Monday, March 21, 2011

Trip to Pietermaritzburg

I have just spent a weekend with my family in Cape Town. And now I return to work in Pietermaritzburg - joining the ranks of many thousands of migrant workers in Southern Africa.

There is no direct flight to Pietermaritzburg, so I made the trip in two stages: first from Cape Town to Johannesburg; then from Johannesburg to Pmburg.

The first leg was uneventful - "Thank you for flying with us. You and the other 300 passengers are special to us, bla bla bla. " Then a 90 minute wait for the second leg. We went downstairs at the airport - all 28 of us. The bus took us out onto the runway - past the big jets of SAA, and the second hand jets of Kulula and 1Time, and past the smaller private jets, and then .... oh hell: propellers! There was a ladder leaning against the pilot's cockpit at a cleaner with bucket at squeegie cleaned the window. And another ladder for us passengers. We boarded a Jetstream 4100 Turboprop Airliner - top speed 500kmph.
We squeezed in and the air hostess/door guard/announcer/ got us comfortable. And she brought us drinks. And and she gave the hairy eyeball to a passenger twice her size who did not switch off his phone fast enough.

And so I am back at the Seminary.

Sent via my BlackBerry

1 comment:

Steven Jones said...

In my Nampak corporate days I was seconded to one of our branches in Pietermaritzburg for six weeks, but we were home for weekends. In Week One we flew from Johannesburg to Pietermaritzburg on one of those model aircraft you describe in this post (which we dubbed the "Vomit Comet") - the experience was instrumental in my decision to rather drive here for the remaining five weeks!