Pre-PS: This is officially the lengthiest entry in my diary, I think. Be advised. So, we make it to the airport about 2 hours prior to takeoff, listening to the decline of the health of the Pope on the radio, and proceed to SAA's extremely busy check-in counters. It's April Fool's Day. They have at least four flights every hour departing out of Cape Town, destinations being domestic spots in and about the country - Bloemfontein (small and ghastly - avoid), Durban, Joburg, PE etc. In addition, there are 4 other domestic airlines, also flying all over the show every hour, so Cape Town International's domestic departures terminal is muy busy all the time. And they are finally trying to sort out the parking, as mentioned in an earlier entry, so it is a bit of a Hellhole when it comes to getting in and out and around the place. Anyway, finally make it to the front of the line to select my seat on the new Pride-of-the-fleet Airbus A340-600 flights SA346 departing at 15h10 to Johannesburg. It's a busy flight, so they have the big A340 flying it (350 passengers), as opposed to the smaller Boeing 737-800 (148) or 737-200 (108) which fly the route during the rest of the day. Also, for some reason, fuel is cheaper at the coast, so they send a lot of the big planes via Cape Town to refuel for the long-haul flights. I present both my passports - I have dual SA/UK citizenship, thanks to my dad being English - and tell them to check me through all the way on the UK one. The alternative is to be hauled off to "a private room" at JFK for "confirmation" if I arrive on the wrong passport. They tell me they can't put me on the plane because I have no visa. I smile and point out that the reason I am traveling on the UK one is because I do not need a visa for the first 90 days of my visit to the USA on account of Tony Blair and George W being good mates and developing the Visa Waiver Programme. The SAA guy disagrees. I politely insist. He vehemently declines to process my ticket. In the end a supervisor is obliged to step in, in the nick of time, to prevent me from removing the gentleman's face and showing it to him. "Put it through, man, he's on the visa waiver programme." I think this is why he gave me shit seat on account of me having shown him up in front of the waiting masses. I am checked all the way through to JFK. I unfortunately have crap seats. By all accounts, there are only 4 good seats - the emergency exits - in cattle class (which is where I am sitting, on account of my funding only being $2000 for flights. Business class would be about $5000 just to JFK from Joburg, let alone the connection to Denver and all over the place where I was going, and let alone a return leg, so I was happy enough to be sardined in. Still, my seats are shitty. The A340 has a 2-4-2 configuration in economy and I wanted a window since I was unlikely to be able to sleep cramped into my tiny chair. Alas, I ended up with a middle aisle (basically the 4th of the 4 in the 2-4-2 config) for both legs of the flight. After the obligatory cappuccino with the folks, and three last-minute "have a good trip" calls from friends and family, I hopped onto the big A346 and headed off to Jnb. The flight was okay. Unfortunately, SAA pilots tend to be a leeeeetle on the heavy side on landing - in fairness, the plane is some 400 tons, fully fuelled and passengered, so probably a good 390 tons after a 100 minute flight to Joburg. Probably not too easy to put something that large going quite fast down very lightly in a thunderstorm, I'm guessing, so we'll forgive that. Anyway, hopped out in the rain, gathered all my shit together - camera, carry-on and research poster, neither going in the hold - and moseyed into the terminal. Checked in for the next flight and managed to trade seats for a back-row-nobody-behind-to-piss-off-when-you-drop-the-seat window aisle, made sure my bags were checked through ("no, son, ticket says you don't need to collect them here. Next time you'll see them is in New York." More on that later), and went through the gate, Mother on the phone making sure I still had everything - she knows me too well - and through to passport control. The man at passport control checks both passports and stamps the SA one and I am free to run amok through International Departures, buy overpriced underpants from the Hugo Boss shop (I didn't) and buy a gift for the guy I am staying with in New York. Yeah, I also thought I'd done that the day before but that was more a case of "Please bring x y and z with you which we can't get here." X, Y and Z being Cadbury's plain Dairy Milk chocolate, Cadbury's Top Deck (plain brown base chocolate with white chocolate bits on top) and several bags of