I've said it before, but again I want to apologise for not giving any detailed blog updates since I left. The last week has been very busy, but at last I have some time to spare.
I'll start by telling you a little about my flight to Oxford. I've already posted some of the photos, so here's the "story" that goes along with it.
On Wed 21 Sept, my dad and I left Durban airport just after 6 pm. Aunty Margie, my mum and Keith went with us to the airport. We had farewell beverages at Milky Lane (my last Milky Lane for a while), and then checked in to international departures. For some reason, we were sent to the Business Class aisle, so we got "Business Class" labels on our hand-luggage even though we didn't fly business class. The international departures section of the airport was very disappointing. It has exactly one duty-free shop with curios, perfumes and alcohol, a Fego coffee shop and some bar thing. That was all.
Dad and I had croissants at the Fego and then made our way down to the waiting area. We finally got to see the ever elusive UShaka International runway :-P
Dad and I were seated on the left two of the four middle aisle seats. Not the best spot, but it could have been worse. There wasn't much to see, as it was already dark - just some runway lights. The TV screens on the back of the seats in front of us, showed a map with our location.
One of the most exciting things was watching the little plane on the screen move up along Africa. We would also get periodic updates of the altitude, outside temperature and speed of the plane (which were almost constant when once we reached a certain height). For some odd reason, I hadn't thought that we'd stick to the African coast, but of course it makes sense that we did. We flew over Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia. Somalia seemed to take forever to cross. Somewhere over Somalia or just before (at about 8.30, which was very late for me) we were brought dinner. It was a relatively good (small-scale) three course meal with a fish starter, a choice of mains, a cake for pudding and cheese and biscuits. Once we crossed out into the gulf of Akbar, I ceased to follow the map and tried to get some sleep.
One important lesson I learnt from my flight: If you are a chronic insomniac flying for 20 hours - don't make the first leg of your journey overnight. You will not get any sleep.
I tried listening to some music on my cellphone and even listening to radio, but I couldn't drift off. While in theory it was possible to recline one's seat, you couldn't do it without landing on top of the person behind you. I usually fall asleep on my side, but there wasn't leg room for turning, so I had to lie in the upright position.
Some of you will remember that I ha had a bad throat before I left. Well I was still a little fluey on the day of the flight so we went to ask a chemist (pharmacist) for advice on what I should do so my ears didn't hurt to much from the pressure changes. He advised me to take Actifed. It worked well - so well in fact that it not only cleared my ears, but dried up my nose - too much. When you're in an aeroplane at however many thousand metres with an air-conditioner at full blast, you really don't want an overly dry nose. I've experienced a similar thing on my two visits to Jo'burg. I usually find a damp facecloth over my nose and eyes helps. Needless to say, this added to my inability to sleep, and I didn't have a facecloth in my hand luggage.
Eventually, at 1 am (South African time) we were "woken up" (i.e. the internal lights came back on) for breakfast. Why they felt we needed breakfast at that time of the morning, I'm still not sure. We had only had dinner 5 hours before and it was 2 am in the current time zone. Breakfast was, however, a pretty good continental spread and since it gave me something to occupy my time, I ate some of it (including another croissant).
At some point - this latter part of the flight blurs in my memory a little, I saw someone nearby watching Thomas the Tank Engine on their TV screen. I haven't seen Thomas on TV for I don't know how long, so I switched to the kiddies' channel. I actually think I recognised the story from the books we have. It was about Gordon getting stuck in the snow. Rather apt since it was -40 degrees Celsius outside the plane. I also figured out that if I wet one of the paper towels for hand-drying, I could put it over my face and it helped my nose feel less dry. They were fairly firm sheets of paper and didn't disintegrate when you wet them. I'm not sure what everyone thought of me lying there with a wet paper towel over my nose, but I was passed caring.
At around 3 am South African time (5 am Dubai time) we began our landing. It was starting to get light so there was actually a little more of the runway to be seen.
The Dubai airport is very nice. It is similar to Durban's, in its long shiny passages, but far bigger and the section we were in had much better shops.
We had four hours before our next flight so we wandered around. The first shop we came to was a curio shop. It was the first time in my life I had seen a curio shop that wasn't (Southern) African, so it was quite exciting to see souvenirs other than the Big 5 and related African things. We can be grateful that we have the Big 5 in Africa (elephant, lion, leopard, buffalo and rhino) plus other animals like the zebra, giraffe and various kinds of buck. In Dubai, apparently, they only have camels. So the entire shop was full of camel-goodies in all sorts of shapes and sizes. For some variation there were also a few pack-donkey souvenirs. And then there were lots of pictures of their more famous buildings. It made for an interesting browse. The rest of the shops weren't so exciting. Lots of perfume, tobacco, chocolate and other expensive goods. We got quite a nice view of the city from a distance and even got to see the tallest building in the world. It was really hazy and far away, though, so it doesn't show up on any of our photographs.
