jpatokal

SIN-JNB SQ478 C B772ER seat 12K

Having quaffed enough bubbly in the lounge, I stuck to non-alcoholic options on board and this month's special, pineapple juice mixed with ginger ale, tasted just as bizarre as it sounds. Despite it being 3 AM SIN time -- but only 9 PM in JNB -- SQ served a hot semi-meal, the choices being either a croque-monsieur (read: cheese toast) with tomato soup or a fairly unappetizing-looking chicken and noodle set. The sandwich was so-so, the soup was good.

And with that out of the way it was time to settle down for the night and mm, mm, Spacebed. My reaction was again the same as the first time around: this thing is huge... and I still had to scratch my head over the controls, before my friendly seatmate reminded me that the blue switch is what makes things happen. It feels great when used as intended, namely sleeping on your back, but I find it difficult to sleep in any other position that on my stomach and this is mildly uncomfortable, because the seat is a tad 'lumpy' and you have a tendency to slide down as it's angled. Then again, sleeping on your stomach is absolutely impossible in your average biz seat, so I can't complain! One thing I will bee-yotch about: SQ's blanket is fairly pathetic compared to the thick comforter doled out in SK C, and I was glad I'd brought along a sweater.

After 6 hours of pleasant if somewhat intermittent sleep, with some turbulent bumps every now and then, the lights came back on and it was breakfast time. A plate of fruit, fresh bread, a choice of cereal or muesli (with fresh raspberries!), and then your choice of dim sum, eggs and bacon or pancakes. I went for the dim sum, which as feared were greasy and unspectacular , but then again, this was probably the last Asian food item I'd eat for at least three weeks.

Three more goodies to rave about: in-seat power to fuel my laptop (straight 110V, no adapter hassles either), Mika Nakashima & Thievery Corporation on KrisWorld audio on-demand, and my new Shure E3C isolating earbud headphones. It took me a few weeks to learn out to insert the damn things properly and train my ear canal to get used to having them inside, but the end result is worth it as the isolation is near-total and music sounds great; far better than, for instance, the normal Raffles noise-cancelling phones.

And there I was, looking out the window at 35,000 ft, watching Africa loom ever larger and larger in the route map as we flew over Mauritius, Madagascar and the Mozambique Channel, reaching the coast of the continent just as night broke into dawn. One long-haul down, five more to go!

jpatokal

JNB

One of the more infuriating little epics of planning for my trip was the simple act of getting my JNB-LLW tickets issued. I'd purchased them online off flysaa.com, which told me that it would be an E-ticket when I booked. The first receipt afterwards changed its mind, but said I could pick it up at any SAA office... except, evidently, the one in Singapore. Neither could they arrange for me to pick it up airside, and the result of half a dozen calls over three weeks was that I'd have to immigrate into South Africa, pick up my ticket, check in and go through immigration yet again. Or so they said until the morning of my departure, when the wonderfully persistent guy at the Singapore office called to say he'd finally gotten HQ permission to issue, and I stopped by their office on my way to the airport to pick it up!

So it was with a sigh of relief that I opted for "transfer" instead of "baggage claim" at JNB, but alas, the airport does a singularly bad job of giving pax a good first impression. First a march down a corridor with broken light fixtures falling from the ceiling, then queues and angry Anglo aunties at the transfer desk, then an absolutely ridiculous crowd trying to squeeze through the one (1) security checkpoint for access back into the terminal. People were coming up from the ground floor desk to the first floor security by lift, and finding that they couldn't even step out of the lift because there were so many people jammed into the hallway. But once this gauntlet was over, the actual airside of the terminal proved somewhat more pleasant. Signs pointing towards a SilverKris lounge even raised false hopes of a shower in there somewhere, but nay, there's no arrivals lounge available for biz/*G pax, although the friendly lady at the SAA Biz lounge did console me with a 'sweetie' (candy) and invited me back for my upcoming LH flight to FRA. Non-lounge internet options were limited to Wifi at 50 rand/hour, so I decided to just bury myself in LP Zambia instead.

JNB-LLW SA170 Y A319 seat 28C

Eventually three hours rolled by and it was time to board my flight. We were bussed out and kindly offered a free sightseeing tour of the entire terminal, at one point looping back past our starting point, before we actually found our plane. Not that I minded: even the Departures board in the airport seemed downright romantic, with places like Gaborone, Antananarivo and of course Lilongwe calling out their siren song, and the selection of airlines and their planes was equally eclectic.

This plane, however, was so squeaky clean and new you could still smell the Saran Wrap. I'd neglected to ask for a window and got an aisle way in the back (2nd last row), surrounded by Americans on safari and a long-suffering Malawian student getting quizzed on the intricacies of Chinyanja grammar by the tourist next to him, despite his protestations that he didn't actually speak Chinyanja. After half an hour of sitting around on tarmac for no obvious reason, the fully-loaded plane bounced to the sky. It was only a two-hour flight, and somewhat to my surprise we were served a hot meal with a drink service to wash down my Lariam. But then again, with tickets starting from around US$400 and a full plane, maybe there's still enough room in the profit margins for a few fripperies like this...

LLW-CIP by car

Modern airport buses came down to meet the plane and I squeezed myself in just as the doors were closing -- and was among the first in the soon-to-be-long immigration queue, with two grumpy military types stamping passports and scribbling notes in pen (computers? what computers?). Appearances aside, immigration and customs were surprisingly smooth, I'd been expecting hassles as the passport number on my yellow fever cert didn't match that on my actual passport but they didn't even ask to see it. Once through I headed to the taxi counter, which sported a reasonable-sounding "US$16 to Lilongwe" and asked how much to the Zambian border. The guy's eyes lit up and he made a phonecall. "mumble mumble mzungu mumble mumble!" He put down the receiver and quoted with a wide smile: US$200. I grinned, told him that was way too expensive and offered 5000 Malawi kwacha ($40). He grinned back and counteroffered US$140. Bridging this gap was unlikely to be worth the effort, so I thanked him and walked off to the taxi hyenas outside, picking a guy at random and telling him I wanted to go to Lilongwe. "20 dollar!" "OK. Show me your car."

