Slingshot

Famous.  Last.  Words.

The flight back from Namibia was supposed to leave at 20:25 on Friday, which would have had us flying through the night and arriving in Paris some time in the morning.  But… a little experience goes a long way, once bitten twice shy and all that… with the benefit of our previous experience with this airline, we called the airport to see if the flight would be taking off on time.

It wasn’t.

The flight was scheduled to arrive at 01h45, offload passengers, and “if all goes well” take off again around 03h00.  6 hours and 15 minutes late.

I reacted in the only manner that seemed appropriate.  I went to the hotel bar and ordered a beer.

Tuesday’s delay – when we had an overnight stay in Frankfurt inflicted upon us – had never been caught up by the airline, and the plane had continued flying seriously overdue all week rather than cancel a couple of flights and refund a couple of hundred passengers.

As it happens, our tickets were incorrectly entered into the airline booking system, so we had a nice 20-minute wait as an exhausted and frustrated airline employee tapped manically away at a terminal that had probably been installed sometime in the 1970s.  Finally equipped with boarding passes, we went through customs and sat in the business lounge, where a rather large man had passed out on one of the couches and was snoring so loud I thought my beer glass was going to shatter.

Thankfully, that was the last of our problems, and once on the plane, it left at the new time of 03h00 for Frankfurt, where we arrived in one piece (although the landing was more like a handbrake turn than a gentle touchdown).  Once in Germany, everything worked with predictable efficiency and we were soon on a plane to Paris.

We decided to continue to Namibia despite the horror of the trip so far.  There were meetings we needed to have and things we needed to do.  We telephoned every Air Namibia number we could find and worked out the departure gate, then talked our way through security despite not having boarding passes.  Then waited in a really tiny lounge for hours before getting to the gate where a bunch of very haggard-looking passengers were in various states of disarray.

When the crew arrived, some of the passengers applauded.  I have yet to figure this out, and have decided to put it down to confused, incoherent exhaustion.  These individuals are part of the company that had cost some 200 people 13 hours of their lives.  That’s over half a year of waking life.  And they were applauded as they arrived.  I have no explanation.

We got on the plane, into the same seat as the day before, and flew to Windhoek.  Upon arrival, I did my usual arrival routine : prepare well in advance, leave the aircraft like a bullet from a gun, and be the first in line at customs.  It was 1am, and I had a slightly surreal conversation with the female immigration agent.

You come to Namibia often?

Yes, actually…

You always come for negotiations?

Yes…

You should get a visa.

I thought getting temporary stay stamps was Ok…

It is, but your passport is going to run out of pages if you carry on like this.

The driver who was waiting for us in the arrivals area was also waiting for another 6 people who were there for a convention of some description.  I didn’t know we would have to wait for anyone else, and they clearly didn’t have the same aircraft dismount technique as I did, so I was going to have to wait for ages as they queued and cleared customs.  After some consultation with my travelling companion, we told the driver to find us someone else who could leave immediately.

Windhoek airport isn’t in Windhoek.  The area is mountainous and you have to drive 40 minutes out of the city before you get somewhere flat enough to build an airport.  So we had a 40 minute drive in.  We got to the hotel a little past 2 am.

The fellow at check-in was borderline comatose.  It took him at least 2 minutes to copy my credit card number down.  We did manage to talk him into reopening the bar to serve us a couple of beers so we could deal with a very intense need to unwind.  The beers were very good.  African countries in general make great lager.

We made it to our rooms… I was too tired to figure out that the reason the air conditioning remote wasn’t working was that the batteries in it were back-to-front, so I slept in the heat, and four hours later, I was getting ready for breakfast.

We’re leaving tomorrow…. On Air Namibia again… And if we’re lucky, the flight will take off.  If we’re really lucky, it will take off at a time that somewhat resembles the stated departure time.  This will certainly not have been either the most productive, or the most enjoyable journey of my travelling career…

An Air Namibia aircraft actually flying!

This week was quite important.  I had spent much of last week and the beginning of this week preparing a presentation for some fairly important individuals in Namibia.  Everything was organised, the meeting had been arranged (with considerable difficulty), the people were going to be present and all we had to do was show up and deliver the presentation.

In other news: My company likes us to save cost where possible, and therefore the travel policy states that we must take the cheaper of two different travel alternatives if the time difference between the two is within certain limits.  This sounds reasonable, but in this case it meant that instead of flying to South Africa on Air France and then into Namibia on South African Airways, we flew to Frankfurt on Lufthansa and then planned to fly to Namibia on Air Namibia.

