Africa Air Travel Con't!

Fair warning - this blog post is more of a hymn to the glories of expensive air travel, (and a few specific notes on flying to South Africa), than a funny anecdote.  

In my admittedly short(ish) life, (oh god oh god next year I'm turning 30...), I've flown on lots, and lots, of planes.  My family used to fly to Norway every summer, and the Bahamas every winter.  Flying to Norway meant a long straight flight, flying to the Bahamas meant a flight from JFK to somewhere in Florida, then a flight from Florida to some small island somewhere, then a flight from that island to another island, and then a boat ride to Harbour Island, where we always stayed.  

My brother Sean and I loved the little puddle jumper planes that would take us to the islands because one of us kids would always be allowed to sit up front with the pilot and be The Navigator.  It was usually Sean, because otherwise he would throw the Temper Tantrum from Hell.  When you've been traveling all day, and you're on your third plane, that is not the time to toy with the emotions of a highly-strung 4 year-old.  Even his 6 year-old sister knew that much.  

I've flown economy class many times.  One particularly memorable trip was to Norway, with Sandy, after graduating from college.  We were in the very last row on the plane, with our seat backs up against the bulkhead - so they couldn't recline at all.  Sandy was on the aisle and I was in the middle, between him and a woman who nowadays would be required to buy two seats.  She took up half of mine, easily*.  Sandy's seat also had a big metal box locked down on the floor under the seat in front of him, so he couldn't put his bag or his feet underneath it, couldn't stretch his legs at all.  It was incredibly uncomfortable.  Also, hilarious.   Sandy would try and doze off, and his elbow would slip off his arm rest into the aisle - and without fail, every time that would happen, the stewardess would appear from whatever black hole stewardesses disappear into during the times between services, (or every time you want a bag of peanuts or a glass of water), and she would WHACK his elbow with the service cart as she pushed it at high speeds down the aisle.  EVERY.  TIME.  It was amazing.  Around the 10 hour mark we both started to hallucinate.  Sandy referred to our seats as "chicken class" and invented a very intricate scenario in which we were actually being kept down in the hold with the chickens, and he had to fight the lead rooster for a share of the crumbled crackers and peanuts the stewardesses threw down at us.  Caveat Emptor if you are buying your seats via something like Priceline.com, etc, or you too could be traveling via Chicken Class. 

I've also flown Business Class, and First Class, though with much less regularity. Ever since I married Sandy, however;  that frequency has been increasing.  And by increasing I mean I haven't flown anything but First Class in 4 years.  There are some things that, with enough familiarity, become easy to take for granted.  First Class airline travel will never be one of those things, for me.   And here, in one photograph, is the reason why.

Are you f*ing kidding me?  Seats that recline FULLY.  Oh my dear lord.  Pillows with real linens and a duvet?  Sign me up.  

The bed situation was particularly fabulous on the flight to South Africa, because that flight was so very, very long.  We're talking about 18 hours of air travel here.  Half of which was spent traveling to Dakar, in Senegal, where the plane stopped and refueled, and the other half of which was spent traveling from Dakar to Johannesburg, in South Africa.

A note on the stop in Dakar - it was a bit over one hour in length, and it consisted of some people leaving the plane, a cleaning crew entering and cleaning the areas of the plane that had been abandoned by the people leaving the plane, a refueling, and then the doors were closed, and the cabin crew suddenly appeared, one stewardess in each aisle, each holding two aerosol cans at shoulder height.  They blew the tops off both cans, and then marched up and down the aisles, through the entire plane, while the cans shot a nauseating air-freshener-smelling fog straight up into the air.  The stewardesses had to empty the entire cans before they stopped.  This was the first time I'd ever seen anything like this happen on an aircraft.  At first, none of us really understood why they had released this gas warfare...later we were told that it was a permethrin spraying to kill any mosquitoes carrying malaria that might have snuck onto the plane.  Frankly it was incredibly uncomfortable to breath this stuff, and it made me feel sick to my stomach.  Ugh.  And though this was the first time I'd experienced it, it was definitely not the last.  The fogging was repeated three times during our flights throughout South Africa.  I wonder what sort of lasting damage that stuff can do...

During the second leg of our flight, I pulled up the window shades and saw the sun just beginning to rise above the cloud cover.  In fact, the picture I used for that last blog post was taken at that moment.  Sandy leaned over my shoulder and whispered, "look...the sun rises over South Africa."  And then he burst into the beginning verse of "Circle of Life."  (If you play that clip, we're talking about the first 7 seconds, and I'm pretty sure he got all those words wrong, but you get the general idea, anyway.)  Since I'd only had about 4 hours of sleep in that magnificent fully-reclining bed chair in first class, this was unspeakably funny.  

I took notes on the flight, but most of them are incoherent and bizarre.  I will share two of them with you.

"Sandy does not laugh out loud while reading Terry Pratchett.  He is defective."

"Sugar packet covered in odd 3 letter abbreviations for things.  I don't know what things, though."

After a short eternity, we landed in Johannesburg.  We were met at the airport by our Abercrombie and Kent representatives/guides, and were shuttled to the Westcliff Hotel for the night.  We arrived in Joburg around 6 or 7 p.m., so there was no time for sightseeing - and we were all so destroyed by the travel that sightseeing was the last thing on our minds anyway.  We all just wanted to grab  some dinner, and go to bed.

Dinner at the Westcliff is a story for another post, though.

Footnote:  I'm awfully sorry that this particular post was not humorous.  However, as Sandy says, there is nothing funny about being in a plane for 18 hours, and breathing poison gas.

* I by no means wish to impugn anyone of generous size.  I have known and loved many people who struggle with their weight, and I know that they face daily persecution because of it, and I'm sure that being required to purchase additional seat space on an aircraft is humiliating and costly and, in general, horrible.  But having spent a very long flight indeed jammed up against one side of my seat, with the armrest cutting into my torso just beneath the ribs, I confess I believe that for some passengers, it is a necessity - and a courtesy that they offer to the people seated around them.