We walked off to the parking lot to see the car, which was an older but seemingly well-maintained Toyota. Only then, out of earshot from the rest, did I proffer that I wanted to go to the Zambian border. How much? 8000 kwacha, he said; 5000, I fired back. 7000 kwacha, he suggested; 50 dollars, I danced. 60 dollars, he insisted and on this he stuck to his guns. I'd been advised that 2000 to the city plus 5000-6000 to the border would be reasonable, so I caved and hopped in.

Compared to the cold of Jo'burg it was warm edging on hot, maybe 25 C or so with the sun beating down. We took off into an arid landscape of flat scraggy bush, red soil, simple dwellings of red brick and corrugated iron sheets as roof. It's the dry season now, most fields have already been harvested and the new ones planted haven't sprouted yet, adding to the rather desolate vista. Cars are obviously a major luxury here, a lucky few had bicycles but most people just walked, the women balancing heavy loads of water or firewood on their heads. Some kids at a makeshift stand by the side of the road were selling the carcass of an antelope. The road was, however, in excellent shape, with Afro-pop blasting we barreled down at 120 km/h without a problem and covered the 130 km to Mchinji in an hour and a half.

Zambia's arrival was announced by hills suddenly popping up on the horizon. Malawi exit immigration was a non-event, and from there it was another 15 kilometers to the Zambian border post. I'd been advised to pick up a Malawian SIM card, but figured out I could save that hassle and roam with my Singaporean SIM instead; alas, I'd had no luck in Malawi, and as I approached the Zambian side it became clear that the Zambian operators weren't going to treat me any better. Neither was their immigration: despite a visa instruction sheet stating quite clearly that Scandinavian passport holders were to be treated to free visas, the surly lady at the counter wasn't having any of it: "Your paper is 2004", she objected, "but now it is 2005 and the law has changed. So you pay." And I did, US$25 to be precise, but at least I'd had the presence of mind to bring along two photos and a passport copy. Stampa stampa!

And there I was, standing at the Zambian side of the dusty border town of Mchinji-Mwima, a hundred people looking curiously at the blond mzungu with spiky hair and a Flyertalk-tagged rollaboard in tow. The feeling was like somebody was filming the scene from a helicopter had just zoomed all the way out to a wide-angle view: I've rarely felt so alone and out of place before. Shifty-eyed moneychangers flashed wads of kwacha at me, but I declined politely and asked if I could use a telephone somewhere. I was waved down the road towards a "white house" (of which there were not a few) supposedly containing a public telephone, so I trudged onward... and at the third one a guy grinned happily when I asked and said yes, this is the public telephone. I walked around the corner of the house, expecting to see a phone bolted to the wall, but there was nothing and the guy explained: "No no, it is a mobile telephone", and pointed to the Nokia 1611 in his hand, with a cracked screen and the lettering on the keys worn off.

We made a couple of tries to a couple of numbers, with no luck, but then K called back and he said he'd be down to get me in an hour or so. So I sat down with Mr Mbele -- for that was the telephone guy's name -- and chatted at a languorous pace, him teaching me the local language Chinyanja and me asking about his life. He rents his phone out for 5000 kwacha (US$1) per minute for local calls, 15000 kwacha (US$3) for international calls. (He didn't ask for anything from me and got a tiny bit flustered when I tipped him a dollar: he wanted to give me change!) A new phone can be bought for 250,000 kwacha ($50) in Lusaka, old ones for less, and it was his dream to buy one. He also confided that he had been a witchman previously, but then The Company offered him this post as a salesman (in his words), selling not just airtime but also bags of fertilizer and seed to passersby. Prices were cheaper in Malawi, but quality was better here, he said, and sometimes Malawians bought some from him.


The sun was setting as K showed up and whisked me off. Chipata is a bustling town of 200,000, the capital of Zambia's Eastern Province and the home of my good friend E. E was away on a business trip, but I knocked back a few bottles of Mosi, the rather tasty Zambian lager, over fish and chips at Mama Rula's with K, and before 9 PM I collapsed into my mosquito-netted bed and slept like a baby until morning.

jpatokal

CIP-MFU by car

"Life in Africa is unpredictable", K had told me the previous day, "you never know what's going to happen tomorrow." I got a taste of this on a small scale when my taxi, arranged to ferry me over to South Luangwa National Park, was late. And why, you ask? Because the government had just decreed that all taxis in Zambia have be painted a certain color, so the police had impounded all taxis until they could figure out what the color was going to be. But also in typical African style, anything is possible with enough kwacha and connections, so a non-taxi was found soon enough to take me over to Mfuwe.

Some 10 km north of Chipata, a sign planted by the roadside proclaimed "Republic of Zambia - Department of Road Transport - Emergency Repairs to Chipata-Mfuwe Road". At the same point the tarmac ended and turned into gravel, full of potholes, corrugations and reminders that "rocky road" isn't just a flavor of ice cream. Villages dotted the hillsides here and there, but now bricks and corrugated iron were replaced with thatched straw and mud. After three hours of bouncing about I was dropped off in Mfuwe, but at the wrong place as it turned out, and I had to hitch a lift with a friendly local mom to central Mfuwe, where the lodge picked me up. Oddly, back at lodge the fact that I'd ventured over by taxi was made to sound equivalent to crossing the Congo by bicycle, I've seen (and my tender rear has felt) much worse in eg. Cambodia. But a conspiracy theory I heard says that South Luangwa's safari lodges actively conspire to keep the road untarred, so their buddies the air charter operators at MFU are kept busy. Hmm-mm...

