the gate area. Security was incredibly lax compared to the domestic US flights I’d been accustomed to and it caught me offguard. I didn’t even have to remove my shoes. Odd.
At the gate sat a Boeing 747. Once upon a time this was the largest commercial airliner ever built. It was by far the largest plane I’d ever been on, having flown mostly 737s and other assorted small birds within the United States. The United 747 had ten seats across, two aisles with three seats on the outside of each. I was in a window seat behind the wing with a decent view. This was to be an eleven hour flight; I was absolutely ready.
We departed San Francisco headed for Frankfurt at about 3pm, Sunday, January 4th. We were going to arrive around 11am on Monday morning. I wasn’t sure how to tackle my jet lag. Accommodations awaited during the day in Germany, so I decided it best to stay as awake as possible during the flight. I remember everything. We hit one of the roughest patches of turbulence I can remember over Colorado or Nebraska. As the sun set, I attempted to identify American cities by lights only. I succeeded in noting Milwaukee, thanks to the Lake Michigan coastline. As the plane continued up and over Atlantic Canada, I dived into episodes of the The Wire on my laptop. I knocked off five before my battery was nearly drained, and I maintain that as one of the absolute best ways to pass time on a long flight.
As the last episode came to an end, it was already lightening outside. Thick clouds blanketed the land outside, which might have been anywhere between the UK, North Sea, the Netherlands or Germany at the time.
And soon the clouds broke and I laid eyes on Europe for the first time. The land was a mix of snow and green, rolling hills dotted with villages. Scattered around were the occasional cluster of wind turbines. It was somehow exactly as I’d imagined it might be.
The plane descended through patchy ground fog into Frankfurt on time. I excitedly powered on my phones to notice they were now served by Vodafone.de and it was somehow ten hours later than my body felt it should be. As I watched the buildings grow closer, adorned with, shockingly, mostly English signage, the crew suddenly all spoke German. I shot as much as I could out the window with my camera, every single occasion of German writing. I was beyond excited to step off the plane into the airport and absorb it all.
Before long, the passengers disembarked into Frankfurt Flughafen and I forced myself to be as nonchalant as possible. Act like you’ve been there, they say. Wholly lost in this strange airport, I grappled immediately toward the numerous signs in the gates. They were all German-English bilingual, which is great for me since I could not only read them, but I learned a bunch of new words at the same time! It was a long walk toward passport control, through a long long terminal wing to an empty immigration station. I greeted everyone with the standard German “guten Morgen” and left with a simple “dankeschön,” despite my American passport. I was ill-equipped to respond to anything beyond basic German, unfortunately. Story of my trip, really. I’ll get there.
Once beyond passport control, I got lost navigating baggage claim. It was nearly empty and all of the signs seemed to loop around to each other. I found a non-descript set of doors centrally located on the opposite side of the baggage claim from which I entered, and upon traversing their threshold, I was in a different world. The terminal was flooded with thousands of people, there was movement and life, and light. I had emerged on the ticketing side of the terminal and joined the flow of humanity in search of a check-in kiosk and my hotel.
The third flight on my itinerary, from Johannesburg to Kimberley, South Africa, was in less than 18 hours and I was looking to print my boarding pass as soon as I could. The Lufthansa Star Alliance kiosk didn’t work. I attempted to find a booking agent to assist, but they were reportedly at the ends of the queues labeled “Ticketed passengers only.”
Resigned, I took the long walk from the airport entrance across several bridges to The Squaire, a beautiful office building / train station on the northwest of the Flughafen. Skipping up the stairs, I found my hotel. The woman at the desk greeted with a delightful “Hallo!” I eavesdropped nearby conversations to my best ability. German is really a beautiful language. It’s just misunderstood in this country. Thank World War II and seventy-years of pent-up anti-Germany propaganda for that, probably.
My hotel room was beautiful. It took a second to figure out how the lights worked. (First switch in the room powered all of them, which I missed on first walkthrough…) The bathroom had a fogless mirror, heated floors and a tub with a drain in the middle (?). The view out the window was of the airport to the southeast. Nothing really to speak of.
