During a leisurely breakfast at the Intercontinental’s Quills restaurant at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, an SMS arrives from Qantas that QF64 has been delayed by 70 minutes. That’s okay, I can still make my 6pm flight from Sydney to Melbourne.
Another SMS from Qantas arrives an hour later – QF64 has been delay to 21:20, arriving in Sydney at 17:30. That’s not okay as it is impossible to get from the International Terminal to Domestic in that timeframe. I end up calling the Qantas Johannesburg office, who can only change my reward business class flight from Sydney to Melbourne from 18:00 to 22:05. I’ll take the ticket and negotiate an earlier flight once I get to Sydney.
In the meantime, there are few hours to kill in Johannesburg between brunch and a 5pm extended checkout at the hotel. The Gautrain is a safe if relatively expensive way to get to and from the airport and Sandton, with a return fare working out to be about $30. This seems to be to discourage people who are not flying from travelling to the airport. There is a large and visible police presence on the train platforms, at the entrances, and there are mounted police on patrol outside Sandton station. The mounted police need to invest in some tail bags for their horses, as it is quite evident where they have been patrolling.
Sandton City is your typical large shopping mall, attached to the Intercontinental Hotel at Sandton. It’s only moderately busy, and there are some very bored shop assistants with not much to do. All of the high end boutiques have visible external security personnel, and there must be a problem with shoplifting at some of the ‘pop up’ stores in the centre of the walkways, as one of the sunglass retailers is having an animated discussion with the mall security about protecting their merchandise. I discovered this mall on a previous trip when I was searching for a camera shop that might sell the hood for (at the time) my Canon 100-400 lens.
Johannesburg is a very un-photogenic city, and I’ve managed to take exactly 0 photos today. That’s a problem for the feature image for the blog, so in memory of Sudan the last male northern white rhino that died this week, the feature image is a maternal group of black rhinos from a previous trip to South Africa.
Wandering around the mall is just form of exercise, and after hitting 10,000 steps it’s time to take the train back to the airport, and check out of the hotel.
There haven’t been any further delays to QF64, and everyone including a rugby team returning home are on board ready for take-over by 9pm. We are a little late departing, but the captain informs us that the flight time is going to be a very quick 10 hours 45 minutes, which will have us arriving in Sydney at just after 5pm.
The captain is as good as his word, and we arrive in Sydney just after 5pm. That means a 5 hour wait until my domestic flight, but ‘Michael’ at the Domestic transfer desk manages to rebook my onto the 7pm flight, retaining my business class seat. Love you Qantas! That’s it for this trip, it’s been a busy month, effectively travelling around the world by plane across two oceans, and by ship across another!