South Luangwa National Park


I stayed two nights at South Luangwa National Park, one night at Kafunta River Lodge -- wonderful staff, great chalets but outside the park -- and another at Mfuwe Lodge -- more impersonal, older chalets, but smack dab in the middle of the park, so great viewing even off the balcony. This was my first safari ever and, not being much of a zoogoer, I wasn't expecting all that much but this was, indeed, quite something else. Ever been surrounded by a herd of elephants and had a grand old man with tusks intact bellow and take a few steps towards you? Neither had I. But instead of waxing eloquent about how many stripes a Zambian zebra has, I'll just let the pictures do the talking:

http://jpatokal.iki.fi/photo/travel/.../SouthLuangwa/

MFU-CIP by car

After three days of bumping about in the back of a safari car, it was time for three more hours of bumping about in a taxi. I wasn't exactly looking forward to this, and a frisson of excitement was added by a brief conversation in the middle of the journey, after the cabbie stopped the car and got out for a brief inspection:

"Everything OK?"
"The brake is gone. I use handbrake now."

This was promptly demonstrated when a kamikaze pig ran out on to the road: our brakeless taxi swerved to avoid it and did a neat 180-degree spin into a ditch. Fortunately damage was minimal and we managed to get to Chipata without further mishaps.

mad_atta

I love it! What a classic Africa moment. Thanks for another 2 outstanding instalments. Loved the photos, too - you are clearly an accomplished photographer.

So, how are you finding the food? Much as I love Africa, it ain't no SE Asia when it comes to culinary sensations. Are you sick of sadza yet?!

I'm now waiting impatiently for the next instalment...

jpatokal

You can say that again (although they call it nsima in Zambia). Fortunately (?), I'm already in Svalbard as I type this and hence subsisting on a steady diet of Norwegian fiskebullar, but it may be another week until I can connect up my laptop and post the next installment...

movingalong

TIP for LYR:

go to a bank and take a picture of the sign asking 'please remove skimasks and remember to have your gun in a friendly position BEFORE entering bank'

As said before LYR is at 78 deg north, so people use skimasks to keep thei faces warm when snowmobiling. And it is required that when outside Longyearbyen one must carry a gun for polar bear protection. And for some strange reason the ladies behind the bank counter get worked up, when someone, face covered with a skimask, holding a high powered rifle comes runing into the bank.... saying something like: 'forgot to pay my phonebill'

one of the most beautiful places on this planet! enjoy spitsbergen!!!

jpatokal

CIP

After decades of misery, Zambia's economy has been doing pretty well in the last few years thanks to two factors: the price of copper, by far Zambia's biggest export, has gone up due to demand from China, and the (still small) tourist industry has been booming, in no small part thanks to the chaos in Zimbabwe, which previously hoovered up the bulk of tourists to the Victoria Falls on the countries' border.

But this year has not been a good one. First there were acute diesel shortages, caused by the country's sole refinery having problems, and then there were still ongoing power shortages, caused (or so they say) by repairs to the country's sole large hydroelectric plant on the Zambezi. In Chipata, this manifests as the euphemistically named "load shedding", where power is cut for a few hours in the evening for a part -- or occasionally all -- of the town, and the hottest-selling item in the markets was a battery-powered bicycle headlamp that makes navigating your way around a pitch-dark house easy (tip: 84,000K at General Dealers). And last and worst, there was a terrible drought that ruined the crops, sending the price of the staple maize meal skyrocketing. Thanks to imports from neighboring countries and food aid it's not shaping up to be quite the total catastrophe of a place like Niger, but there will still be people dying of starvation before the year is over.

So it was on this rather somber note that we headed off to the Kulamba festival, a yearly thanksgiving ceremony of the Chewa people being held the very weekend I was in town, in the village of Umdi about 75 km down the road towards Lusaka. It was the first festival in several years, as the paramount chief presiding over it had passed away, but now a new one had been chosen. Kulamba's star draw is the chance to see the Nyau dancers, who come from from neighboring Malawi and Mozambique as well as Zambia and decorate themselves with wild outfits composed of feathers, twigs, FIFA World Cup 2002 chitengis, Santa Claus masks and anything else they can get their hands on. Formerly the paramount chief's honor guard, today's Nyau are a secret society primarily tasked with initiation rites for the young people of the tribe, but being secret the contents of these rites is not known to the public and wasn't about to be revealed to us either.


Thousands of people had shown up for the festival, by pickup, minibus, truck, bicycle or foot. It was Saturday, the peak of the three-day ceremonies and the village was packed. The focal point was a 100m ring of barbed wire where the dancers performed and the paramount chief looked on from an elevated dais. VIPs were around the inside edge of the ring, while the hoi polloi jostled on the outside, police armed with batons and the ceremonial honor guard armed with bow and arrow trying, mostly ineffectually, to keep them whipped into shape. Thanks to our white skin, plus a local friend from a nearby village, we snuck out way into the VIP stand, not that this consisted of more than patchy shade from a scraggy tree and dry, dusty grass to sit on.

After an hour of droning by local dignitaries -- "Welcome, welcome, welcome! The Assistant Vice-Secretary of the Fertilizer Control Committee in Rutungu Sub-Province of the Republic of Zambia, Mr Herbert Chibwabwa. Welcome, welcome, welcome! All the way from Lilongwe, his Excellency the Second Minister for Agriculture and Fishery Co-operatives in the Republic of Malawi, Dr Krispy Kapenta. Welcome, welcome, welcome..." -- the Nyau trooped in and started dancing. Unfortunately, privileged as we were, it was still tough to see anything as a constant gaggle of guards, VVIPs, and photographers who'd forked out 30,000 kwacha for a permit buzzed around the dancers, and the best glimpses were offered as the dancers walked in and out of the ring. After sweating it out for 3 hours in the hot midday sun we decided to call it a day... just in time, as we heard later, before a raging bush fire engulfed several huts and burned some poor sod's minibus to a crisp.

http://jpatokal.iki.fi/photo/travel/Zambia/Kulamba/

jpatokal

CIP-LLW by car


All good things must come to an end, and soon it was time to wave goodbye to the joys of nshima (maize porridge), mahue (maize drink) and ucwala (maize beer). Evidently in need of a decadent splurge, K & E had booked us rooms at Lilongwe's (arguably) premier hotel the Cresta Crossroads, and we zipped across the border and the 120 km to Lilongwe in time to make to dinner at Mamma Mia, Lilongwe's premier Italian restaurant, home to (conservatively) half the expat population on this ordinary Monday. Food quality was a little inconsistent, but then again, how many places in Central Africa are there that will serve you a spaghetti San Remo with homemade pesto?

