2023-08-07: Arrival in Cape Town

After getting some sleep on the plane from Zurich, we woke up and were served some breakfast. Looking at the flight tracker, something didn’t seem right. The arrival time was about an hour later than we were expecting. After reviewing our flight schedule and doing some time zone calculations, it still seemed incorrect. After giving up trying to figure out why the time seemed wrong, the captain came on the intercom and informed us that the airspace over Niger was closed at the last minute due to the ongoing coup and they had to reroute around the country. Because of that, our arrival in Johannesburg is delayed by an hour. Well, that explains why we couldn’t figure out the time discrepancy. They also mentioned we would have to claim our bags in Johannesburg and go through customs if we had a domestic connecting flight. We weren’t expecting that since our bags were checked through to Cape Town. And now we have an hour less time at the airport. Our stress level increased a bit.

We landed in Johannesburg an hour late as advised. Patrick realized his book was missing as we were getting ready to depart the plane. We helped him look for it briefly, but came to the conclusion that it ended up under his seat when he converted it from a bed to a chair overnight. The chair controls were turned off since we were on land and we didn’t have time to keep searching for it so we moved along. First we had to go through immigration which was a fairly large line at that point. It took us 20 to 30 minutes to get through that. Then we had to collect our bags which was pretty quick but we had to leave the secure area and proceed to the regular check-in desk to drop off our bags for the next flight. One of the airport workers approached us and asked if we needed help. We explained the situation. She looked at her watch and asked us to follow her. She helped us bypass the check-in line to get our bags re-checked. Then she escorted us to the security entrance. She asked for a tip which we were happy to provide. Skipping the check-in line was worth every penny. We made it through security within 5 or 10 minutes and were at our gate with about 20 minutes until boarding. It was a stressful couple of hours, but we made it. We went through the boarding gate and onto the loading ramp where we stopped and stood in line to board the plane. We could see they were still taking luggage off the plane from the previous flight. About 10 or 15 minutes later, we were finally boarding the plane.

Our flight was about 15 minutes late departing. The flight itself was as expected. They served us some lunch and after a couple of hours we landed in Cape Town. They made up the time in the air and we landed on time. We noticed some smoke in a couple of areas of the city as we were landing. The Cape Town airport is fairly small. We waited for our bags and were happy to see they had all arrived. We collected our bags and made our way to the exit.

Our travel agent had organized a driver to pick us up at the airport and take us to the hotel. We found the driver and she escorted us to her van. She waited a few minutes while she looked up the best route to the hotel. She informed us that there were strikes happening in the city. The strikes were not peaceful and people were burning buildings and piles of garbage. That would explain the smoke we saw from the plane. Because of the strikes she needed to plan a route through safer areas of the city. She had to drive another family to the airport for 7:00am this morning. She would normally leave the airport and come back, but because of the strikes, she wasn’t sure she would be able to make it back to the airport. So, she decided to stay at the airport until we arrived at 2:30pm. We felt bad for her. She was very nice and pointed out several things along the way. We passed one of the fires that the strike folks had started. The driver also informed us that our guide for the next day wanted to change the schedule and we’d call him once we got to the hotel.

About 30 minutes later we arrived at our hotel. We unloaded our bags and checked into the hotel. Before the driver left, she got a call from our guide for tomorrow and she passed the phone to Amanda. The weather for tomorrow isn’t looking great so he asked if we could shuffle the schedule around. Instead of doing a tour of the cape peninsula, he wanted to push that back a day as the forecast is better on Wednesday. We told him that wasn’t an issue. So, tomorrow will be a day on our own exploring the area around the hotel. We’ll do the peninsula tour on Wednesday.

We said goodbye to the driver and made our way to our hotel rooms. We have two rooms at the hotel that are next door to each other. The hotel is very nice and our rooms have a great view of Table Mountain . We got unpacked and cleaned up. It had been almost 36 hours since we’d showered last. It was about 5:00pm at this point so we decided to go find a place for dinner.

We walked the block or two to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. There is a wharf there along with a mall and a whole bunch of restaurants. We checked out the menu of several restaurants before deciding on giving a place called Karibu a try. We saw evidence of the strike here too. Amanda ordered a Greek salad as a starter but the waiter informed us their salad chef hadn’t arrived due to the strike. He could only offer a garden salad which was fine. After dinner we explored the mall a bit. It was 7:00pm by the time we were done dinner so most of the stores in the mall were closed. We saw signs on a couple of the closed stores mentioning that because of the strike interrupting their operations they were closing early. We grabbed some ice cream from a shop and headed back to the hotel. We decided we’d check out the mall tomorrow when more of the stores were open. We chilled in our rooms for a bit before calling it a night. It had been a long couple of days.