Arrival

I made it. Arriving in Jo'burg airport, I realised that I had just over an hour to clear customs and check into the domestic terminal for my flight to Cape Town. An hour is the equivalent of a photo-finish in a 100m sprint. A single nose-hair's difference means boarding or missing my flight. So I ran. Every opportunity, running from passport control to baggage pickup to customs (who didn't even talk to me. For all he knew, my bag was filled with ecstasy). Oh, and if you've ever heard of Africa being the bastion of friendliness, the domestic terminal is the black hole of of despair. Even in Sydney, where I was stopped for a random check (no bending and coughing, thank God), the security officer and I were trading jokes. I made it to the security checkpoint for the domestic terminal, where the guy on security threw a plastic tray at me and barked an order to empty my pockets into the tray. When I did so and handed the tray back, he stared at me, eyes expanding, like I was Apartheid itself and yelled, I kid you not, yelled at me for my absurd belief that he would place the tray on the carriage. A natural assumption, since he was doing it for the previous dozen travellers he'd cattled through. The guy after me got the same treatment. We made it through the checkpoint, and while we reattached watches, he looked at me and rolled his eyes. "Friendly place," I replied.

I made it on the 737 to Cape Town, and took a short drive to my old home town of Durbanville. My brother picked me up from the airport, and celebrated my arrival by devouring half a chicken, and drinking until midnight at his local. He's promised to show me the night life this weekend. He drove me to his flat a little tipsy, and left me to my own devices at around 1am.

Two days later, I can tell you that this is a very different place to how I remember it. The sleepy little town I lived in on the edge of the city has woken and is on speed. Two lane roads are everywhere. Cars zoom past, with little notion of the road code. Taxi's screetch by with absolutely no knowledge of any code. I'm on foot, and say a little prayer each time I need to cross a street. I've stopped trusting pedestrian crossings, even though I saw someone take almost no heed of traffic, and just walked through one in blind faith that motorists wouldn't want to damage their cars with his internal organs.

But this place, as much as I'm surrounded by Africans, and everyone jibbers in Afrikaans, Durbanville doesn't feel all that different to New Zealand. If nothing else, with the flat, wide roads, green grass, and bad driving, I could be in Christchurch.

I go clubbing in Cape Town this weekend, and try and fill my social calendar by catching up with family and friends next week. I have a nagging need to start picking up some contacts for work, and finding kiwi's to write about. It's going to be a busy time, but after months of preparation, I've finally made it to Africa.