LLW
The surreal feeling continued the next morning after I waved goodbye to E & K, watching CNN warble excitedly about Hurricane Katrina, popping in for some weight-training in the gym and even sampling the satellite broadband Internet via 54 Mbps WLAN in the hotel lobby. A spiffy shopping mall that wouldn't look (too much) out of place in New Jersey had sprouted up next to the hotel, and I finally managed to buy and send the postcards I couldn't find anywhere in Chipata.

Obviously figuring (correctly) that any mzungu who can pony up US$120 for a night in a hotel isn't going to balk too much at cab prices, the driver insisted that US$20 is the fare paid by everybody, and cheerily informed me it'd be $25 the next time around as fuel prices were going up again soon. Malawi's roads remain unfathomably excellent by Zambian standards -- lane dividers! traffic signs! honest-to-goodness bus stops! -- but any illusions about the next Singapore in Africa were slightly dented by newspaper headlines announcing that 4.5 million were at risk of starvation this year, the appearance of an ox-cart and the same sight that had greeted me on the way from the airport: a row of women in colorful chitengi walking along the roadside, balancing impossibly heavy-looking buckets and baskets on their head. Buh-bye, Africa, I'm going to miss you.

Lilongwe's Kamuzu International Airport was, undoubtedly, the pride of the country when opened in the 1980s. Unfortunately, little has been done since, down to the wonderfully retro black-on-yellow signage in all lowercase. The day's flight schedules are maintained on a board with nails hammered in to hold little wooden bits and bobs for showing flight numbers and destinations: today, the nation's capital had five domestic flights (to Blantyre and Mzuzu) and five international flights (Lusaka, Dar es-Salaam, Dubai and twice to Jo'burg). It must, however, be said that Lilongwe isn't actually Malawi's largest city -- that honor belongs to Blantyre -- so Air Malawi, "Africa's Friendliest Airline", has the difficult job of operating from two hubs.

Once again the SAA flight to JNB was packed to the gills and the check-in queue stretched all the way to the end of the terminal and then back again in a U-shape. I whiled away an hour with the joys of SMS (Celtel Malawi was able to message to Singapore and back!), splurged my remaining 250 kwacha on a bottle of piri-piri sauce and two chocolate bars, and then headed to The Gate (for at LLW there is only one). Standing in my way, however, was the most thorough security check I've seen since Tel Aviv: bags were duly passed through an X-ray, but any results from therein were roundly ignored, with every single passenger getting patted down and having every single bag opened. Once through, the holding area didn't have enough seats for a full A319, so I plonked myself down on the floor next to a power outlet and typed away.

I'd noted with foreboding that there were no SAA planes in sight from the 2nd floor departures area, and indeed, it was soon announced (by a lady yelling, no fancy PA systems here) that the plane would be arriving at 13:15. It didn't, of course, but it wasn't too late from the announced lateness and we departed shortly after 14:00.

LLW-JNB SA171 Y A737-800 seat 20C

I was somewhat surprised to see that this was a 737-800, instead of the A319 of the way in. The plane was, again, very close to full and the luggage holds were even more jampacked with every other safari tourist bringing back full-size shields, wooden giraffes and similar kitsch, and I rudely if conveniently stuffed my solitary rollaboard above 12A before proceeding down the aisle.

Once everybody and their giraffes were stowed away, we took off towards JNB. The captain excused the delay as a technical glitch, reassuringly noting that they had to replace a defective electrical component before they could take off, and that they'd made up for some lost time but would still be an hour late. Lunch was that eternal choice, beef or chicken; I'm usually chicken, but was feeling beefy that day, which I came to regret as soon as I tried to stick a knife in it and felt it bounce. The cherry on the cake was an irritatingly chipper stewardess: being asked "would you like coffee or tea, or should I just ask the captain to land? Ha-ha!" is mildly amusing the first time around, but hearing this repeated every two rows as she headed for the back of the bus just brought back too many memories of my 5th grade science teacher Mrs Miller asking the class if there is "a fungus... among us! Har har!".

mad_atta

^ ^ ^

Your SAA flight might not have been the best ever, but it sounds a lot more pleasant than my trip from Jo'burg to Blantyre - 36 hours on a bus while recovering from malaria, complete with 3 agonising border crossings. Still, I think I subsisted very happily in Malawi for the next months on the savings, so I guess it was all worth it in the end.

jpatokal

JNB

The above is from Murakami Haruki's "The End of the World and the Hard-Boiled Wonderland" (feeble translation by me), but as this masterpiece by Japan's best living author is all too obscure outside his home country, I'll lay out how the first scene unfolds. Our protagonist, about whom we know nothing, finds himself in an elevator. There are no buttons and no indicators inside, he can't feel whether the elevator is moving, he can't hear any sounds, and he can't tell how much time has passed. And slowly his sense of discomfort increases: not because he's actually uncomfortable, but because he just doesn't know what is happening and starts imagining all sorts of nightmare scenarios...

This, in a way, is how I felt when I climbed two flights of stairs after JNB's transit check-in (less crowded then last time) and suddenly realized that my pulse had shot up to approximately 200 and I was feeling distinctly feverish. Thanks to the fine red dust sandblasted into my system in Zambia plus the difficulty of adjusting from South-East Asian humidity to the total dryness of an African winter, I'd already had a series of allergic symptoms (runny nose, sore throat, itchy eyes, vague headache) and had occasionally wondered if I was slipping into a flu, but this seemed like uncontestable proof that Something was Wrong. And when Something is Wrong after a sojourn in the deepest heart of Africa, it's much more morbidly entertaining to imagine all the exotic possibilities: malaria? dengue? yellow fever? schistosomiasis? Ebola? Do I now need to spend tomorrow in some Oslo hospital's tropical diseases ward? And even if it is just flu or food poisoning, should I now cancel the whole Svalbard trip?!

