Johannesburg

As fourteen and a half hour flights go, the journey on South Africa Airways was as painless as long flights ever get. The very good South African wine is free, and abundant, in both business class and coach, which has the positive effect of putting most of the passengers to sleep for much of the journey. (It may not be entirely coincidental that this is the only airline I've encountered that explicitly prohibits sleeping on the floor of the aircraft, along with the usual warnings about smoking in the bathrooms and using unapproved electronic devices.)

When the cabin crew opened the window shades and started serving breakfast, we were over either Angola or Botswana and the sun was just coming up, blazing red over a land that as far as I could tell consisted of nothing but trees: sunrise over Africa. I was really here; I was really about to arrive in Africa.

Then we landed, and all of my poetic rhapsodies fizzled in the usual chores of queuing up for immigration and baggage claim and customs--airports, like happy families, are fundamentally all alike. What was different this time was that instead of getting money and finding a cab and handling everything myself, I was supposed to meet up with my tour group outside customs, and they were nowhere to be found. I wandered around for what felt like hours, dragging my luggage through crowds of Asian monks in brown robes, soldiers in berets and camouflage outfits in an odd purply blue, and tearful family reunions in Afrikaans, before finally sighting a familiar looking luggage tag on someone else's bag, presenting myself, and being claimed, like a missing suitcase.

After quick introductions, we were off to the hotel, where it turned out that all of the rooms were ready except mine, so while the rest of the group went off to shower and change, I sat on a couch in the lobby and read for an hour, until the tour director pulled some strings and suddenly I had a room after all.

And oh, did that bed look tempting! I certainly had earned a little nap, hadn't I?

But I was determined to stay awake until after dinner, so I took a shower and went for a walk instead. The hotel, the D'Oreale Grande, is part of a complex near the airport, with several hotels, a casino, shops and restaurants. And, as it turns out, walls and gates and guards; it's a little fortress which it's not safe to leave, so there's really nowhere to walk unless you want to circle the slot machines or the big ugly fountain with pseudo-classical statuary in front of the casino.

I went back to the hotel and found the lovely garden around the swimming pool in the photo above, and drank tea, and listened to the birds sing.

Which is when I finally felt that I was really in a different country, on a different continent. I'm hopeless at identifying birds by their calls, but these bird sounds were completely new and strange. Even the dove in the tree overhead, similar in appearance to a mourning dove but gray instead of brown, had a four-note call like American doves but in a completely different rhythm--a dove with a South African accent.



And it wasn't just the bird sounds that were different. There were a pair of what I later figured out were Hadeda ibises wandering around the lawns, exotic birds the size of a goose that definitely are not indigenous to Central Park.

This must be Africa. I'm in Africa.