Deb and I are in Cape Town, South Africa after a pretty ridiculous two days of travel. We got in yesterday at about 7am after a 12 hour flight from London. This after a 7 hour lay-over in Heathrow. After a 6.5 hour flight from Toronto.
After a few hours of that, things started to look kind of like this:
Deb and I made a bit of a game of following all the various pieces of supporting vehicles around the airport through the windows. We had particular fun at keeping track of the “shoe” vehicles. Specialized trucks built to capture the front wheel of airliners and push them out of their berths. If you’re ever at Heathrow, send a shout out to number 109. He was totally my favorite.
I can’t sleep on airplanes. Never really been able to. I’m really envious of people who can. It’s not like I can get a lot done on an airplane other than some extra reading though after being awake for a total of about 40 hours, words on “pages” stop making a lot of sense.
On these flights, I read a couple of unmentionable books about street photography I downloaded for free in iBooks, a good chunk of Game of Thrones book 3 and most of Micheal Freeman’s, decent The Photographer’s Eye.
My time might have been put to better use reading up on South Africa, though my usual plan of attack of just winging it should be fine, right?
The cab ride to our hotel was very educational. We got a pretty good overview of the geo-political situation in the country from our driver Solly. He also gave us a swell tour of Cape Town along the way from the airport to our hotel. In another day, I am going to take a crack at driving.
Some interesting personal achievements on this trip:
- 3 continents in 2 days
- 40 hours without sleep!
- flown over an entire continent from north to south
- crossed the equator
- 3rd continent