This article begins a new series recounting my trip to South Africa in 2008. I travelled there, then, to visit Maria, my wife, as she worked with a small orphanage-type organization in rural Durban. We were dating back then. With the World Cup and all that I thought this would be an excellent time to give a little peek into my, and our, time on the African continent. Enjoy.
Just getting there was a pretty intense experience. Since flights out were about $600 cheaper flying out of the States than out of Canada, I bummed a ride off my parents to the airport in Buffalo, New York. It wasn’t a early morning flight, but I had been up late the night before, scrambling to copy DVDs and CDs to add to a collection I had been creating for Maria, and to do some last minute packing. I didn’t get much sleep, so even an early afternoon flight out, after the long drive from my parent’s house in Newmarket, I was already beat by the time I got to the airport.
After surrendering a jar of Nutella which somehow snuck into my carry-on suitcase, I said goodbye to my parents and weaved my way through customs, security, and found my departure gate. The afternoon before had been the finale for the Euro Cup and I’d been avoiding spoilers at all costs. This was an era largely before streaming live video and Twitter updates so it wasn’t too difficult to do. Instead of watching the match live I’d downloaded it onto my iPod Touch. Once I settled in at my gate I watched the game.
It felt strange to be going some place so new, and for such a long period of time. I was leaving North America for South Africa. My then girlfriend, now wife, Maria, was volunteering with a tiny organization outside of Durban. She had left shortly after she graduated from school, in May, and it was now July. She was to be there for a total of six months and my visit, a mere six weeks long, would hopefully split things up for her and give me a chance to see what life is like for her across the Atlantic.
Only a month earlier, I had graduated from Teacher’s College at the University of Western Ontario. In a whirlwind tour I’d moved—with the help of my parents, again—from London back to Newmarket for the summer, collecting some things from Kitchener-Waterloo on the way, and then to South Africa shortly after.
The flight to South Africa began at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. but first I needed to get there from Buffalo. A short, forgettable trip would take me there, where I landed at an unmistakably American airport. Washington, the capital. As I wandered the vast corridors and terminals to find my gate I couldn’t help but lose myself, just a little bit, in all the national pride. Aimed, I guess, at the airport tourist, were flags and t-shirts, buttons and pins, stickers, mousepads, and temporary tattoos—so much America. But alongside the George W. Bush and I Heart NY shirts—yes, in Washington!—was the face of a young-ish black man, Barack Obama, who was making a long-shot bid for the Presidency at the time.
And then my plane finally came. I don’t know planes well, but this one was massive. A South African Airways jet staffed by strangers with even stranger accents. Indeed, when the voice of the pilot came over the address system I could barely follow a single thing he said. I thought to myself, what am I doing? Where am I going? But language, or rather accent, barriers aside, I was excited more than anything else and this is something I have a hard time describing. Maybe you know, if you’ve ever traveled some place strange to visit someone that you love. It was a feeling totally unlike traveling to see Maria at her apartment in Waterloo, say. It was totally different from the feeling of traveling to see her in Sarnia, at her parents house. Even different from the feeling I got when I first made that trip, before we were dating, when I barely knew her at all. It was an all together different feeling traveling across the ocean, eighteen hours, to see her in such a brand new environment.
As we flew, all through the night, over the Atlantic ocean and then over an incredible swatch of the continent of Africa I tried to take some notes. Written in tiny little snatches, I can barely understand what I meant looking back now, two years later. The trip on the airplane was surreal, to put it lightly. Nevermind the feeling of expectancy, the excitement over seeing Maria when I finally landed, the whole thing was just so new, so strange, that it all carried with it a heavy aroma of immediacy. This was happening now.
Things like the cabin darkening for “nighttime†even though no one, nobody at all, had any clue what time it was supposed to be. This artificial night was punctuated by artificial meals as well. As we flew across international timelines nobody really knew when to eat, or even if they were hungry. It was odd. So we ate when food came onto our plates. On the flight back from Johannesburg, many weeks later, I would make the mistake of sleeping through a major meal-time and when I landed in Dulles, and then Buffalo International I would be absolutely famished, nearly faint. But on the flight there, I ate and ate and ate. Whenever the trolley rolled by I figured I must’ve been hungry, and so I ate. And as the hours stretched and stretched upwards to eighteen I got the sense that we’d be up there, in the air, forever.
My notes reveal an interesting assortment of characters, faintly remembered in my memory, and vaguely familiar. An aid worker, the MCC sort, traveling by herself with handbags and carry-ons spilling over onto the empty seats around her, headed to some tiny corner of the continent. A group of burly bikers, tattooed and rough around the edges, from somewhere in the deep Southern States and headed to South Africa for a hunting safari as casually as one would head out into the backyard. By the time we hit ten hours in they were drunk, and loud, boasting of killing lions and tigers and, oh my.
My notes talk about people curled up on seats, crunched between arm rests, and the elderly couple across the aisle, flipping through the on-flight magazine with the precision of a team of rowers. Flip, read, flip, read. And of course there was the man who passed out somewhere over West Africa. I was awoke, then, to screams from a few seats back and the hustle of stewardesses and then the call for a doctor. He wasn’t breathing, I heard, as I drifted in and out of my own consciousness—maybe he’s just tired too, I thought. The next morning, and the next day, explaining the whole thing to Maria I wasn’t unconvinced that it was merely a dream.
When we finally landed in Johannesburg, a couple hours behind schedule, I was thrilled to find that my connecting flight to Durban left in about half an hour from a terminal somewhere across the airport. What began then was the scramble of my life. Picking up my suitcase, racing through the dangerous underground parking lot in the middle of the night and catching an airport bus to the appropriate terminal and gate. Intervening then was an older Indian couple who were surely angels under guise. They spoke barely a word of English but, like me, were desperately trying to find the same connecting flight. Together we made the hasty pilgrimage across the airport and ended up seat in the same row when we finally found the plane. A collective sigh of relief. Smiles, in place of language.
When I finally landed in Durban it seemed like it had been weeks since I’d left my parent’s house in Newmarket. After collecting my bags and navigating the confusing Durban airport to find my ride, my girlfriend—a beautiful sight for sore and tired eyes—and to hopefully find a decent bed soon there afterwards. I can remember the elation beyond words at dragging my luggage through the automatic doors and seeing Maria’s face. In my sorry, smelly state of sweaty airplane sleep, I got the first great big hug that I’d had in months, and it was wonderful. I had arrived.
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