Ho, hum, what happened here? I thought I had sent off a post about landing in Johannesburg but where is it? Then this morning before coming to the library, I wrote one introducing y'all to our first trip into the African back lands---and it vanished! Well, it's time to hustle out another one!
Here goes!! Maybe I'll even get two written!
As the plane loses altitude and the African landscape rolls out before us, I am enjoying a very African looking sunrise. If you ask me why it looked more African than any other sunrise I can only say because the colors so closely resembled one in a picture I checked out in my online research.
After landing in Johannesburg we had to (guess what?!) go through customs again. There weren't as many blacks as you might have expected but many that I thought had a distinctly Africaan (Dutch?) look. Not that that made them much easier to understand.
There was a bewildering array of exotic looking souvenirs that we scurried past on our way to our next flight.
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| As we hurried through the airport the gift shops were like a kaledoscopic blur |
The plane that took us to Tate was the smallest I've been on in in a long, long time. I had an opportunity to chat with a man who regularly flew back and forth between Mozambique and South Africa because he worked in the recently developing coal mines.
Now I was sorry for trying to protect my son's brand new computer by squeezing it into a suitcase without completely removing the box. Those customs officers quickly got wise to the fact that it was a Brand New Laptop and wanted to levy a seriously hefty duty tax on it. With all the dilly-dallying and delays our son and the missionary finally were able to get through and help with the language problem. I understand that they wanted to charge us the equivalent of a week, or was it a month's wages for that tiny piece of wires and, and well whatever. There was a woman there that was willing to pay 200 Metcash for that slim, sleek looking piece of technology, but 'we' swallowed our ire ad paid the duty. I looked and listened carefully, but never once heard any remonstrance that I should have packed the laptop differently. Thank you!
The temperature was pleasantly comfortable when we landed, and would you believe we didn't hit a serious heat wave until we got back home to northern Alberta?