Whatever it was, this was a singularly inopportune moment for it to appear, so all I could do was slink into the SAA Business Lounge and try to drown my worries in a flood of bytes. The place was packed, helped at least in part by a three-hour delay of a flight to NY, but I located a table equipped with power -- only of the bizarre South African three-round-pin sort, but reception kindly exchanged my C ticket to FRA for an adapter at a 1:1 exchange rate -- and what looked very much like a network plug. I duly plugged in my cable, only to find no signal, and the scenario repeated itself for the next half an hour as I poked around with a laptop in hand, trying to get online. No dice. In the end, I ditched my moral objection to paying for wireless Internet and forked out the bloody 50 rand for an hour's fix. Sigh.

JNB-FRA LH573 C B747-400 seat 2K

I'd spotted a parked LH plane earlier and thought it didn't look like a 747, raising hopes that this might be the new spiffy model with decent Biz seats, and being unexpectedly bussed out to the plane raised hopes even higher. Alas, it was the same old clunker that FT had warned me about, with everything inside of 80's vintage -- not, I gather, the best introduction to LH's C product. Lufthansa's interior livery really has to be among the ugliest on the planet, the grey-and-mustard makes even Business Class look depressing.

There were a couple of upsides though, the first being my seat 2K: it's the first time I've sat this up front in a jumbo (or any plane, really; in everything else there's a cockpit in the way), and it really is amazingly quiet. With the Shures plugged in my ears I literally couldn't hear the plane at all. Better yet, though, was that my mystery disease -- or hypochondria -- faded away within an hour of takeoff, and instead of skipping the meal and fitfully attempting sleep I decided to take it like a man and tackle the meal service. Here's the menu of the day, or at least the parts of it that I sampled:

Cajun-style Breast of Chicken with Salsa and Polenta
Mesclun Mix presented with Dressing
Bread, Rolls and Butter

Penne Pasta enhanced by Mushroom Cream, Red Pepper Sauce and Pesto

Cheddar and herbed Cheese

The first three were brought in on a tray, with a selection of bread on the side (mm, German brown pumpernickel). The chicken breast was quite OK, at least if you're willing to categorize cold chicken as a "fashion statement" instead of the more usual "leftover", although "salsa" was a slightly generous description of what most would refer to as "chopped tomatoes". I'd groaned a bit on seeing the polenta -- this being the Italian version of nshima -- but, on further reflection, found it rather appropriate for my last meal in (on?) Africa, and thanks to judicious use of salt and turmeric (it can't have been saffron, can it?) it actually tasted like, well, something. As for the salad... well, I think I need a paragraph break so I can properly pontificate.

Consider the humble olive. When I find one in my salad in Economy class, it's making a statement, and that statement is "Hello, I am an olive." If I root around my little box o' salad for a while longer, perhaps I can find a cube of feta cheese, and then we can both pretend it's a Greek salad. Safely categorized, compartmentalized and consumed, I don't particularly mind if said olive happens to be of the usual pre-pitted, pre-sliced, brine-soaked, mushy variety with the consistency and taste of a sea slug, because hey, this is Economy and we're both looking for the lowest common denominator.

But if I'm paying four times the fare for Business, then that olive must be able to stand up and proclaim: "I am the one true Olive, hear me roar!" If your dish claims to be a Greek salad, that olive had damn well better be a juicy black uncircumcized Kalamata coated with nothing but the juices of its fellow olives; call it an Arabic mezze, and may the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits if the olive is not green, cracked and Syrian. So what kind of statement is Lufthansa making when they give me a salad that contains mesclun, sunflower seeds, bell pepper and mushy pitted sea slug olives? Obviously the answer is, "We have no idea what the hell we are doing." Boo.

The next step was, strangely enough, to take away the entire tray and then serve the main course alone. I steered clear of beef this time, and seafood curry didn't sound too apposite, so I went for the pasta which, if nothing else, has to be the least appetizing-looking dish I've seen in Biz to date: a plate of whitish-gray with squirts of green and red on top, kind of like a desecrated Italian flag. Tastewise, however, it was quite alright (if perhaps overly creamy to my tastes) and a nice counterpoint to the previous night's pesto in Lilongwe.

Dessert was almond cake, fruit or cheese: unusually, I went for the cheese, and was glad I did. I don't much go for the Bries and Stiltons that usually make up cheese platters, but a nice sharp Cheddar and some soft cheese with herbs, paired with a carrot, a prune and a stick of thyme (!) hit the spot nicely. Alas, the glass of port I requested along with it was the usual execrable cheap ruby; I won't repeat the olive rant here, but again, if you're going to pretend to be gourmet cuisine and employ a wine consultant to select the reds and the whites, then you could at least serve an LBV or decently aged tawny instead of the cheapest bottle of Graham's Ruby on the shelf. Grr.

Food duly digested, it was time to entertain myself. The entertainment system on these old 747s is a bit of a joke: there's a personal screen alright, but it just loops a bunch of movies, without even a pretension of interactivity, and neither of the two interesting-looking movies in the guide were actually available on this flight. Audio options were limited to the same channels as the back of bus, but at least Channel 6's Club Mix was fairly decent and, unlike SQ, LH is smart enough to separate the 'rock' and 'club' genres into their separate channels. For self-entertainment with a laptop, LH does provide a 110V power outlet in the seat, but as soon as I stuck in my plug adaptor (not even my laptop!) it switched itself off and the staff were unable to debug it. Sigh.

Soon enough the lights went off and it was time to sleep. As expected the seat's recline was poor, but to top it off the lumbar support and legrest extension functions were broken, and I spun around for half an hour trying to find a comfortable position. In the end, though, I surprised even myself by sleeping for over 4 hours and not waking up with an aching back. This seat's doing something right, I'll just be damned if I know what.