We also realised we had no idea what the Dubai exchange-rate/currency conversion was. We went to an exchange desk and discovered it was roughly R2 to one of the Emirates currency (the name of which has escaped my mind). We used my dad's travel card to buy some post cards and tried to find somewhere for a second breakfast (now that it was a reasonable hour). We weren't very hungry so we went to a coffee shop where my dad had tea and I had coffee. I only recently started drinking coffee and I take it very weak so I knew it was a risk getting it there, but I had gone an entire night without sleep. I ordered a latte and asked them to make it even weaker than usual. I wondered if people in Dubai even know what weak coffee is. Somehow, I was able to drink it and actually began to enjoy it towards the end (I had poured in a lot of sugar). So I can say, at least, that I've drunk coffee in an Arab country.
The second flight would have been quite enjoyable if I wasn't so tired. Now that it was day time, I could watch the images from the aeroplane's cameras on my screen in addition to the computer generated map. We were now sitting in the middle two of the middle aisle seats so there was no chance of seeing out the windows. We spent quite some time flying over Iraq. It looked so pretty from the air, you would never guess its war-torn state. At one stage there was a really massive river/body of water in sight. I'm fairly sure it was the Tigris. It makes me kind of excited to say I've flown over the Tigris.
I should probably point out that the on-screen map only gave names of towns and not countries so we had to work out which country we were over. Thankfully my dad is good at knowing that sort of thing. I think after Iraq we flew over Syria (possibly via Iran) and then Turkey. We crossed into Europe over the Black Sea (I can't remember, for all my Narnian friends, if we also saw the Caspian Sea before that). Interestingly, when we got to the Black Sea, we flew over water in preference to flying over (coastal) land as had been the practice.
I tried sleeping again at various points, but to no avail. My nose was still dry and I now had a permanent wet cloth over it. I think the girl next to me must have thought me really odd between that and my excited comments to my dad about the places we were flying over. She didn't say a single word to me the entire trip. After lunch, another cooked meal, (I wasn't really hungry, but I ate the breadrolls and biscuit), I saw the above-mentioned girl watching The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe on her screen. This plane had a fancier system than the first and allowed you to pick a movie and watch it in your own time (the first plane had scheduled programmes). I thought I'd watch it too, but when I saw Prince Caspian was also an option, I chose it instead.
I haven't seen it since it came out in the cinemas and it is generally disapproved of by Narnian fans, so I wanted to see if it was really as bad as I've come to remember. At the same time, I was so tired so I thought it might even help me sleep. To begin with, I listened to the soundtrack with my eyes closed. It was an interesting experience listening to, rather than actually watching, the film.
(A random funny bit of information which TLCers might enjoy - VDT was also one of the films available and I'd have watched it if I hadn't seen it recently, plus it's the only one I have on DVD. The funny part was that all the films were on the list of "Disney Movies" available despite the fact that Disney did not make the third Narnia film.)
I didn't see the whole thing because I did something wrong trying to pause the film and my TV crashed. One of the attendants restarted the system for me and I fast-forwarded it to where I thought I was. Only after the credits came up did I notice that I'd missed the most important part of the film - the dual between Miraz and Peter. The lack of sleep was clearly catching up to me.
We were well into Western Europe now, so I gave up on the film-watching and went back to watching the aeroplane's camera. Europe was a lot cloudier than the Middle East, but some parts I did see were very pretty. Eventually we crossed the channel and I got my first sight of England :-)
England was very pretty from the air and I started to get excited for the first time. We seemed to take forever to land, and circled round many times before descending towards the airport.
Heathrow was clearly a much older airport than Durban and Dubai. It lacked the shiny "newness" of the other two. I didn't get to see too much of it though. We were booked through border control, collected our luggage and then made our way to the bus terminal. On the way I saw a SIM card vending machine so I had a look at the options. Vodaphone had an option which gives you 60 free international minutes so I got it. I didn't realise, however, that I had to top up with airtime separately.
We were spending the first night with a friend of my mum's in Hungerford so we booked a combined bus-ride to Reading followed by a train-ride to Hungerford. At Reading station I bought some airtime so I could actually phone the lady we would be staying with.
I felt like we'd been running non-stop so it was such a relief when we finally arrived at her house. After a much-needed shower, supper and a phone-call to my mum, I went straight to bed. I slept so well that I didn't notice I was still wearing my earrings till I woke up the next morning.
We didn't sleep in too late the next morning because we still had to make the trip to Oxford. I was so relieved to be travelling by car. I don't think I'll ever complain about making a long-distance trip by car again.
We arrived at Worcester college, Oxford some time after 12. I had just enough time to meet with the Graduate Assistant before she closed her office for the weekend. After unloading my stuff, we went to find my dad's accommodation and then had a late lunch at the Covered Market.
And there I will leave off my post for another one about my first week in Oxford which should hopefully follow shortly.