NikNaks. NikNaks are a .za delicacy - processed corn chips in the shape of twigs flavoured horrifically with artificial cheese flavour numbers 1 through 14 and tartrazine. Yeah, they're awesome - one bite and you will be addicted. Oh, and also Cadbury's Flakes - more chocolate. So technically w, x, y and z. Anyway, I remembered right at the death that it was also Ryan's birthday like 3 days before, so I should also probably get him something that he didn't ask for as a happy-birthday/thanks-for-having-me gift. Voila - fine KWV export quality 5-year old matured-in-oak-cask brandy. Put down the poster, hand-luggage and camera, scout about for a good red wine, find nothing reasonable. Well, nothing reasonable price-wise - they had a spectacular '96 Meerlust Rubicon for R750 (or US$ 130) a pop which I decided was not an option, so the KWV 5-year old it was. Get that, pay for it, head out to Steers for my traditional before-you-fly burger and coke. Find a little spot to sit and watch the planes take off - can't; one, it's pissing with rain; and 2, for some reason there are fire trucks and ambulances all over the place with flashing lights everywhere, clearly in some kind of hurry - eventually head off to board. Get to the very back row to seat 77H on the A340-300 (slightly smaller than the 340-600 which I came up on; that goes on to Atlanta) and find a nice young lady sitting in my chair. "Oh, is this yours?" she asks me knowingly. She's actually not that young - mid-30s, I'd say - and she is traveling with her young son back to New York. Unfortunately, they checked in kinda late and they are separated by 3 chairs, so she wants to trade mine for hers. Hers is shitty seat 4 of 4 in the back row. I politely decline. She accepts my declination (is that a word?) and mutters a bit under her breath. I'm thinking I'll trade for the kid's window seat, then they'll just be an aisle apart, but he doesn't want to trade. Little shit. The stewardess comes up to ask if she's had any luck, and I get the guilt complex treatment. "The gentleman does not wish to trade his aisle seat for my aisle seat. He has some problem with it, apparently, even though it's obvious they are identical." I bite my tongue. The stewardess suggests that the little shit trade me for his window seat. He refuses; you can see though that he is about to start blubbing. I say "fine, have my seat. But, I get option at the window at sunrise to take a shot of Manhattan as we fly in." She rolls her eyes at me but agrees. I give her my seat. I settle into her seat thinking they are pretty much the same, nobody behind, can recline all I want without pissing anyone off, no problem. I sit down and get comfy. You can see them busy checking passenger lists up front and making sure everyone is on-board. They are making to shut the door and whatever when I get a prickle of fear down my spine. I've been having weird panic-attacky things the entire preceding week, ironically every time I think of the California leg of the trip and the car-hire, and I have a suspicion that something kooky is going to happen either on the flight into San Diego, the drive to LA, or the midnight flight out of LA back to New York. I'm wondering if something weird happened to me in SoCal in a previous life, or something, or if perhaps I have been there before and been abducted by aliens and now their brainwashing is wearing off. But that was in the preceding week - at this point, they are showing the safety video and I am not thinking about Cali and I still have this irrational fear. Suddenly it hits me. I leap out of the seat and open the overhead lockers. The stewardess is all "sir, please sit down; we're preparing for takeoff" when I realise that my research poster - the reason I am being funded to fly to the conference in the first place - is not there. It's somewhere in the vast metropolis of shops, restaurants and lounges of Joburg International's international departures hall. I bolt for the front of the plane; the stewardess is all "please take your seat!" when I tell her that I have left half my luggage in the airport. She says "get to the door, quickly." The A343 is not a small plane; less so when it is full of people stowing hand luggage and taking a last minute piss and shit like that and of course they board from the front of the plane where it docks with the walkway thingy, so it is a bit of a mosey back to the door. I get there and tell them my story. The purser says "well, bad luck, too late. Sorry." I explain that the reason for my going on the nice big shiny brand-spanking new aeroplane is to present my PhD work at a nice big conference, and that if my PhD work is not on the nice big shiny brand-spanking