As mistakes go, this one was a classic.  “Air Namibia”.  The clue was in the name.

First, the transfer time in Frankfurt was only 60 minutes and our Lufthansa flight landed 15 minutes late, then upon landing we discovered that they had moved our Air Namibia flight to the far side of the other terminal and so we had to cross the entirety of Frankfurt Airport – which, by the way, is fairly huge.

After rushing through two security checkpoints and performing marathon-like feats of endurace with our luggage in tow, we arrived (slightly out of breath) at the Air Namibia gate in good time for the flight.  We checked in, went through to the aircraft and sat down.

After a few minutes, the doors closed, we pushed back and the plane started to make its way to the runway.  Then it stopped in the middle of the tarmac and we waited 10 minutes before the captain made an annoucement.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the captain speaking.  Unfortunately, we have a small problem with one of the engines, and we are going to park just short of the runway for two minutes, while some of our engineers take a look.  We should be on our way shortly.

This was at 22h30.

The aircraft duly parked, the engines shut down, and cars started driving around us in a ballet clearly intended to calm the aircraft’s nerves down.  Yellow-jacketed individuals climbed into the cockpit to chat with the pilots and the crew milled around pointlessly.  After about 45 minutes, the engineers left, the stairway pulled away, the various vehicles beat a strategic withdrawal to a minimum safe distance and we felt the engines power up.

Then the engines powered down again.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it appears that our problem is not yet fixed, ah, so we will be getting the engineers back on board to see if they can take another look at the problem.

Vehicles reappeared, the stairwell approached again, yellow jackets wandered around the front of the aircraft.  Much head-scratching occurred.  45 more minutes passed.

Then four buses pulled up next to the aircraft.

Ah… Ladies and Gentlemen… it appears that our engine problem is more serious than we originally thought, and we are therefore going to ask you all to leave the aircraft and return to the terminal.  We will fix the aircraft overnight and fly you to Namibia tomorrow morning.  Safety first.

Great.

A large group of lost-looking people ended up in Terminal 2, looking confused and frustrated, tired and pissed off, and waiting to be told what to do.  We were gradually herded towards the exit where a lady had some pieces of paper in her hand.  We listened intently…

Ah.  So.  Ah.  The aircraft has a technical fault and we will have to fly you tomorrow.  We will put you in hotels.  Ah.  But.  Ah.  There is a commercial fair in Frankfurt at the moment and all the hotels are fully booked.  Ah.  So you will be taken in buses to a hotel one hundred and thirty kilometers away where we have found sufficient rooms for everyone.

The Germans in the crowd laughed out loud.  I think they thought it was a joke.

We were on the phone to American Express Travel Services in under three-and-a-half seconds, asking them to find us rooms in an airport hotel.  “Just try them all, one of them is bound to have a couple of cancellations.”  We stayed at possibly the world’s most overpriced Holiday Inn, to which we were driven by a North African taxi driver of volatile temperament at speeds that certainly rivalled the Air Namibia flight.

I am now in Frankfurt airport again, trying to figure out if there’s any point in continuing the journey to Namibia, or if we get a local representative to make the presentation and just wander back to Paris.

Namibian Desert Landscape – from Panoramio

I was in Namibia a couple of weeks ago and was served the most awesome steak on a South African Airlines flight from Johannesburg to Windhoek.  How do you get awesome steak on a flight?  In-between the second and third mouthful, I looked across the aisle to my right to see if the gentleman sitting in the window seat over there was having the same experience I was.  We looked at each other in amazement, as if to say, “I know… What the hell?”.

Namibia was interesting.  Instead of getting driven to Swakopmund as I usually do, I was given the keys by the employee that has previously held the ungrateful task of ferrying me across the desert with the excuse that he had VAT returns to be getting on with, and I could please drive myself this time thank you very much.

Driving across the desert isn’t as romantic as it sounds.  There’s a very modern tarmac road laid down and you can drive very fast – although I had to do a couple of interesting manoeuvers to avoid some baboons who wanted to play chicken.  The scenery is wonderful though – Namibia is amazing in this way.  You start amid heavyish greenery and trees, and as you drive west, the vegtetation becomes gradually more sparse.  Soon you’re driving through brush and scrubland, and then a little under an hour away from the coast, it turns into real desert.  Then you get to Swakopmund and the desert throws itself into the Atlantic ocean.  Cool.

