Day 22 –Johannesburg to Cape Town

Our flights out were not until around 6 PM, so we had a leisurely day. We got ready, repacked, had breakfast and took off around 11 AM. I wanted to scope out some things before we left, so we headed off to Benmore Gardens and Bryanston. In the latter we stopped and had a marvelous Indian lunch at a place where our favorite Indonesian restaurant used to be, the Oude Batavia.

Afterwards we went by the Sandton Medical Clinic where Greg was born and took some photos before heading down to Rosebank and the Wanderer’s Club. From there we followed Rivonia Weg (Road) up to the NI and got on. Rivonia used to be upscale (once called the Mink and Manure Belt because of all the rich homes and horse estates), but had slowly settled into being somewhat seemly with bars and strip joints. The landed folk had moved further north to walled communities around golf courses.

From there we headed to the airport and arrived right at 4 PM, just the correct amount of time to get Susan checked into her flight back home and off through passport control. It was a sad and tearful parting, but she was a trooper and kept on going. Only I knew that she would find the big curio shop inside where she was to buy a guinea fowl do-dad, so there was method to her madness!

Reese and I had another hour and a half, so we found a local version of Starbucks (Mugg and Bean) where we plopped down and used the free WIFI connection. We soon found out that it was only available for free for a short time, so within about 30 minutes we were off again to go through security and onto our gate. While there we met a young Texas girl from Galveston who had graduated from Stanford and was a Rhodes scholar in England. She was in South Africa working on an internship in economic development, so we had a nice talk with her before leaving.

We flew a low cost airline similar to Southwest in the US called Kulula Airlines. School started on Monday and this was Friday evening, so the flight was full of students heading back to school. The upscale vacation was over and Reese and I were getting into our new roles as students, so it was quite fitting. Reese was a bit upset that we had to pay for soft drinks and food for the first time.

In the end, we arrived into Cape Town on time and with no problems. Our luggage was there waiting for us, and so we got a cart, loaded it up and went outside to meet our ride. We had rented a flat through Reese’s school in Somerset West, so the owner, a German citizen named Franz Popoff, met us and took us to our new home. It was a mother-in-law suite off the garage from the main house. It was cold and late and so we turned on a propane space heater and fell asleep in our individual bedrooms, thoroughly exhausted and a bit overwhelmed by the reality of finally being in the place where we were to stay for the coming month(s).