new aeroplane, then there is no point in me being on the nice big shiny brand-spanking new aeroplane. "They'll find it and ship it on." Which may be true. The fact that it is not labeled and is just a big white tube is a small problem; and the fact that it will get to New York around the time I get to Denver and hop on a shuttle to the mountains three hours away and that I can't really just, you know, shoot back to the airport to collect it, is an issue. And it's not like it was lost luggage, so the airline is under no obligation to ship it to me. And the funding people at the conference will undoubtedly not be amused if I pitch up without the research they shelled out a few grand to see. I point all this out in vain to the purser. He maintains that he can't let me off the plane. I decide to play my trump card. "It’s a rolled-up poster in an unlabelled tube," I say. "It looks like a pipe-bomb." We regard one-another. We regard the security controller and the gate-walkway-plane-docking motor-operating guy. They regard us back. It seems like an eternity, but after maybe two seconds the airport security guy says "go with him. Hurry." At this point I'm thinking to myself that it looks like a pipe-bomb and that I hope nobody has taken it outside and had it blown up. At this point I'm also putting 2 and 2 together and vaguely wondering if that's why there were all fire trucks and ambulances all over the runways when I was eating my Steers burger. We bolt back up the walkway and into the terminal. The gate controller up-front is all "stop him! Don't let him back into the building!" until the purser pops up and says "It's fine. We'll be back. Stop running," he calls to me. "They will leave you behind, but not me. And they'd have to unload your luggage first, so you have a bit of time." We get to Steers and I race for the observation deck. Needless to say, the poster is not there. A word on the architecture of Jnb International. The International terminals are on top of one another, arrivals at the bottom, and departures on the top floor. Passport control and the security gates are on the far right side of the duty-free/restaurants area as you face the runways; the duty-free and restaurants then occupy a large central portion of the terminal with gates scattered throughout. There are three huge observation decks; the one with Steers, closest to the gate for the US flights being on the far left of the gigantic central area. I realise that the poster must be in the duty-free shop I picked up the brandy in, It is in the observation deck furthest away from where we are now, the furthest place you could be without actually leaving the building. We run like no tomorrow, the purser yelling from behind to the security guards - who are all watching me run through with some trepidation, presumably fearing the worst - to stand down. We get through the second observation area and into the first and there is the pipe-bomb, leaning against the counter, stark-white against dark wood, hanging around like a first-class socialite at a trendy nightclub, nobody paying any attention to it whatsoever. I was relieved and annoyed at the same time. This kind of alertness speaks volumes as to how they can have an armed robbery in the terminal three months prior (and those guys got away, as well as to how a gang of armed men could get right up to the daily KLM plane on the tarmac and attempt to make off with a chunk of its cargo, followed by a shootout with airport police. Nevertheless, I have my poster/pipe-bomb, and all is again well. The purser casually suggests to me that I add in an acknowledgment to him at the conference. I agree. We get back to the plane. After a brief delay, we take off. It's all good. Until some kid starts screaming, and proceeds to do so for half an hour every 2 hours for the next 19 hours in and out of Dakar for a fuel stop and right into Kennedy. And then I realise as well, as the woman in front of me pops a sleeping pill and reclines her chair practically into my lap so I can't watch the seat-mounted TV anymore without reclining mine, that the 4 seats in the 2-4-2 are slightly further back than the 2 seats in the 2-4-2, and that the 2 seats have about a foot of space between them and the rear galley wall and the 4 seats have a space between them and the wall which would not even accept the swipe of a MasterCard. And of course I just gave up my 2 seat to that annoying woman and her annoying kid for her shitty 4 seat. So I had 19 hours of not being able to move, with my legs stretched into the walkway so that every time anyone walks past they kick them or smash them with an airline trolley full of drinks and/or food. Not a pleasant 19 hours. -d-