Shortly before 4 AM, just after we'd crossed the Mediterranean, the lights came back and it was breakfast time. Choices were an omelette or a plate of cold cuts, and I figured that while omelettes always tasty airplane-y the Germans ought to know how to cut a decent slice of wurst, so I chose:

Cold Gourmet Plate
Chicken and Black Forest Ham, smoked Mozzarella and Andean Cheese

From the Bread Basket
a selection of Rolls, Croissants and Muffins with Butter and Preserves

Don't You just love the wacky germanesque Capitalization? Finer Points of Punctuation aside, everything was good and the croissants were soft, fluffy and lovely. So full points for breakfast. The plane started its descent just as the horizon started to redden with approaching dawn. Up in front you could feel as well as hear the landing gear lower and even hear the added wind resistance as we did a picture-perfect touchdown into Europe.

So overall summary for my first LH C experience: plane was crap, food was pretty good but not perfect, and service was solid if a little slow (then again, it was a full plane). I'll fly them again, but not in an old Jumbo if I can help it.

Ed. I later figured that my mystery malady might well have been caused by the tablet of Lariam I'd swallowed about two hours beforehand...?

jpatokal

FRA

I marched straight from gate B36 to the Business Lounge right above it, only to find it opening at 7 AM -- 1.5 hours from now. The sign saying this was, of course, placed only at the top of a flight of stairs leading to the lounge and there was a steady crowd trooping up to see it... so I skedaddled over to the B2x satellite's Senator Lounge, which had just opened (happy!) and had a shower empty and waiting for me (joy!). And when I found authentic warm Frankfurter Pretzels and a dispenser of Apfelschörle at the amazingly generous breakfast buffet bar I almost shed a tear. But no free Internet here either, with a stoic shrug I bled my Amex of 10 euros for a two-hour fix. This is starting to be an expensive habit.

Two hours later I disengaged, grabbed some newspapers, wolfed down a second breakfast and headed out into FRA. Some people I know hate this airport with a vengeance, but I visit rarely enough that I still find it interesting. "Where the world meets", claims their website, and this certainly seems true in the bathrooms, whose walls are scribbled full of graffiti from everybody in the world: Colombia, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Norway, Korea, Israel, Japan... and live specimens of denizens of faraway places were scattered around the airport, sleeping behind the currency exchange desk or under the stairs, everybody with a story to tell but nobody to tell it to. Next time I'm in FRA with 4 hours to spare I'll try to do some guerrilla photography.

Flights to OSL were on the other side of the Schengen barrier (which Norway subscribes to without being an EU member), passport control was queueless but security was surprisingly obtrusive: you want me to remove my belt, even though it contains no metal? At least they let me keep my shoes on.

FRA-OSL LH3130 C A320-200 seat 4F

Boarding started a few minutes late, but for once the plane was well below capacity (30-40%?) and ready in a jiffy. As usual in European business class, the seat was identical up front and in the back, but this was a short hop (1.5 hours) and, with nobody in the seats next to me, I could lift up the armrest and spread out. No IFE or no facilities of any other kind either. Lunch/breakfast was another tasty spread of cold cuts with a selection of fresh bread, and by the time the trays had been cleared, we were already flying past the last tip of Denmark and coasting towards Oslo.

jpatokal

OSL

I've been to Oslo exactly once before and, coming in from Copenhagen (one of my favorite cities in Europe), wasn't too impressed that time. (In fact, I would have been happy to transit via CPH again, but flights to LYR are flown only from OSL and Tromso, so I didn't have much of a choice.) First impressions of OSL the airport -- my first visit -- were that the scenery around looked exactly like Stockholm and the terminal itself was a reduced-scale carbon copy of CPH, all glass and steel tempered with Scandinavian wood. This was a theme to be much repeated in the next 24 hours throughout Oslo...

I'd booked the SAS Radisson Nydalen in advance, knowing that it was located a bit in the 'burbs but with a subway station next to it, so the first order of duty was figuring out how to get there. First suggestion from the public transport desk (yes, OSL actually has such a beast) was a direct bus to "500m away" from the station, but dragging my suitcase in random circles in a suburb I don't know looking for an unfamiliar hotel didn't sound too appealing, and I was itching to try the Flytoget express train. Option 2, then, was Flytoget to Nationaltheatret and a change to Line 5 to Nydalen.

A supersleek confection of steel, glass and wood (what else?), Flytoget has two services, a direct non-stop to Oslo Sentral and a suburban service that goes onward from Oslo S to Nationaltheatret and all the way to Asker. At NOK 160 (~$25) one way it's pricy, but it rockets through the Norwegian countryside at over 160 km/h and reaches the city center in just 20 minutes, and I vainly tried to imagine what it would look like if this thing was in Lilongwe and could be used to reach Chipata. (They're actually building just such a train line, if maybe not quite as fast, but the Zambian last bit of it remains mired in a political quagmire, with money allocated but then disappearing mysteriously into the pockets of some politician.)

My reverie was interrupted by the train's arrival in the heart of Oslo. Figuring out my connection at Nationaltheatret took a bit of hunting though, not helped by the train conductor informing me that "this is subway", until I realized that she was wrong, I'd gotten off in the NSB regional services station, and thus needed to schlep over to the separate subway side, marked with a "T" for Tunnelbana. Single trips are NOK 20 a pop while a 24-hour pass is NOK 60, so I did the math, picked up a Dagskort and even had the presence of mind to stamp it. Oslo's still using old-school printed tickets at the moment, but is busily upgrading to a electronic touch card system as we speak.


Oslo's subways are rather Gothamesque, with ancient trains l(built in 1965, proclaimed the plate on the one I boarded) and lightning flashing in the grimy tunnels as the overhead power collector sparked. The suburb of Nydalen, on the other hand, was so squeaky clean and new it almost hurt the eyes to look at it. My hotel, too, was just opened and followed the standard glass-steel-wood paradigm when seen from the outside, but I was surprised to find logs crackling in the fireplace in the lobby and even more surprised to find the eclectic room decoration of my 'Chilli'-styled room; presumably the 'Urban' types are more boring.

