Getting There

January 17th, 2006

While checking in at the airport, my heart skipped a beat when I read "DAKAR" as the destination on my boarding pass. My reservation records made no mention of this little pit stop- so much for my direct flight to Johannesburg! The sun was just beginning to rise as we landed there, revealing a low-lying windswept city, pummeled on both the east and west by the Sahara and the Atlantic, respectively. Very dramatic!

After spending several hours in a complete haze, I took notice of two good omens as the plane flew its final stretch over South Africa. Small rainbows kept appearing and disappearing outside my window (my delirium? perhaps...). I was then served some bottled water from the Cape region that, according to its label, was "blessed with a low dissolved mineral content." How nice, I thought, to come to a country where even unconsecrated airline water is blessed!

A bird's eye view of Johannesburg is very telling of its tainted past. Instead of one contiguous cluster of buildings, the city and its suburbs looked like a patchwork quilt of isolated communities, divided by a thick grid of treeless parks. In academic-speak, I would venture to say that the mechanisms of Apartheid, literally "apart-ness" in Afrikaans, were laid bare before me.

I was greeted in the airport by Kelly Clarkson's "Since You Were Gone"- oh well, there'd be plenty of time for multi-culturalism. My taxi driver more than made up for this initial dose of Americana as he recounted his participation in the Soweto student uprisings of 1976- an event that marked the beginning of the end of the Apartheid regime.

By all accounts, Johannesburg remains a dangerous city. When leaving the airport garage, my driver was required to present his keys to security and turn the car off and on to prove that it wasn't hijacked! His parting words to me were few: "Do NOT go out tonight."

I spent my layover night at the Don International Airport Hotel, which I booked on hotels.com for an unusually low rate. The next morning, the pricing scale became slightly more understandable as I opened my window to a nuclear power plant about a mile away!

On January 19th I made the final leg of my trip to Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia. I can honestly say I would book another round trip ticket from Johannesburg just to land in Lusaka again. It rests on a vast, lush green plain extending interminably in all directions, disappearing like the ocean beneath the horizon.