hot damn Hit the road at the crack of dawn this morning, headed out on Hell's Highway, the great 'n' mighty 'n' just plain ol' fucking terrifying N2. Not for the faint-hearted, nor for the weak-willed, and definitely not for the dicky-tickered. Cell-phones are mandatory on this particular stretch of Hell's Highway. Carjackings and people throwing sparkplugs, stones, bricks and other people off bridges into the oncoming traffic not unheard of. Fairly common, in fact. Oh, and another thing... the City of Cape Town's official stance: If you do not have a cellphone and you break down on the N2 and cannot call for help, you are lost to us. So be advised, travellers. Bearing in mind that it's fairly urban for the first 25 kilometers out of town, running through several unsavoury districts and suburbs and shanty-townships; very easy for smeone to mug/mutilate/kill you and escape in mere seconds into the blue. Our reason for brazenly heading out, hats cocked at jaunty angles on our heads, at a leisurely 65 miles or 110 km/hour into a gale-force wind, down this particular stretch into the mouth of madness, was to visit the residence of Beelzebub himself - the very same - at the airport. My younger cousin, having had a rough time involving moving out of the house, shacking up into a new house co-owned by the erstwhile boyfriend, then having some obscure breakdown in said relationship (which is some 4 years old) and having the whole thing go pear-shaped and fall to bits around her afteer 6 months, has decided, well, fuck all this for a game of soldiers, and is pissing off to do the .za thing and take a 2-year working holiday thing in England. Joining another estimated 2 million .za, .nz and .au youth doing much the same. So, since my aunt - my mom's sister - needed the moral support while having the first of her 2 birds leave the nest, my mom decided we should tag along to bid her a fond farewell. Trouble is, international flights at 08h15 needed checking in by 06h15 latest, and given all the snot-en-trane (as thel ocals say, basically snot and tears - much moping), we decided it would be useful to get there good'n'early to do the right thing. Bah. I was up before 5am in order to facilitate. Anyway, I have only had the pleasure of visiting the "new, improved" International Departures and Arrivals terminals at Cape Town International twice previously; and the first time was during its big, multi-million costing renovation into the Paragon of Uselessness and 6th Circle of Hell-dom. Each of those previous times has been to put someone on the same sodding carrier - one British Airways - bound for London. What happened to national pride? SAA has some 6 flights per day to London; Nationwide - another local airline - has an additional two. BA has 4 daily - two from here and two out of Joburg; Virgin has several weekly as well. Of course, they are all full. Hell, you're not going to get 2 million South Africans to the UK flying once a day, are you? Ironically, BA and local partner Comair has managed to land the contract to be the official airline of all South Africa's national sports teams. Not quite sure how that works... Our guys head off from various airports in their official colours and carrying .za flags and bypass the fleets of SAA jumbos (16 in all) and big new Airbuses (11, will be 14 by year's end) and 737s (about 25 in all) and into the manky old BA 747 parked at the end of the tarmac. Go figure. Our airport does suck, though. Almost seven million passengers annually, 5 million in domestic flights - which averages out to around twenty thousand a day (and that's tiny, I know - O'Hare in Chicago has two thousand fligths per day, so they must be in the half-million passengers sort of area) - and still there is only enough parking for about 800 cars, maybe one thousand at a push. And that includes the parking for people who arrive in the morning and fly up to |Joburg or Durban or whereever just for a day or two on business, which accounts for three quarters of the parking. So the remaining 18000 passengers (plus their hangers-on in the form of friends and relatives, like we were this morning, going along for the ride, get to fight for the remaining three parking bays. Fortunately, some bright spark finally figured it out and construction started three days ago on a new 5-floor parkade which will service the Domestic terminal exclusively. And in doing so, provide an additional whole 2000 extra parking bays... Bearing in mind they are trying to increase flight volumes by about 10% annually to deal with the World Cup soccerin 2010, we'll be only about 20 thousand bays short. Well done there, airport planners! Followed all the tearful farewells and a good, good cappuccino with a 55 minute ride down the final 10 miles into town in rush-hour traffic - was not a happy camper by the time I got here. In other news, a rogue booking to travel on BA (bloody BA again!) from a travel agent who, never even gave me a quote for my trip, has caused SAA to cancel my existing tickets from Cape Town to New York and back again. Some breach of security, they say, to have the same guy on two planes simultaneously flying to differnet countries; not to mention a breach of Schrodinger's poisoned cat experiment. They have managed to get me back on SAA, after I slaughtered the errant travel agent and screamed blue murder at them, but only on three of the four flights. So at the moment, if I can get myself to Joburg to connect to New York, hooray for me. Otherwise, well, bad luck - no trip. And SAA's 12 flights out of Cape Town to Joburg are full on the day, so I may have to pull a The Terminal and fly up much earlier - like 25 hours - and hang around waiting... good times. Apart from that, well, my whole building smeels like a blend of raw sewage and stagnant air. Molotov shitbomb, anyone? Take care out there. -d-