As soon as I could, I went to the desk in the room. I found a built-in power strip with standard European plugs, as well as ones for US and UK plugs. I made sure to get some use out of my adaptor and shoved my universal into the UK slot, while powering my computer off of the regular one. I got onto the hotel Wifi and did some internetting, catching up on the last 13 hours of my world. I then realized that, sitting there, I was the farthest north I’d ever been on land. Take that, northern Vancouver, Frankfurt Flughafen is at 50.05°N! I was also my farthest east, but that wouldn’t last for too much longer.
I tried not to spend too much time on the computer, as my stay was limited and I needed to catch up on sleep. I scuttled over into my bed and tried to nap. I couldn’t fall asleep because I was so excited that I was actually in Europe. It was truly unbelievable.
My alarm rang. At some point I must have drifted off. I staggered over to the bathroom and took a shower. I freshened up, but put on same clothes I wore yesterday. When did society decide that we have to change and wash a t-shirt after every individual use? If it’s not dirty, I’m gonna wear it! (It was dirty. I’d just worn it for an eleven hour flight. I chose to because I’d miscalculated my number of outfits I’d need for the trip, short by one. I blame the ever-changing timezones for that oversight.)
Once ready again, I went downstairs and coordinated the boarding passes for my Kimberley flight with my co-worker. After checking-in, I went over to neighboring hotel business center to print them on an open computer.
I sat down and opened up my Gmail. Except I mistyped my email address because Germany uses the QWERTZ keyboard. Upon looking down, I found several keys to be missing, as well as new ones in their places. For the longest time, I just could not figure out how to type a # symbol because it had been replaced by §. What is that even for!? Then there’s the @ symbol, which was below the Q on its key, like some kind of down-shift. The button with the down arrow above left shift (which was denoted with an up arrow) was actually Caps Lock. Huh? I was completely lost. Eventually, I figured out some combination of buttons that got me my @ symbol (as well as the #, located on the bottom of the ‘ key between Ä and Enter). I don’t remember what I did.
Boarding passes in hand, my coworker and I wandered over to security. The agent greeted me in German and asked me which languages I spoke. I told him English and German, and when he spoke to me in German, my eyes glazed over. I know the words, I really do, but I cannot keep them straight with natural accents, fluency, and normal volume. He regressed to English, to my appreciation.
After a thorough search by a nice (I think) German security agent, I continued onward to the gate. We ended up at one of the Lufthansa Gold Lounges, which I was able to enter because my coworker has miles or points or something. Let me just say, this lounge was amazing. Tons of free food and drink, a smattering of people from all different cultures, speaking and reading their own languages. It was incredibly clean and looked brand new. (It was renovated relatively recently). I made haste in grabbing dinner before the flight. Delicious Indian rice and Frikadellen, German meatballs, was enough for me. They also had pretzels, which I hope were authentically German, but I didn’t have one. I drank some kind of Fruchtsaft, fruit juice, however its name was a much longer single word. It was pretty good.
Once again, we scurried over to the gate for our South African Airways flight. It was a short wait in the queue and as folks funneled up into the single passport line, I squeezed in relatively close to the gate. Now, this South African Airways plane wasn’t really that nice. It was an Airbus A346, a little smaller than the 747, but generally older feeling. The crew appeared to be mostly Black African, yet most of them I heard speaking German. That was bizarre.
Shortly, we were in the air again. Since we were flying south, I made a note to look out for Zürich, the city on top of my next-to-visit-in-Europe list. Turns out, Europe is tiny. By the time I thought to look out the window for Swiss cities, we were already out over Italy. Checking the flightpath after we landed, I discovered that we flew directly over Zürich probably around a half-hour into the flight. Darn.
As the land began to darken into the Mediterranean sea, I looked out over to the west and saw a cluster of bright lights. The live flight map confirmed this to be Monaco, the most densely-populated and one of the wealthiest per capita nations in the world.
Over the sea, we were served dinner. Along with broccoli and chicken, there was, wait for it, spätzle! Of course there was! To my surprise, it tasted exactly like the kind I make. Good recipe, eh?
