2nd August
Victoria Falls to Cape Town
Sadly the train line through to Cape Town is largely not in use these days and as such I had no choice but to fly

i had a quick breakfast of granola and yogurt at the lodge before a far earlier pick up that I would have favoured to get to the airport


2nd August 2019
BA6282
VFA-JNB
1355-1535
Comair Boeing 737-800
Seat 5F

I had arranged a bus transfer to the airport, paying US$12 one way/for one person which was ideal and avoided me having to negotiate with a taxi. There were only about 8 other people on a massive coach so we all had heaps of space to spread out

Arriving at VFA I was surprised but probably shouldn’t have been by how large and modern the airport was, even compared to LVI


The lost baggage again managed to work in my favour as there were many unofficial porters and my cabin sized bag ended up being grabbed and put on a trolley with other people’s main bags, making it easy for me to grab it and then make a break for it while the others argued with “their” porters

a dance troupe was here to entertain us. I wasn’t in the market for a CD but did give them some money as they were rather good


Originally I was booked to overnight in JNB and take an early flight to CPT the next morning, as Pants was (supposed to be) staff travelling from Sydney and thus wanted a buffer. However had then booked himself a paid JNB-CPT// CPT-JNB-PER on SAA with no buffer at all between the flight he might not even be able to get on and his domestic connection. I genuinely wonder how some people survive life when he does .... like that. Anyway, it meant I could use some of my excess time at VFA trying to change my JNB-CPT leg to today

i don’t have huge experience of making these kind of changes and so approached the check in desk initially. There was a check in supervisor who wanted to know why I was in the Club queue. I explained it was because I had a OWE card. He asked which airline, and when told qantas told me that I had to use economy as the only members of oneworld are BA, IB and QR (as these are the only airlines that codeshare on the service). I pointed again at the “oneworld” symbol on my card and he grudgingly let me into the queue.

the gent at the check in desk was very helpful but concerned that checking me in for this segment would upset the sales desk’s ability to change the JNB-CPT segment, and so I was off to the sales desk to get sorted

Evidently the sales desk for comair also handled other airlines. There was an Austrian family who had (I think) missed their flight or been wrongly ticketed or some such and essentially appeared to be needing to pay a walk up price to get somewhere on (I believe) Ethiopian airlines. The sales desk were happy to tell me my ticket could be changed for only a change fee and that seats were available in just about all buckets, however as the change fee was in ZAR they suggested it might be better to sort in Johannesburg as they only had capacity to collect payment in USD

and so I was back off to the club check in queue to get my boarding pass for this flight. The business class check in man was busy dealing with another customer for a sustained period of time, and the check in supervisor made a point of emptying the entire traveller queue before he checked me in. Maybe he thought this would be a drama but given there’s no lounge at VFA and I was fairly low on hard currency, it wasn’t like I was missing out on anything

Eventually I made it through security, which was a kind of hybrid “all shoes and belts off but we have no interest in your liquids” affair; there was only an X-ray operator, no other employee at the end of the belt so I’m not even entirely convinced that if anything had been spotted it would have been challenged. Then through immigration with an extremely personable officer and portrait of the new president and I was officially no longer in Zimbabwe



the departures board was slim pickings. I’m not clear on whether there’s a separate domestic terminal or domestic gates as I didn’t see anywhere other than the international security entrance in my lap of the airport looking for sales desks


I was rather peckish so had a bit of a look at the various food options. There is a restaurant and cafe centrally, near where security spews out people. The cafe appeared to not have any food and the restaurant was possibly the biggest rip off ever, with the cheapest food item on the menu being a not very impressive looking Margherita pizza for US$39!! Happily there was a smaller, crappier cafe down one of the piers where I was able to get a massively processed sandwich and can of Coke for US$7.

I’m not sure why but I was quite surprised to see air bridges


there was also some kind of situation going on with the Ethiopian airlines plane- the fire truck was nosing around the rear of it for a fair period of time; I couldn’t decide if there was a problem with the plane or perhaps if they were “doing a Canberra airport” and blocking them in to make sure the landing fees had been paid. ET eventually left 26 minutes late so whatever the issue was evidently resolved


our plane soon arrived and despite the efforts of many people who surged forward as soon as boarding was announced, group boarding was very strictly enforced by the staff. This meant I was first down the jet bridge, although evidently the crew was not actually ready for boarding so we stood in the jet bridge for 5 minutes waiting for the cleaners to leave. I will not complain about this as the comair planes were absolutely spotless at every point. Once onboard I was into my favourite row 5 with its ludicrous legroom

a couple of North American sounding tourists came and “sat” next to me. I say “sat” as they didn’t actually sit until they had wiped down their entire seat area with disinfectant wipes, including the air vents and the seat back tray tables in front of them, which even a complete idiot could see were too far away to be useful for say eating a meal off, and which comair have kindly stuck labels on saying “please use the table in the arm of your seat”. While they were obviously trying to work out how to get the seat back tables to extend to bridge the metre odd gap, I decided to be kind of explain to them how to access the armrest based tables, which they duly opened and wiped down extensively, before (bizarrely) folding the tables back up and putting them into the impossible to clean bacterial soup which is the housing of the arm table. Despite being educated in germ theory of disease, I will never fully understand germaphobes on planes and these two were easily the worst I have ever seen.