With stuff dumped in room it was time to send a one-man hit squad into the city to prepare for tomorrow's Arctic assault. Disembarking at Nationaltheatret again, I strolled along Karl Johans gate and was positively amazed by how pretty the city was on a clear, crisp late summer day like today. Facades were painted, shops were bustling, statuesque Nordic goddesses were sauntering and it all looked so very... European? The Oslo of bland concrete boxes and grime that I remembered was, however, still there, just hidden a few blocks away in the distinctly proletarian and now immigrant-heavy street of Torggata. I devoured a pølse (hot dog) wrapped in a lompe (potato flatbread), picked up a winter coat and ski cap in H&M -- made in Indonesia, said the coat's tag, and I'm sure I could have bought it in Jakarta for a fraction of the still rather reasonable NOK 398 it cost me here -- and sunglass clip-ons at an optical store, then headed back to the hotel.


Only one thing to do before I crashed into bed: I wanted to find a decent kebab. But nay, squeaky clean Nydalen and neighboring Storø proved exactly the wrong place to find it, despite much searching I couldn't locate a single kebab joint and had to go for the neighboring shopping mall's "Viet-Thai-Sushi" restaurant. Despite an appetizing slew of Vietnamese diacritics on the menu, my plate of fried noodles was predictably atrocious and could have (is?) sold equally well as "chao mien", "mee goreng" or "phad thai". Then again, Europeanized "Asian" food is best regarded as a cuisine with no connection to its mothership: the utter tastelessness of the sauce just can't happen in any South-East Asian country, and only in Scandinavia could it be served with a bottle of ketchup and a few slices of pickled beetroot on the side.

Up bright and early the next morning, I devoured as much of the hotel's rather amazing smorgasbord buffet as I could in 15 minutes, then hopped on the subway. I now had an interesting logistical issue: I could either disembark at Nationaltheatret at 7:28 and wait 15 minutes for the next regional Flytoget, or head on to Jernbanestasjon (ETA 7:31) and try my luck at catching the 7:35 direct to OSL. Following Mae West's advice and opting for the evil I hadn't tried before, I rode past Nationaltheatret and onto Sentral. Alas, it was 7:37 by the time I'd walked across all of Oslo Sentral, but turns out the regional service was delayed by 15 min so I'd made the right choice anyway. A nifty feature on the train: below the usual news and stock market quotes, the infoscreen shows (almost?) realtime updates for delayed and cancelled flights. There were quite a few thing morning, but mine wasn't on the list. Zoom-zoom-zoom, went the Norwegian countryside, and the weather report was predicting 6 deg C and rainy for Longyearbyen as we arrived at OSL.

OSL-TOS-LYR SK4412 B737-400 C seat 05A "Magnus den Gode"

"Ladies and gentlemen, you now have the opportunity to buy the items we have for sale."

Congratulations SAS Braathens! You are the new winner of my exclusive "Worst Business Class Ever" award, taking over the crown from Asiana's regional flights. Paying the premium for business class on SAS Braathens domestic Norwegian flights gets you the following features: no lounge access, no Internet access (unless you pay), no in-flight entertainment of any kind, no food or drinks (unless you pay) and exactly the same seat as the folks back in economy. A one-class concept then, I hear you say, yet my flights were all ticketed as "D". So why, then, would anybody ever pay for business? Simple: SAS Braathens has the monopoly on routes to LYR, and with 12 (!) rows of a 737 allocated to C you have to book very, very early to get one of the elusive Y seats, which were unsurprisingly packed.


On this sunny day, the descent into TOS was one of if not the most incredible descent I've experienced: first flying low past peaks that were still snow-capped in August, over the fjords of the Norwegian coastline, then over and a full loop around the island of Tromso before doing a steep turn and landing at the airport. The views were gorgeous and I can't ever before recall taking pictures of the scenery out the window at an airport before... With an hour's layover, I struck a blow against predatory SAS snack pricing, contributed to Europe's northern dimension and went off to eat a salad -- featuring, of course, our continuing theme pesto sauce -- at the surprisingly large airport's restaurant, stocking up on juice and bananas in preparation for the famously high prices of Svalbard.

Soon enough we were bundled back on and now even the front of the plane was full. An elderly couple had tried to commandeer my window seat, but this was one flight for which I did have to insist on a view. Alas, perhaps as punishment for my lack of respect the plane promptly flew into heavy cloud cover and stayed there for the rest of the 1.5-hour flight.

jpatokal

LYR

Sanctified excrement. This place is just way more extreme than I'd expected...

What surprised me was not the blast of Arctic air -- in, for once, the literal instead of merely hyberbolic sense -- at the aircraft door, nor the sleet raining down. Even the town, with its gaily painted buildings and pretty red roofs, looked both larger and more normal that I imagined. The amazing thing here is the environment...


Svalbard's mountains look like giant, precipitous slag heaps: steeply piled stacks of rubble, eroded by rain with peaks jutting out at improbable angles. The only visible vegetation is a brownish green moss, the color of dead grass, that sprouts patchily up the mountainsides. The overall effect is undescribably desolate: add in a few rivers of molten lava and Peter Jackson could have filmed his Mordor sequences here! Mining has long been the islands' main (and, until recently, only) economic activity, and the varying related detritus are scattered about the sides of the solitary road running from the airport to the town. Longyearbyen itself is hunkered down in a crevice between two rows of jagged peaks, and closer inspection reveals that all buildings are constructed on wooden stilts to avoid sinking down into the permafrost. Summer in Svalbard officially ended yesterday, and by October the islands will be plunged into a polar night of total darkness. At 78 degrees north, Svalbard is further north than all of Alaska and all but the northernmost islands of Canada. The only thing more surreal than looking at this from my guesthouse window was munching on a fresh tropical banana imported from Central America as I did so.

Weather on the first day was miserable, windy with sleet raining down. The rain died down by morning, so it wasn't quite as bone-chillingly cold, but fog and a dense cloud cover remained, so I decided to head underground and joined a tour of Mine 3, Longyearbyen's last manually worked coal mine, closed only in 1996. Our guide for the day was an ex-miner himself, and after putting on our overalls, helmets and lamps we trooped off through the blast doors into mine. The temperature is a steady -5 degrees C, with moisture percolating through the permafrost and crystallizing on the walls as a glittering frosting of ice.

