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Travel travails

STRANGE, that little habit hotel cleaning staff have of wrapping the phone cord round the phone. In Gaborone last night, I found myself battling to unwind a cord that was already kinky, and I was way too tired to suppress my impulse to swear.

I’ve done my share of travelling in sub-Saharan Africa, and my travels have been remarkably benign – a couple of minor delays, that’s all. To the point where I’ve wondered why I’ve never had any of the bad experiences other people talk about around the dinner table.

But I left for Botswana in a helluva hurry, coming off the back of two major conferences which had absorbed all my time and energy, so I didn’t check on who was meeting me and which hotel they’d booked me into. I mean, Gaborone, how hard can it be, right?

So of course the goblins rubbed their hands in glee and set out to make it a day from hell. Up at 5 am to put the last touches on my presentation, off to OR Tambo at 9, the time that best suited my husband to take me, prepared for a three-hour wait with coffee and some plane-watching from the Mugg & Bean in International. Down to the gate in good time.

And then.

Nobody came to open the gate. Nobody in uniform was there. Just a small trickle of passengers, including one man who’d been sitting at the gate since 11.

Eventually I approached a staff member womanning the next-door gate and about to handle a flight to Tete.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know what’s happening about the Air Botswana flight?”

“I don’t know. Umm… let me deal with these people and I’ll see what I can find out.”

So another ten minutes passed. By now we should have been on the bus and off to the plane.

Ms Tete picked up her phone. Minutes later, she told me that our flight was delayed: “I don’t know for how long. Someone will come.”

Someone did come, but only some time later. The flight had not even left Gaborone – we would soon hear a garbled tale of ‘something wrong’. Well over an hour late, we boarded our bus and travelled for an interminable length of time.

The jet plane we expected to see wasn’t there. Instead, an 18-seater little charter plane was parked in the outer suburbs of Kempton Park, the sort of plane where bold men bang their heads as they duck to get inside, and the co-pilot had to squat to give us the safety speech.

Some of the passengers were not happy, but I rather like little planes, and that feeling you get of their bums skedaddling across the sky, every little change in pressure or temperature causing a dip or a waddle. The pilots got us to Gabs most professionally, and a kind fellow-passenger helped me get my backpack down the steep little steps.

And then.

Through customs and to the carousel for baggage. One of the early passengers hoiked his bags onto a trolley and walked off as I arrived. Three bags, one mustard, one grey and one purple, were going round and round.

And round. And round. Eventually the steamed-up little group of passengers realised that no more bags were being loaded, and we started to look for help. Which proved difficult, as the airport was almost empty.

Eventually a man in uniform came along and told us that nine bags had been left behind “as there wasn’t enough room on the plane”. (Nine out of 18 passengers, did they think we wouldn’t notice?)

So we went to the main concourse, where I expected to find someone anxiously waiting with a sign with my name on it. But no. Not a sign. Which freed me to do the form-filling-in, at least. And a friendly passenger asked the brother who’d met him to phone my contact and find out which hotel I was in, so that was good.

And on top of that, imagine my pleasure at discovering the hotel had a regular airport shuttle, so I could just wait till the next Joburg flight came in, an hour or so later. And my bag would be on the flight after that, at 21:15, calloo-callay!

So I sat in the airport and watched the afternoon light fade slowly to those gorgeous bands of purple-blue, rose and blue-grey that mean sunset in Botswana.

Quite a few people seemed to have come out to the airport for a leisurely wait for planes to arrive, and there were four or five children of about three or four squealing with delight at all the space to run in, their twinkling little legs silhouetted against the light from the plate-glass windows.

And the shuttle arrived, and we went to the hotel, passing lone women in running gear pounding down the airport road. And my bag was delivered at 10pm with a gentle smile. What a lovely place Botswana is.
These things happen. And to be frank, I’d rather travel safely in a chartered plane than in a plane that has the slightest mechanical fault.

But oh, dear airport staff – and all others dealing with problems, in whatever industry: why can you not just communicate? Get there before people start panicking and explain what’s going on?

It’s simple, it’s cheap and easy and it would turn the whole thing around.

 - Fin24

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
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