On pushback we were able to get a good look at the architecture of the airport, which I’m assuming is based on a modernisation of traditional Zimbabwean architecture?


we were served a light lunch-lupper type meal of toasted sandwiches- I think mine was pesto chicken, and was really good- as was the white chocolate coconut bar (easily one of the best economy meals I’ve had).
I couldn’t help noticing that the germaphobes didn’t clean their hands before eating with them...😂😂


We overflew Botswana’s Magkadigkadi (which I can’t seem to find the picture of) and the Limpopo river marking the border between Botswana and South Africa


Closer to JNB, some kind of township (possibly Soweto), and then what looks like a CBD of some kind



we landed slightly ahead of schedule. I will never get tired of seeing this, and the many questions it brings up for me


we had braked fairly heavily on landing and as a result my carry on was retrieved from somewhere around row 3
In my rush to get off the plane it seems I forgot my trusty Akubra; unfortunately I didn’t realise this until about 6 hours later when boarding the Cape Town flight 😩


Freed from the requirement to stop by baggage claim, I didn’t worry about the long queue for immigration; either way I was through within 15 minutes. The SA immigration man patrolling the queue was shall we say tactile in reinforcing the “no cell phone use” rule, which raised a few eyebrows

I hot footed it to the Comair desk to try and get my flight changed. Pants was due into Cape Town about 11pm so I plumped for the 2nd last flight of the night and thus paid a very reasonable change fee of about 300ZAR. Not bad, not bad at all.
The geek in me was quite taken with this graphic above the sales desk


Through domestic security, I got massively lost looking for the domestic SLOW lounge, although the long walk to both ends of the terminal did win me a frisson of excitement spotting something else unusual


eventually I found the lounge (it’s upstairs, via the lifts immediately next to security) and was quite entertained to be greeted by a man in full top hat and tails. However, once again I have no photos of the lounge to show you

2nd August
BA6403
JNB-CPT
1950-2200
Comair Boeing 737-800
*more aft exit row, F seat*

i was one of the last to board. As noted, while leaving the lounge I spotted I was missing a hat. The ladies at the desk were kind enough to give me an email address to chase the lost property department up

This flight was again fairly lightly loaded although I was not able to get row 5, the exit row was entirely acceptable, with a very minor whinge expressed about the lack of armrest or even pretend armrest in the window seats



A longish flight, we were again fed a choice of chicken stroganoff or ratatouille pasta. For research purposes I went for the pasta. It was cooked to a nice al dente but the ratatouille was extremely sharp and the one piece of feta cheese might as well have not bothered showing up

As an aside, the tray table appeared to be broken or possibly suffered a design flaw and would not extend very far, so I ate on the edge of the seat. I could have tried out any of the other seats in the row but was not sufficiently bothered about it


On arrival there was clearly freezing fog in Cape Town which i was not attired for. There was some kind of issue on landing which meant we were without power for 5-10 minutes after arrival. This gave an opportunity to check out the exit path lighting




pants’ flight was marginally late and on arrival he wanted to grizzle about the fact it was an all female crew and the many announcements regarding this

i had been disorganised and not looked into ground transport, and as such we almost ended up being talked into a dodgy fake taxi before eventually finding the more official ones

the taxi driver had somehow established I was medical and thus pointed out Groote Schurr Hospital, site of the world’s first heart transplant on the way to our hotel

I had booked 3 nights at the Onomo Inn on the Square through Hotels.com (https://www.onomohotel.com/en/hotel/...-on-the-square)
Annoyingly, I never got a confirmation for this and the booking didn’t show up in the app so, assuming I had messed up and actually not booked it, I booked another room at the same place while waiting for pants.


A daytime photo of the building

Pool which was bloody freezing

Annoyingly, when we arrived it emerged we actually did have 2 rooms reserved. The hotel was quite insistent on having payment for both rooms, and to this day Hotels.com has refused to acknowledge it as their .... up, insisting to this day that I only ever had one booking and refusing to intercede with the hotel about this (the confirmation email for the original booking arrived in my emails in mid September, with the stay dates of 2-5 August)

No photos of the room I’m afraid, I was too tired and pants was grizzling with man flu so it was straight to bed!!