So here's how mining was done in the good old days. There are three shifts of 8 hours each, running non-stop around the clock. Shift 1 goes in and perforates a 200 meter deep, 1.5m wide and just 1 meter high chunk of coal with drilled holes and explosives up top, and a 10-centimeter air space below. When the charges blow, the coal crumbles down, and shift 2's job is to use a massive iron scraper-dredger-sled, pulled around by a motored winch, to scoop up the coal (now broken up) and haul it into the waiting freight train in the main tunnel. When the coal has been extracted, shift 3 has the hardest job: the pillars supporting the now empty vein have to be removed and reinstalled 1.5m further down, ready for tomorrow's shift. And so the cycle continues... and remember, this is all being done hundreds of meters below the ground, by people wielding pickaxes and sledgehammers, crawling around a freezing tunnel full of coal dust and noise, much too small to stand up in. How much did they pay these people, and how can it have been enough!?


At its peak, Mine 3 was employing around 200 people and extracting 300,000 tons of coal a year. Today Svalbard's most advanced mine, at Sveagruva, where giant computerized machines grind out the coal and spew it onto conveyor belts, manages 3 million tons. But both Mines 1 and 2 met their ends in a fiery ball of flame as methane and coal dust exploded, and just last month Sveagruva also caught fire; this time around there were no casualties, but whether the damage can be repaired economically is still unknown. If it can't, it will mean the end of the mining on Svalbard.

I spent the afternoon walking around, visiting the museum and gallery, taking snapshots and slowly but surely getting freaked out. I don't think I've ever before had such a visceral reaction to a place: this just feels evil. The stark landscape, the abandoned mining equipment littering the town, the crosses of the graveyard, the claustrophobic working conditions deep underground, the red soil marking the sites of blown-out mine shafts, the tales of explosions and deaths, even the mangled human skeleton lying in a coffin in the museum... and the weather forecast was predicting more fog, gray and gloom. I was still looking forward to the next day's visit to the Russian settlement of Barentsburg, but what on earth was I going to do the day after that, especially if the weather stays like this? Sunny Oslo seemed like a veritable paradise in comparison. So I used the sole advantage of my much-maligned business class ticket -- full flexibility -- and called up SAS to change my flight back to leave a day earlier.

The next morning I bundled on all the clothes I had and set off to the port. m/s Langøysund had a capacity of 70 passengers, filled to the maximum on this gloomy and rainy day, and we set off to the Esmark glacier, three hours across Isfjorden. And dadgummit, was it cold! The outside temperature may have been a balmy 2 deg C according to the meter, but couple in the windchill of the Arctic Ocean and a spray of rain and it was well below freezing. Dreaming of palm trees and Singapore Girls, I ended up putting on my Raffles slippers and stuffing them in my shoes to stop my toes from dropping off.


Our reward came at the glacier, colored an unearthly hue of blue, where our skipper hauled in a few chunks that had calved off and prepared an appropriately glacial whisky toast. A traditional Norwegian lunch of chili con carne with rice and Chinese cabbage followed, and by 2 PM we saw cranes, stacks of coal and a Cyrillic sign welcoming us to "bAPEHUbYP7". Once a hub of Cold War intrigue, with 3000 Soviet miners and KGB spies in half a dozen colonies, today's Russian settlements on Svalbard have dwindled to one and the population to about 700. A much smaller town than Longyearbyen, Barentsburg is equipped with a solitary hotel, a school, a sports complex with pool, a pig and cabbage farm for keeping the populace fat and flatulent, a power plant spewing coal fumes over it all and, last but not least, the world's second most northernly statue of Lenin (the first prize goes to the now abandoned settlement of Pyramiden across the bay). Still, it was obvious that the locals had cottoned on to the ways of capitalism pretty quick: not only were there a slew of signs in English, but a souvenir shop hawked matryoshka dolls and Komsomol Youth League pins to us tourists while Norwegians knocked back vodka shots in the hotel bar.


At this point, some of my gentle readers are probably wondering what on earth the Russians are doing in Norway anyway, so here's a capsule summary. The Svalbard Treaty of 1920 granted Norway uncontested sovereignty and administrative rights over the islands, but the citizens of the 40 other signatories -- including a few you might not expect to find on the list, such as Afghanistan and the Dominican Republic -- are also granted full rights to visit, work and mine the islands. This right has, in the past, been exercised by the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden and even the US, home to the Arctic Coal Company's John Munro Longyear of Longyearbyen fame, but currently only Norway and Russia have commercial activity. Because Norway can't regulate commerce, the islands are also duty-free and tax-free, making (for example) alcohol and sports clothing considerably cheaper than on the mainland.

There's one more twist to the tale. If you want to get to Svalbard and don't have your own ship at your disposal like the Russians do, you'll have to transit through Norway to get in, and are subject to Norwegian visa regulations. Flights from Norway to Svalbard are thus domestic, because it's a Norwegian possession, but flights from Svalbard to mainland Norway go through international passport control and customs, because otherwise anybody could sneak into Schengen this way! It's interesting to speculate what Svalbard would look like today if, say, gold or oil had been struck on the islands, or if there was a viable Northern Passage for ships from Asia over Siberia to Europe... but over a century of prospecting has to date revealed commercial quantities only of humble coal, which barely pays for its extraction and transportation costs.

netsurferrr

I did not go through any passport and customs controls on my way out of Longyearbyen, Svalbard last summer.
Also, I did not find Svalbard as Gothic as you have described. I actually find the place, as far north as it is located, quite civilized. There is a very nice modern and luxurious Radission SAS and even a modern university up there. I wonder whether one will get this kind of creature comfort offered in Longyearbyen when visiting some remote corners of the Scottish Highlands. I am sorry, no one should even dare expecting Indian Summer when visiting a place less than 1000 kms south of North Pole in the peak of summer.

mosburger

I believe jpatokal is of Scandinavian origin and therefore used to spartan outdoor life and cold climates. Might just be his ( Bill Brysonesque ) writing style...

Great report so far, btw. ^