Day 3
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Cape Town to Johannesburg
| Morning | Muffins and an orange at Sweet Orange. |
|---|---|
| Midday | Uber to Cape Town International. |
| 13:10 | FlySafair FA295. Seats 4A and 4C. |
| 15:15 | Johannesburg. |
| Evening | An airport lodge. An alarm set for six. |
There are no photographs of this day. I looked, Bonnie looked, and there is nothing. What we have instead is the paperwork.
What the Paperwork Says
The morning was breakfast at Sweet Orange: small muffins, fruit, a cookie, coffee. I had a muffin and an orange, which felt like the correct thing to eat in a pink guest house named Sweet Orange. Then we put the twelve and a half kilos back in the bags, took an Uber out to the airport, and left the city.
I booked that flight in March, three months out, and the receipt is a small comedy of its own. Two air fares: R2,302. Then: two checked bags, free. Two SMS confirmations, R15.66. Two travel insurances, R55.66. Two bag insurances, R22.60. Two prebooked front seats, R86.96. Two priority boardings, R86.96. Total, everything in, for both of us: R3,264.62. Somewhere around a hundred and eighty dollars to cross a country.
The Hinge
This is the day the trip turns over, and it does it in an airport. Everything before it was a city: restaurants, a promenade, pavement, a mountain you look at from the road. Everything after it is animals. The thing in between is two hours in a narrow seat above the Karoo, a bed near a runway, and an alarm set for something inhuman. We stayed at the Airport Tower Lodge — 29 Porto Amelia Avenue, Bonaero Park, Kempton Park — close to the airport and yet somehow in the middle of nowhere, a quiet place with nothing much around it. And that address is worth a second look, because it is also printed on the safari voucher, under Pickup Point. The two documents agree. The van was not coming to fetch us from somewhere; it was coming to the door we were already standing behind. There was nothing left to arrange. Everything that had to be booked had been booked, months ago, from a desk in Virginia, and now all that remained was to sleep and be downstairs at seven. There was nowhere to walk to for dinner, so you ordered it and the staff went out and fetched it and brought it back to the little dining room, where we ate very late. It was a great deal of food — big plates, and a pizza besides — and we ate all of it. Then we went to bed early. That is very nearly the whole of a day that no camera saw.