Into Africa

Greetings from Cape Town, South Africa. It's been a while since the last entry- not a WHOLE lot has happened but we've somehow managed to fill every day so that we still feel really busy. The biggest event was probably the marathon travel that took us on New Year's Eve from Bangkok through many airports to go to end up in Cape Town in 2008.

Here are a few highlights of our 48+ hours spent en route (FYI- we were flying using airline miles, so we were at the mercy of Delta hence the ridiculous number of connections.)

We left Bangkok on a 12+hour Aeroflot flight headed to Moscow, Russia. It was the two of us, a handful of Russian tourists, and a pretty surly airline crew. After watching a really grotesque demonstration of orange eating in the airport by one of our future co-passengers (think juice all over the floor, very primitive ripping of the pieces, seriously I cannot overstate how scarring this was for me- clearly it's been 2 weeks and I'm still obsessing over it) we boarded our giant airplane. The flight was so undersold that every person could have almost had an entire row (as in all 9 seats across) to themselves. The plane was decently old so there were lots of quirks that Steve and I had never encountered- only every 5th row was numbered, so you had to count/guess about your row if you weren't seated in row 10, 15, or 20, etc. Also, the seats folded forward (not sure if they were supposed to, but passengers still did this) so after takeoff everyone folded seats forward and stuck their feet up on them like a coffee table. The flight attendants would speak in English to Steve but kept assuming I was Russian and would give me weird looks when I would just stare blankly after they would say a sentence to me in Russian. The flight attendants also had to make **multiple** announcements that it was illegal to consume Duty Free Alcohol while on board the flight.

So I've only been to Moscow one other time so I had a small idea of what to expect in the airport, but when we arrived we were whisked from strange line to strange line while chasing the lady carrying our passports who was taking us to the Transfer desk so we could make our Air France connection to Paris. After arriving at a tiny counter in the middle of who knows where terminal, we were told to wait for the AF representative to come and approve our connection and give us our ticket. A guy shows up, gives us the 3rd degree on why we're going to Cape Town never seeming convinced about anything we're saying that we're on vacation and why we have so many connections, and then finally gives us the approval to eventually board "his" flight. The last experience we had in Moscow was buying bottled water- a simple task yes- but we accidentally bought sparkling water (ít's like we're amateurs!) and then after asking the woman very nicely if we could switch it out for still since we just pulled it out of the case she very rudely said "No" and kept repeating that, so we walked away with our sparkling water, stood at our gate that is surrounded my smoking stations (they haven't adopted the fishbowl style smoking rooms like the States, so there are small air filters placed around that people smoke over that don't really do more than just spread the smoke around the terminal. Needless to say, we were excited to be leaving Moscow behind, because that was one step closer to Cape Town.

The next flight was uneventful, and we landed in Paris the evening of New Year's Eve. We had grandiose plans of going into the city to toast the New Year, but when we landed we realized that we had done no pre-planning, had no idea of where to go, how to get there. We also hadn't planned on it being FREEZING cold in Paris ('we'd just come from sunny and 85F degrees, we werne't thinking about needing our long underwear) and considering our bags were checked all the way through to Cape Town we had no way of getting outfitted for the cold. Plus the subway wouldn't start running in time for us to make it back for our flight, and our chances of finding a taxi to bring us back on NYE was basically 0%. So Plan B was to find a Delta Crown Room (since Steve still has access) and hang out there for a while until they closed and then find a comfy spot in a terminal to hang out until our flight left the next morning. Only problem was that the airport basically shut down at 6PM- it was now 8PM, and we couldn't find a map or anyone to tell us where a crown room was. After going between terminals on a wild goose chase, and being harassed about "why don't you have a hotel, you can't sleep in the airport"(well duh, it's New Year's Eve, and have you ever tried getting a hotel room for less than $500?) we decided to stop the search and found a place to settle down for the evening. Since we didn't have any euros, we couldn't get anything from the vending machines, so we ate the few snacks we had left and crashed on the airport benches. New Year's Eve wasn't quite the exciting Paris spectical we were hoping it to be, but memorable nonetheless.

The next morning we found the Crown Room, haha! And we got an excellent cup of coffee, filled up on the French equivalent of Biscoff cookies (it's a Delta thing) and then caught our flight to Amsterdam. We arrive in Amsterdam, catch our next connection, and are on our way to Cape Town. By this point we are about 35 hours into travel, and have another 12 hour flight ahead of us and our bodies are so confused about time that we have no idea if we should be asleep or trying to stay awake! The flight to Cape Town was great- KLM had awesome in-flight entertainment (it's the small things that make us happy at this point) :-) and the flight attendants were really nice- another thing we'd been missing. So by the time we got to Cape Town, it was about midnight, we were the last flight of the evening, and we were so exhausted we could have slept on the sidewalk! The last adventure was the fact that our bags didn't show up- they were lost somewhere between Paris and Amsterdam we were told. Whatever- at this point we could've cared less- we took a cab to our hotel (using points to stay at the Westin) and crashed. The bags eventually did show up the next day, but we realized that sometime during our journey we'd either lost or had our video iPod stolen. Unfortunately, the next few days of our time in Cape Town had similar downers (we found out that Steve's allergic to the Westin, so we had to switch to a hostel down the street; we had our first African scam pulled on as at an ATM but fortunately we realized what was going on before anything was stolen), and it's been quite an adjustment moving from Thailand where the people were generally really nice to a place where all the stores/restaurants have electric gates and the clerks have to buzz you in.

The GOOD news is that we've signed up with an awesome company to do a guided tour that will take us from Cape Town on Monday along the east coast of South Africa and then up north through parts of East Africa. We'll get to hit some of the highlights such as Kruger National Park, Victoria Falls, and we're really hoping that we'll get to see gorillas in the wild in East Africa. The tour will be almost two months long and we'll see a lot of different countries and meet a lot of different people. We were hesitant to sign up for a guided tour because we've been traveling independently up until now, but we figured that of all the places we're going, it would be nice to travel with a larger group in Africa and to spend more time enjoying the scenery rather than figuring out where we're going to spend the night!

Now that we have our plans made, we're trying to make the most of our last few days in Cape Town- hitting the highlights and seeing more than just the streets outside our hostel. Hopefully the next time I make a posting it will be with awesome pictures of animals we've seen in the African wild!

Cheers,
Anna