Saturday Sept 3 2011 Sydney to Cape Town

ON THE ROAD PLANE AGAIN

As I had a mid-morning flight I organised a taxi in plenty of time. It turns out that Saturday is THE day that half of Sydney flies out on holidays so there was a bottleneck getting into the airport and my taxi fare was 180% of what it normally should be! I made up time, though, by having checked in online last night and now Qantas has a special online check-in queue for international flights. It was obvious that hundreds of passengers haven’t caught on to this yet as they were in a long line snaking back and forth to check-in while my queue had 3 people in front of me.

I had a great seat, as far as economy goes, by the window near the rear of the plane with only an aisle seat beside me and interesting company. My neighbour, from Monash University, is going to Cape Town for a science convention before continuing onto Namibia for a field trip looking for fossils.

My main gripe with Qantas is that this flight was a codeshare with South African Airlines and if you went on a SA ticket the fare was $300 cheaper than the QF ticket plus those on the SA ticket didn’t have to pay to select their seat while Qantas has now brought in a $20 per sector booking fee to pick a seat! To top that off, during the actual flight we found that the reading lamps, attendant call buttons and the on demand entertainment system weren’t working. We could, though, watch some limited movies which went through on a set cycle. If I wasn’t accumulating frequent flyer points for my next trip ….  

Our flight plan took us from Sydney down south over the snowfields and out across the Southern Ocean before turning right and flying not far from Antarctica across to Africa. There was a lot of cloud cover but once we turned north to South Africa the clouds cleared and I could make out countless icebergs. Unfortunately my cameras were in the overhead locker so I couldn’t get to them to take photos.

As we neared Johannesburg the landscape changed from rather barren countryside to agricultural land, parched greens and ruddy browns. I felt as though I should be landing in rural New South Wales.

At Johannesburg I went through immigration and customs before boarding a two hour flight to Cape Town, where I was met at the airport for a transfer to my hotel in Green Point. This is the starting point for my tour to Namibia, Botswana and Zambia, as set out below.

All up, a very long day with the long flight sector being flown completely in daylight.