Modern technology is amazing.  Given the virtual office, GPRS and wireless networks, long-life batteries and lightweight laptops, you can be absolutely anywhere in the world and your equipment can still let you down.  There is nowhere in the world safe from malfunction, because you carry the means of your frustration with you.  Long ago, you needed to be in the office for something technological to go wrong, but now, it can happen to you anywhere.  My computer picked my trip to Namibia to die on me.  It didn’t just die though, that would have been far too simple.  Instead it started failing on an irregular and unpredictable basis.  It would work for three hours and then the power would cut just when you had finally cracked a really difficult clause in a contract, or finally sorted the spreadsheet calculation that just wouldn’t spit out the right number.  Suddenly, the screen goes black, and you find yourself hitting the space bar as though it was going to bring back the information that just disappeared in a puff of dissipating electrons.

Afterwards, when you’d try to restart the computer, it would crash every 11 minutes.  Then, just before you go to bed at some intolerable hour of the morning, it starts working perfectly, and you don’t dare stop working now because for all you know it won’t start again for 3 days, so you just have to start working through the two hundred urgent emails you received in case this is your last chance this week.  You go to bed at four, and the next day, the computer works fine, but you don’t need it any more and you can’t see straight anyway.

Woe is me.  I have just missed the rapid RER to the center of Paris (rapid in this context is a purely relative measure) and am now stuck on the slow version of the same.  The reason I missed it (by about 15 seconds) was that there were 3 or 4 people waiting for each of the RER ticket terminals in the Charles de Gaulle Airport RER station, and the terminals are unbelievably slow to operate.  Literally: Mountains have been known to grow faster than one of these terminals is capable of distributing a ticket.

Earlier on, I was in Heathrow airport, about to return from a weekend in London, in the bright and shiny new terminal 5.  The largest store in terminal 5 is the Harrods-replica that takes up the entire center of the building.  I went to look at the luggage for sale – in particular the rolling cases – and saw one that looked half-decent from a distance.  There were too many pockets on it, but that wasn’t the real problem.  It was made of that shiny leather that you know is going to get scratched to death the first time some luggage handler manhandles it that one time you’re forced to check it into the hold, because it contains a bottle of your favourite vodka (Russian Standard Imperial, if you’re feeling generous and you happen to be passing through Moscow) and you’re not allowed to take your bag onto the plane with you because they’re afraid the liquid is actually an explosive (who told?).

Anyway, the real problem with the rolling case in question, was that it cost 950 pounds.  Now I know what you’re thinking… What’s a pound worth these days anyway, right?  Hardly more than a US dollar… But seriously, it’s a leather box with wheels and a couple of zippers.  While I’m willing to be convinced that the luggage may be of superior quality and therefore worth more than the usual 120 euros, it’s going to have to be hand-made by naked nymphs from a tropical island paradise, and they’re going to have to be packed inside it, in order for it to command that sort of financial respect.  I left luggageless.

And therein lies the problem with terminal 5.  Lots of shops, and not a single thing to buy.  Everything there is extortionate, and that’s after the discount they offer because it’s in an airport.  In a fit of pique, I decided to try my luck in the IT departments, but if you’re going to buy something for a paltry 15 pounds less than you can find it at home, you might as well buy it at home.  That way you can take it back when you discover it doesn’t work rather than wonder how you’re going to make it back to an airport in a faraway land so you can point out that the device you purchased some time ago appears to be a recycled toaster and not a dual core laptop notebook after all.

I made it to the vicinity of my gate and camped in a cafe where they served me a warm pint of Heineken, and I watched the screen.  It went from “Wait in Lounge” to “Boarding Rows 10 to 22″, and since I was in row 8, I waited in my seat like a good, obedient passenger.  After all, I was a two-minute walk away from the gate.  Then the screen changed directly to “Gate Closing” and they annouced my luggage was being offloaded.  Being a regular traveller, I reacted appropriately : I panicked, spilt my beer and ran across the airport like a 12 year old girl in pursuit of a boy band, but with a less full head of hair.  I made the flight with ample time to spare and sat in my seat doing breathing exercises until my neighbour arrived.

The flight was one of those up-and-down shorthaul affairs where they provide you with a funnel so you can get the wine down before they start their descent.  I had a window seat and the gentleman to my left had me crushed against the porthole in an involuntary impersonation of a cross between Dustin Hoffman in the Graduate and Sigourney Weaver in Alien.  By the time we landed, I thought they’d need forceps to get me out of my seat and the chicken and vegetable wrap they’d served was close to making a victory lap, having vanquished my digestive system.  Luckily the wine was sufficiently comparable to drain cleaner to dissolve everything in its path, but it was a near run thing.

I now understand why the Eurostar is four times the cost of an air ticket.