We arrived! Well, Johannesburg airport was a lot nicer than I'd remembered it, even at 2am. I came to South Africa for a two week business trip in around 2005, and other than the weekend safari I did at a private camp near Kruger National Park (Kirkman's Camp), my memories of Joburg were that it wasn't very memorable. However, the airport WAS nicer...
We walked down to security, and I could hear Beth worrying about getting through customs with our simple, completely legit birth certificates and our two kids that don't really look like African babies....
The customs agent waived the Versly through next to us, as Beth sweated bullets next to me. I figured our agent would either say nothing or give us some rudimentary flack and let us through. Sure enough, she asked us for a long form birth certificate that indicated the girl's parent's names and when we couldn't produce, she called her cocky, older male colleague over. He had plenty of swagger for a customs agent... but he was a bit of a douche. His big play was to ask the girls when our birthdays were...which, well I was shocked that they actually got our days right, but they guessed at 1975 for our years... doh! He gave us a lecture on child smuggling and let us in... I suspect he wanted a bribe or something, and he actually stole my pen to make a show that he had won.
So... all good, right!? Yes.... until we went to baggage claim and found an empty baggage handling conveyor cycling around in loops... our bags were nowhere to be found.
At this point, we just rolled with the punches. Alex and I logged a claim at the lost baggage counter (along with a dozen other people from our flight) and with relatively little drama from the rest of the team, we were off to find some lodgings for the night. Lol... or, a Wimpy's Diner to rest at for a few hours. Alex and Kim tried semi successfully to get some shut eye, while Beth feigned sleep, only to pop up like a jack-in-the-box when I asked any of the kids if they wanted to go for an airport walk... "I will!" She shouted while popping up bolt upright.
By about 5:00 am, we started to rouse... it was almost time to go work on our Joburg to Capetown flight. The flight was supposed to leave at 6:00, and the office had just opened up. Even though the South African Airlines lady in Nairobi had theoretically reserved seats for us and told us that the change fees COULD be waived, the staff at the SAA office were assholes. They ended up making us buy 4 business class seats and 4 economy seats (we later saw that the plane was half full!) and they couldn't really give a shit about our misfortune. Oh well.
The clan was doing amazingly well - looking back, I can't believe we didn't have one meltdown, one bout of tears, one desperate need to pound back four cheeseburgers or much of any reaction at all. The kids continued to play cards and kibitz, and the adults moved in and out of sleep and organization mode.
On the plus side, it's really easy travelling without 8 giant back packs!!!
We arrived in Cape Town at 8am, surprisingly only about 10 hours later than our original plan, though we had planned on arriving with bags... We had prearranged with our rental place to send a driver to pick us up at the airport. Would things start working our way?
As I made my way out of the secured area, I spotted a slight, older gentleman with a sign "Tyndall - 8". "Cecil!" I shouted like he was my long last (most likely half or quarter) brother. This little man was the best sight I'd seen in the last day and a half.
We sped through Cape Town, with Cecil droning on about the surrounding areas... I shouldn't be hard on him, but I was tired. He did give me a useful lay of the land. The city is beautifully placed in the crook of a small mountain range and blockaded by the sea and the outer neighbourhoods cling to the slopes at various points, often reaching down to a beachy landing at the ocean.
We had decided that renting a house in the upscale neighbourhood of Camps Bay would be the best thing for us to wind down our trip. It reminded us of the fun we had in apartment style accommodations in Borneo in 2015.
We were met by a rep from the property management company, a twenty something drip named Tyler, who was more interested in rushing through the house orientation and getting back to his social media feeds than looking to warmly welcome us to Cape Town.
The place was beautiful as advertised, and we got settled pretty quickly. In no time, we had ordered two Ubers to pick us up and go towards the city to Sea Point where there was a small mall... we needed some clothes!
Uber is the way to go in Cape Town, and by the time the trip was over, we came to learn that the majority of Uber drivers were from out of country - we met drivers from Malawi, Zimbabwe (quite a number of our drivers were from there), Congo, Rwanda, Namibia, Bangladesh and Sudan and just a couple native Cape Towners.
Buying some clothes in Cape Town was actually always on the to do items, as the temperatures during our stay would range from 12 to 20 degrees (it was Winter after all!) and we didn't want to drag all of our warmer stuff with us throughout the safari. It was actually fun, getting fully clothed and geared up in case our bags didn't show up. Abby seemed the most concerned, as she had her Birthday in a couple of days, and I guess she had something in mind that she wanted to wear. As we say quite a bit to the kids... it could be way worse!
Alex had an unlocked phone (I'd forgotten that I had replaced my phone after our 2015 trip and that my new one was locked... damn you Rogers!) and he got a local SIM card so he could keep pestering the baggage guys. He eventually found a web page that showed the status of our bags, though the status said "NO STATUS", so....yeah.
We walked around Sea Point for a bit, stopping for lunch at a Thai place, then strolling down the strip looking for something interesting. We stumbled upon an old school DVD rental place (haven't seen one of those for a while!) and the kids came alive and were buzzing around the place for twenty minutes. They ended up renting five movies.
We Ubered back and Alex and Beth went to grab some takeout for dinner while I waited for my rental bike and trainer to arrive. I'd arranged for a bike a while ago, and Lez, the guy from the rental shop, was really great about making arrangements for drop off, setup and pickup. All I had to do was sneak in some rides. I'm riding across Canada in September with 7 teammates over eight days, raising money for Childhood cancer research (www.thechase2017.ca), and this three and a half week hole in my training schedule was not doing my legs any favours.
While I got my ride in, dinner arrived and it was fantastic! There's a whole bunch of restaurants and shops along the Camps Bay Beach road which was just a five minute walk from our place.
Well... it was time for some sleep. It had been a very.... eventful couple of days, and even though we were a little light on clothes and supplies, we were still determined to enjoy the rest of our trip in Africa.
Cecil. Scrawny. Best sight
Check in. Tyler drip.
No bags. seapoint mall for some shopping.
DVD rental place. Throwback
Dinner.. takeout Italian
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