A Hop, A Skip, and A Jump

As I pack my backpack for my flight home, I do a little review of everything I took with me on the trip. Gone are most of the medications I brought with me, not consumed, but donated to the hospital at the end of my stay. In their place are a few parting gifts from the hospital administrator and the nurses and a couple small pieces of souvenir. Thankfully, the first aid kit never had to see the light of day. The most useful item would have to be my head lamp, which was used on a daily basis and on one occasion, served as the only light source for a difficult suture job at night. The one thing I did not have to use at all is the water purification tablets. Boiling the water made it safe to drink. Throughout my whole stay in Zambia, I had not once had that most annoying ailment afflicting travelers – traveler’s diarrhea – a proud testament to my intestinal fortitude.

My flight from Lusaka to Johannesburg is delayed, squeezing my two-and-half hour layover in Johannesburg into one. As soon as I get off the plane in Johannesburg, I run to pick up my backpack, clear immigration, and run upstairs to departure. As I run up to the check-in counter, I learn that the flight to Singapore was overbooked. I am now looking at the prospect of having to spend a day in Johannesburg. A whole day! Let’s see, I’ll probably just stay in the airport hotel room and order room service then. If it were anywhere else, I would happily spend the day exploring the city. But this is Jo’burg! I normally shrug off whatever warnings and horror stories people tell of a place, but for some reason, I believe the stories like people getting robbed at gunpoint going from the Jo’burg airport to their hotels downtown.

I stand next to the counter, waiting and watching as a few other passengers learn of the overbooking, become irate and start yelling at the agent. The clock is ticking. Just as I become resigned to the fate of being imprisoned in a hotel room for a day, another agent comes and pulls me aside. He tells me to pick up my bag and follow him. As we walk down the corridor, he tells me that an extra seat has been found and I am the last passenger to get on. Yes! At least I will make it to Singapore now, even if I get stuck there for a day, it wouldn’t be so bad.

On the flight, the guy sitting next to me happens to be a diplomat working at the British High Commission in Harare, Zimbabwe. When I ask him about what he sees in Harare, he tells of a life, as a diplomat, mostly shielded from the everyday reality in Zimbabwe due to the weekly shipment of supplies, but still the empty shelves at supermarkets, the almost universal unemployment, and people pushing wheelbarrows filled with bundles of cash to buy what little is for sale are in plain sight.

Ten hours later, Singapore. It’s the crack of dawn. I am delirious from jetlag. Walking up to the airline counter to get my boarding pass for the flight to Brisbane, I hear the word “overbooked” again. “You’re joking?!” I can’t believe my ears. This is four hours before my flight, I’m pretty sure I am among the first passengers to check in. Ten minutes and some tapping on the keyboard and a couple of phone calls later, the airline agent hands me the boarding pass. Weird how these airlines work with fitting passengers on a plane.

So I get back to Brisbane on time, despite the repeated threats of being marooned in one city after another. I have to say Singapore Airlines has got it perfect: on-demand entertainment system in front of each seat, the food is actually good, with complimentary wine, all this in steerage class. And the stewardesses – let me just say they definitely didn’t hire them with equal opportunity employment in mind. Singapore Airlines makes all the US-based airlines look like some two-bit operation; there’s just no comparison there.