Travelling from the southern end of Australia to Johannesburg in one day is like going through a sublime out-of-body experience that only smoking pot can induce, or better still, wilfully committing hara-kiri, not once but over and over again, as several time zones are crossed. At least three movies are watched and breakfast is partaken at dinner time and lunch is served as a midnight snack.
Our journey started in Hobart, Tasmania, at 5 a.m. where two bleary eyed souls with a combined age of 120 were being dropped off by one of our offspring and her patient ‘partner in love’, who seemed to have one eye closed as he drove us to the airport to take off for South Africa. Waiting for the next hop from Melbourne to Sydney at the Hobart airport brought the stark awareness that we had not much time to spare to catch the intercontinental flight to Johannesburg and then subsequently our connection to Windhoek. The pilot did not help either when he announced after a ten-minute delay on the tarmac that the pin that connects the plane to the pilot vehicle had broken and ‘they’ were trying to fix it.
That was the first time I had come across the word ‘They’ – an ominous and potent reference to people doing things within their control but totally beyond ours.
With the pin fixed, the plane took off after a further wait on the tarmac. (Someone in the control tower had moved up other flights ahead of ours, displaying once again the unseen ‘power’ of ‘they’). We started circling over the cumulonimbus clouds over Sydney with just 50 minutes left for the connecting flight. After spending 20 minutes drawing loops in the sky, the pilot finally landed with assistance from ‘them’. We had just half an hour to connect to the next flight and we planned it as follows: grab luggage, rush to the international terminal in a transit bus, check-in, cross customs and security into the VAT reimbursement counter to claim reimbursements for items bought in Australia before we report at the boarding gate. No worries. It was tight but possible to pull off.
But the sequence of events that followed had all the trappings of a dark comedy.
First of all, I had managed to work myself into such a fluster that I had no idea which flap in my bag contained the right boarding passes, so this search and recovery took five-plus minutes. Then the rush to the shuttle bus started – a brief wait of two minutes in the stationary bus (not bad) before we headed out on to the tarmac to queue up just behind a huge Qantas Airbus that was being moved into a hanger for repairs… it was awesome watching the aircraft at close quarters, but once again we were in the hands of ‘them’ – who had positioned this giant mass of steel that was too heavy to roll and hobble into the hanger in one go. That took another eight minutes.
We reached the terminal and made our dash to catch the flight. In our hurry we had not noticed the nice lady who transferred us over had given us an express pass. We got stuck in the ordinary queue (a further delay of five minutes) and eventually crossed over to the security area.
As my luggage passed through the X-ray ‘they’ decided to take undue interest in its contents. That is when I advised my husband to abandon me and go over to claim the VAT refund.
Now the following events unfolded. A full five minutes for a customs officer to read out my rights, after which she ignored me totally in favour of a Caucasian woman whose make-up case was demolished and her fancy shoes were dismantled. Eventually she laid her eyes on me, gestured politely that I was not to come anywhere near. She opened my hand luggage and proceeded to totally dismantle it. She announced that I had no right to touch my box, my articles and provide any explanation until she was completely through – and then that she would be X-raying my stuff again.
At that moment I was ready to abandon all of my worldly possessions and walk off with the sole purpose of catching the plane – the 12 minutes of spare time vanished in front of my eyes as the Customs officer carried on unpacking, dismantling, creatively arranging and rearranging and meticulously examining each little cream, chocolate, house keys and my BlackBerry. The rule book written for ‘Them’ must have been prepared by a set of aliens with no emotional intelligence or self-awareness – probably she was their team leader for training and mentoring on the job.
Soon I was hurtling towards Gate 25. My intense training at the gym and some wonderful treks in Tasmania left me in good stead when I sprinted to the boarding area. I saw my husband running towards the gate trying to cope with multiple bags and the VAT receipt. ‘They’ had thwarted his bid to get a VAT refund.
Just 13 hours and 12 minutes later we landed in Johannesburg. We had enough time to collect our luggage and check in for our next flight to Windhoek. Our check-in was very smooth. A pleasant woman allowed us to carry excess baggage and provided comfortable seating and even put Priority stickers on our check-in luggage. Smooth cross-over at security. No one emptied my precious creams and balms. We remarked about the politeness, warmth and lack of red tape. Where were all of ‘them’, we wondered.
We reached Windhoek late in the night and opened our luggage, only to find that our suitcases had been rifled through. The contents seemed in disarray but we did not find anything missing.
Wonder what was that about putting Priority stickers on our bags. Priority could be a code word ‘they’ had designed in order to mark the luggage of unsuspecting victims. Till date we do not know what went missing… so long as ‘they’ got what they wanted, we are fine with it.