Friday 23 – Saturday 24 September: Livingstone to Sydney

THE BIG FIVE

Throughout the tour we’ve heard of a few different variations on which animals make up the Big Five and Innocent clarified this for us over a leisurely breakfast this morning but what I found especially interesting was why they are the Big Five. To start with, the Big Five are elephant, rhino, Cape buffalo, leopard and lion. The only one we didn’t see was the leopard which is pretty elusive. I’ve always been under the mistaken belief that the Big Five was what the tourists came to see and photograph because you always hear of them ticking off their sightings but then why weren’t hippos, giraffes, cheetahs or zebras included which I think are more interesting to photograph than Cape Buffalo. Innocent explained that the Big Five term came from hunters who have a 50/50 chance of killing one of the Big Five or being killed by one of them while hippos and giraffes are easy game.

My taxi ride to the airport took me through the town centre again where there were lots of celebrations as the results of the elections were announced – the Opposition Leader has won power. Car and truck drivers were honking their horns and flags were flying from the windows – a bit like a football grand final back home. Hopefully he will prove worthy of their faith in him, although I doubt that he will line the streets with copper!

Livingstone airport is a small airport mainly catering for the tourists flying in and out although a new terminal was being constructed next door. It’s the first airport I’ve been through where the passengers’ names are ticked off a manifesto before you’ve even gone through security and checked-in.

As I arrived early it didn’t take long to check-in but the wait to go through immigration with only one official working was another story. By the time I entered the departures hall, the queues for both check-in and immigration were very long and it didn’t take much time for all available seating to be filled in the waiting area. Apart from my South African Airlines flight, there was also a British Airways plane departing at roughly the same time and the terminal wasn’t really built to cater for this occurrence.

My connecting flight to Johannesburg was just under two hours and uneventful, the way flights should be. In Johannesburg, though, my three hour transit time turned into nearly six hours with a technical problem on the Qantas flight. I hoped the technical problem was only that the on demand entertainment wasn’t working correctly and they were fixing it!

I had booked the window seat towards the back of the 747 again, with only an aisle seat beside me, similar to my flight here but this time I had a large gentleman sitting next to me who had little leg room so tended to encroach on my space – all up quite an uncomfortable flight home!

With the Rugby World Cup being held in New Zealand at the moment there were a lot of Springbok fans sharing the flight, en route to Auckland, to follow their team. For rugby fans, they were extremely well behaved!

Back in Sydney to a dreary day and the first rain I’d seen since I had left home, I breezed through immigration and customs without any problems and within an hour of stepping off the plane I was at home.

Now, where to next?