Jo'burg, and beyond

After a restless night's sleep, we wake at 5:30 to get the bus back to Heathrow.  The self check-in kiosk doesn't work.  A humourless woman checks us in and a semi-tap young man provides us with food vouchers which we spend on Pret's proper porridge and other hangover-appropriate food.  I feel nauseous.  At security the alarm goes off despite me having nothing but the clothes I stand up in on.  A young man pats me down, and for the first time in my experience of being searched at the airport, run his fingers around the top of my boxers.  Cheap thrill.  Not.  Onwards.  We learn in Dixons that 'worldwide' travel adaptors do not include South Africa, which still uses the old rounded-pin system you see in British lighting circuits sometimes so have to fork out for yet another one.  They lie!

When we board the plane, we discover that we are two of only 83 passengers, with 23 crew to serve our needs.

 A disarmingly blue-eyed flight attendant called Kyle asks, with a soft and suggestible Mancunian accent, whether we could sit in the door seats with extra leg room.  I am happy to oblige.  He then sits in the crew seat in front of us and we chat and exchange lingering but slightly awkward eye contact.  He starts talking to his colleague about his girlfriend in Manchester and my interest dips slightly.  Ro has instead focussed on a tall, blonde attendant with manicured facial hair and a stern but fair expression who towered over us as we boarded.  Being encased in a metal tube at 37,000ft with such people is not without its advantages.

Initially exciting, the 11 hour flight quickly becomes boring and after being fed and lapsing into a dose for a while I watch the Hunger Games, which I found compelling but was pretty much a carbon copy of Battle Royale, which I felt on balance was better, if only because it was novel, and the Japanese are more imaginative when it comes to needless and wanton violence.  I then turn to 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' as an antidote, which follows a series of sixty-somethings seeking different things in Jaipur, India.  I am attracted to it because it has Maggie Smith and Judy Dench in, amongst others, and also because it is about India.  It's a tear-jerker at times, although I was pretty hungover and tired.  Normally I'd be more robust I think.  Anyway, the flight attendant is more diverting so I barely finish before we land, as it were.  

We land in Jo'burg at 9:30pm and Chris from the hostel picks us up.  Being picked up from the airport by a hostel is remarkably rare in my experience, and incredibly convenient.  I think it is because the crime rate in Jo'burg is quite alarming and so such things are necessary, beyond the mere convenience.  When we get to the hostel (Gandhi Backpackers) we find a charming Swiss man called Heinz, who tends to stare at you a bit too long, and an even more charming dog called Fluffy, who lies in guard outside the entrance to the main office, and likes having his tummy tickled.  The hostel has a pool and hot showers and you can buy beer and play pool.  My hostel picking skills seem not to have withered with age.  We collapse into bed.

Next day we decide to fly to Madagascar, and book a flight for the next day.  We then visit the Apartheid Museum.  Chris drives us there after Heinz essentially tells us not to take public transport in the city.  I feel this is a shame really but I don't doubt him.  I'm not keen on being mugged on the first few days of a year off and Jo'burg does have a rep.  If you go to Jo'burg, go to the Apartheid museum.  It is probably one of the best museums I have ever been too.  Most museums manage to divert me for about 90 minutes before indifference or lower back pain force me to seek respite.  I was entranced for four hours and then we had to leave because Chris came to pick us up.  Lots of tear-jerking moments, not so much for the horrors of Apartheid, but more for the humanity of the people who fought it, and eventually won with essentially non-violent means.  If I could have had respected Nelson Mandela any the less before, I certainly did not now.  The man is, quite simply, a legend and will be for centuries.  Apartheid was not dissimilar in many ways to the extremes of fascism and communism, and although I knew that intellectually, rarely has a museum brought home the emotion so strongly, and so well.  Visually an austere building (presumably purposefully), and mystifyingly built next to Jo'burg's answer to Thorpe Park (so that the despair of the repressed mingle intermittently with the screams coming from the roller coaster) it contains a story of repression and freedom, fear and optimism, despair and hope, but above all the implacable belief in certain fundamentals of humanity that can only be right.  I was entranced.  And museums rarely entrance me.

When we return a couple in the hostel have just arrived and within minutes had their car with all their luggage stolen from the road outside.  Buggeh!  We have a beautiful steak at a restaurant down the road.  South Africans love their meat, and by the evidence of the first couple of meals we had, they do it better than almost anyone else.  I have the meat sweats.

Up at dawn and we drive to the airport to fly to Madagascar, or Mad, as it is affectionately known.  The capital has one of the more unpronounceable names, Antananarivo.  It's a big island often devastated by cyclones, very poor, but with that curious, exotic draw that made us want to visit.  The plane sinks lower and the long spines of rough cut hills become visible, then mud paths, shacks and the occasional house.  Nearer the city a surfaced road is seen, with a few vehicles taking their time down them.  We land.  You need a visa to get into Madagascar, but you get it at the airport and you don't have to pay for it and they base it entirely on your passport and the landing card you fill out.  I feel someone has missed a trick here.  The ATM doesn't work so we persuade a taxi driver to take us to another one, and then to the city.  Only it's not really a city, or at least not like I'm used to.  Rough shacks prop up shoddy looking brick buildings.  Paddy fields are commonplace, often filled with rubbish and decay. Children play in them.  People bustle about the street.  Life seems to shine through the apparent poverty and decay.  And it is heartening to see.  But the reality of poverty is brought home when we are brought to a halt by a crowd milling about a market in the street and the taxi driver abruptly reaches behind him and locks both the doors and shuts the windows.  It doesn't feel dangerous, but poverty induces desperation I suppose.  Many people do not have shoes.