This time it's her turn. We arrive at JNB and present ourselves for stamping. My passport is stamped and the sticker installed. Hers is not.

"You don't have room for our visa. You can't enter South Africa."

Turns out my wife's passport has several visa pages where lazy stampers in other countries had their stamps overlap the boundaries of the little visa boxes. Thus she doesn't have the full half-plus page for the SA sticky and stamps.

"What can we do?"

"You can't enter South Africa."

(Silently) "Do you have a sister in Tel Aviv?"

It's a silent standoff for several minutes. She expects us, I guess, to turn around and slink back to - where? - Madrid? Fat chance of that happening.

Eventually she emits a loud sigh and escorts us through access-coded doors and up flights of stairs to the airport branch of the Department of Serious Stuff, where our passports are handed to various uniform-wearing people accompanied by lengthy verbal exchanges in Afrikaans and (I think) Xhosa. We are instructed to wait in the hall.

There are already numerous people, some looking annoyed, some worried, some crying, in said hall. There appears to be a large group of Chinese people en route to Swaziland who have encountered difficulties in their ticketing and visa plans, courtesy of something called the "Sino Swazi Travel Authority" (now there's a niche market for you.) And us.

The official in charge (we think) is Will Smith's lost twin. When he finally gets around to us (after almost an hour) he says it's not the South Africans who are so strict about not stamping the "amendments and modifications" pages that follow the visa pages, but the Americans. Don't know about that - these guys seem to be pretty bureaucratic without any help from Washington - but regardless it looks for quite a while like we are at an impasse. It's Sunday, so no way to contact the US consulate in Joburg or the embassy in Pretoria to arrange for extra pages (which the official says the US won't do anyway in cases like this) so once more we're faced with the Tom Hanks vision - my wife wandering around Joburg airport for weeks while I plead her case to whoever.

Finally, though, Will looks at us carefully, probably to detect if we're shills for the State Department or something, says words to the effect of "This could get me in a lot of trouble," which makes me think he's asking for a little "incentive" (which we're not going to pay for fear that it would backfire big time) and sticks the sticky on one of the forbidden pages in my wife's passport, and sends us back through the coded doors and down the stairs to the customs hall, where - amazingly given it's Joburg airport - our bags are sitting on the floor by themselves, unmolested, two hours after we landed. Hoo boy.

Three hours later we've negotiated rental car pickup, navigated through suburban Joburg freeways, and we're out in the Highveld under African skies. Jet-lagged and jangled, tired of bureaucrats, we crash at our bed-and-breakfast lodgings on a farm near Ermelo, where the owners' Corgis roll over on their backs, exposing their bellies for welcoming rubs. Nice to see you too.