It appears I got this totally wrong!

The 737-400 is the aircraft that usually plies this route and the seats we were sitting in on this flight were 1A/C, 2A/C. It was the first row on the left that had enormous legroom, but this is on the older bird, not the 737-800.

The 737-800, which we flew on back to JNB was a sub, due to the 734 going tech. The new aircraft does not have the legroom advantage on the left side and both A/F seats do not have a tray in the armrest (row 1 only) meaning you have to have a tray slotted into your seat for food. Not a major drama and seats have a good pitch and width (spacesaver seats I think as whole aircraft can be configured for all-economy). Only thing that was a bit weird was that we were split up from our 7 and 11 year old as the front rows are emergency only and there were several other families on board, so they totally re-jigged our seats so that we couldn't even see our children for take off and landing. That felt really, really strange and I didn't want to make a fuss about it but there were other families with much older children who were sat together and so I though it was odd, especially since the configuration did not really change at all on the left of the aircraft - 2 seats and as many rows as they want, so couldn't really see why there was any need to move us at all...

The outbound flight was great - just over 3 hours. The inbound was marred by strong headwinds and took almost 5 hours! Bring a film on an iPad - I didn't and was bored senseless. There is only so much sudoku and cards that one can play...