Johannesburg - One Night Only

We arrived at the airport in Johannesburg, and I think I speak for the entire family when I say we all felt really, immensely dreadful.  We landed in the early evening, and we were met at the airport by our two Abercrombie and Kent representatives for Johannesburg.  (A&K is the tour group we were traveling with.)

One of the A&K reps looked like an elderly news anchor.  (We later found out that he WAS a news anchor, retired, who had found it necessary to change careers...)  The other one looked exactly like Angela Lansbury.  She also TALKED like Angela Lansbury, which meant that I spent the entire car ride to the hotel in a kind of Bedknobs-and-Broomsticks-related hallucination.  I also kept thinking we were about to be engaged in a kind of very sedate car chase, a la Murder She Wrote.  

We reached the hotel safely, and without foiling any nefarious murder plans or discovering cartoon fish bobbing along on the bottom of the beautiful briny sea.  Or chasing off Nazis by animating a museum full of armor.  I, for one, was disappointed. 

We checked into the Westcliff Hotel.  We were told that it had been built originally as a series of condos, but had been so overpriced that it hadn't sold for the intended use.  Rather than a cohesive structure, it is composed of semi-private large bungalows all built into the side of a hill - in a kind of rice paddy terrace structure.  

photo courtesy of the Westcliff Hotel

The restaurant and pool are at the very top.  After dropping our things in our rooms, we all oozed up toward the restaurant, intending to eat in the bar, where our horrifying plane clothing and travel odor would not cause comment.  It took us an embarrassingly long time to work out the various signs pointing the way toward the restaurant.  Finally, we achieved our objective.  The bar was completely full though, and we were told that a reservation at La Belle Terrace had been made for us by our tour guides.  Oh god oh god oh god.  Sandy had been very specific when he gave me my packing instructions.  He said, "do not bring anything fancy.  We aren't eating anywhere fancy during the entire trip.  We are camping."  He LIED to me.  I said, in a very small and worried voice, to the host at the bar who had just told us about the reservation; "should we change our clothes?"  He looked down his very long nose at me and said, "I'm sure it will be fine."

I was wearing jeans and a Tina Turner concert tee, guys.  And hiking boots.  I smelled like I'd just spent 20 hours on a plane.  We walked into the restaurant, and there were silver chargers on the table, and snowy white linens, and sterling flatware, and as other diners trickled in I could not help but notice that they were all in black tie attire.  BLACK TIE.  

my outfit at dinner

I've never felt so uncomfortable, or so AMERICAN, eating in my entire life.  And it was a shame, because the food was freaking delicious.  I had the Springbok carpaccio, which was so heavily sauced that you couldn't taste whatever Springbok was supposed to taste like - I'm assuming they do this on purpose, like with the Curious Squid in Ankh-Morpork.*  I also had the Ostrich.  This provided me with a brief shock.  Because an Ostrich is a bloody great bird, I assumed that it would be chicken-esque.  Especially since practically everything else is, even things that aren't birds.  It turns out though, that Ostrich is a red meat.  A delicious, delicious red meat.

nom nom nom!

While we'd been waiting in the bar earlier, I had set out to find the pool.  Upon finding it, I immediately hatched a plan to go night swimming.

photo courtesy of the Westcliff Hotel

Despite being absolutely exhausted, I felt this was an experience I couldn't miss - the pool there is an infinity pool, perched right on the edge of a cliff, so it felt like you were swimming right out into the Johannesburg night sky.  Beautiful beautiful beautiful.

It was also freaking freezing.  And extremely windy.  And none of us had brought down towels.  We did laps, and held handstand contests, and tried to keep as much of our skin underwater as possible, since it was much warmer there than out in the air.  Nothing like starting a vacation by toying with the idea of catching pneumonia...

Afterward, we all went back to our separate rooms and fell into the kind of dreamless sleep that one earns when one has traveled for a 24 hour period, eaten a delicious meal under terrible, socially-awkward circumstances, and gone swimming under the stars.  

That's actually a dreadful lie.  Because all of us were taking a drug called Malarone, which is a Malaria preventative, and which causes insane dreams and, on at least one occasion, hallucinations.  So yes, I slept like a log, but my dreams were wild things, untamed and gamboling around in my brain.  Morning came entirely too soon.

For the first time, we got dressed in our special, bug-repellent safari clothes.  That, we are pretty sure, did not work at all.

Our guides picked us up very early indeed, along with our new bush guide who would be traveling with us through Zimbabwe and Botswana, and took us back to the Johannesburg airport to catch our flight to Maun in Botswana.  

A sidenote on the Johannesburg airport.  We were told by A&K to be very sure that any valuables were traveling in our carry on luggage, because the Joburg airport is infamous for theft while bags are in the care of the luggage handlers, security, etc.  Our bush guide, Gavin, reaffirmed this when we reached the Joburg airport that morning, adding that even things like binoculars needed to be kept with us at all times, because the men who load the planes will take them out of the bags.  Luckily for all of us, A&K had imposed very strict baggage weight and size restrictions on our luggage, because we were traveling in so many small bush planes.  Those restrictions meant that ALL our luggage was carry-on size, and we each only had two of these small bags, (hence the no fancy clothes for dinner), so we solved the threat of thievery by carrying all our luggage onto the plane ourselves, for every flight.  

Never checking your bags is the BEST!  Why haven't I ALWAYS carried my luggage onto the plane?  No waiting at the stupid luggage turnstile for your luggage to appear - no fearing that it was lost or misplaced in transit...awesome.  I'm never checking another bag again.

We reached Maun with a minimum of fuss, passed through immigrations in Botswana, and then got immediately onto a bush plane headed for the Moremi Game Reserve, and Stanley's Camp.

We were on our way to the Okavanga Delta, and the Bush!

* "The Curious Squid were very small, harmless, difficult to find, and reckoned by connoisseurs to have the foulest taste of any creature in the world.  This made them very much in demand in a certain kind of restaurant where highly skilled chefs made, with great care, dishes containing no trace of the squid whatsoever."  ~Jingo, Terry Pratchett