Night over Africa was dark. I followed the coastline of Tunisia, which led into nothing but sparse lights scattered in the Sahara. Some of them looked almost like fires. I posit they might have been, but since flight data isn’t tracked over the majority of Africa I haven’t a clue where we actually were. The pilot noted that we were to fly around Libya, as it is a restricted no-fly zone, so I would venture these might have been somewhere in Algeria at the time.
To pass the time, I listened to music for a little before diving in to more Wire. It served me until the pre-dawn hours.
Flying south is odd. We launched from Germany after sunset, and the moon had risen in the east sometime shortly after that. It was a full moon the night before. As I was occupied with The Wire, I occasionally charted the moon’s progress from the first time I could see it above the plane out my west-facing window. It crossed overhead to my right and drifted toward northwest as night went on.
The sun rose over Africa as the moon disappeared below clouds and haze. Gradually, green and red blotched terrain was revealed below. We flew not far what I believe to have been Gaborone, in southern Botswana, a moderately developed border city with a clearly visible international demarcation on its edge.
Now over South Africa, we slowly began to descend into metropolitan Gauteng. As the city features came into clarity from the sky, I spotted for the first time a highway with cars driving on the left side. It would get weirder once we landed.
The area around Johannesburg was hazy in the summer morning. I unfortunately never saw the skyline from plane, as O.R. Tambo International Airport is not really that close to downtown. We touched down mid-morning on Tuesday, January 6th, a long-ass time since I’d left San Francisco.
The sky out my window from ground-level was dusty. The trees with their bright green foliage contrasted with the orange dirt around the runways. It was super hot for 9am, but again, it was mid-summer.
Upon disembarking into Tambo, I noted the terminal was completely empty. The arrivals concourse was darkly lit with yellowish-green fluorescent lights, and was totally adorned in colorful tiles forming vertical stripes on the walls. It was very old-fashioned, as if it were constructed sometime in the 1970s. Aside from a baggage claim, there was nothing else.
Harried due to the brevity of my layover (40 minutes), I picked up the pace to get to passport control. Following the signs for non-visa nations, I somehow ended up in the wrong queue. Already nervous and tired and hungry and out of my element, I shrugged and jumped the short barrier into the correct line.
At its end was a thermal sensor checking arriving passengers for a fever. The Ebola outbreak is geographically closer to Paris than it is Johannesburg, but they were taking no chances there. After less than a minute to check and stamp my passport, my coworker and I decided to step it up to a jog through to the domestic terminal. We had maybe 15 minutes left before boarding the connection to Kimberley.
The domestic departure concourse was bustling and very modern looking, in stark contrast to the previously described international arrivals concourse. There were countless check-in kiosks, bag checks, security lines, and ticket counters. At the far end was another security check for the gates. This one was incredibly short. There was no line, few safety regulations, and the security personnel were very nice, cheery people. Once again, all of Black African descent.
Once down at the gate, I was flummoxed to find a bus there. Handing my ticket off to the attendant, he joked that the bus was our way to Kimberley. We shared a laugh, an occurrence much more rare in the United States.
As I stood on bus for several minutes, a South African colleague randomly introduced himself. He was shuttling from our Johannesburg office to site on the same flight as our American team. Wonderful! The plane we were taking was tiny, perhaps the smallest commercial flight I’d taken. The final flight of our long cross-planetary sojourn was soon underway.
It did a short loop around Johannesburg. I was seated on the wrong side of the plane to snap pictures, but I did see the skyline briefly through the window across the aisle. And then nothing. The green and red mottled landscape stretched for as far as I could see, interspersing waterways and reservoirs occasionally. It was a quick flight over African prairie, done in what seemed like less than an hour.
As we landed over Kimberley, I spotted out my window the famous “Big Hole.” Quite impressive from the sky, but more on that later. The airport in Kimberley is very small, consisting of two perpendicularly laid out runways and with a fun-sized terminal. A short walk from the plane on the tarmac into the back door, maybe fifteen meters of terminal, and then out into South African freedom.
We were ready for an adventure. But first, we needed a ride.
And so he spoke... 
