Back in Southern Africa: Part 1

I'm back in Namibia and will be here through next Thursday. The trip to get here was nothing short of hellish but what's life without a detour or two? My trip started off at Ronald Reagan (that should have been an omen in itself!) National Airport in Washington, D.C. where I got stuck/held captive on the runway for 4 hours in a tiny plane (there is a whole other story here but I will spare you the egregious details) and got into New York's JFK two hours after my flight to South Africa had left. Moral of the story: NEVER fly Delta!!!! Well, I ended up stranded in NYC and called one of my favorite gal pals in Manhattan and asked her if I could crash with her for the evening. She readily agreed (thank God...since an average motel near the airport was around$200/night!!!!!) and I met her at the Underground Lounge (a bar near 107th and West End) after a hegira of a cab ride (with a very chatty Senegalese cabby). Wow, the bar was an interesting experience.....aside from drinking too much and paying the price for it the next morning (not pretty....sorry Jessica!!!)...the bar was full of highly educated/highly paid (I guess you would have to be!) coke heads! I went to use the bathroom and the lady who came out of it (who I had been introduced to earlier in the evening) was flying in addition to several other folks that I met. All of them were just a bit too fascinated by my life, way too jittery, and had pupils the size of Montana....hmmmm.

The next day I managed (after worshipping the porcelain god, taking a hot shower and putting my grubby clothes back on -my bags were located somewhere on the planet) to drag my ass to the airport (via a very enlightening ride with a Sikh cabby who tried to guide me to the "righteous path" with some master Yogi in New Mexico....yeah, sure) and get on the South African Airways flight to Joburg - a 17 hour fun fest that was packed like a can of mainly Afrikaans-speaking and slightly inebriated sardines (SA had just won the Rugby World Cup before we got on the plane and the bars at JFK had been doing a brisk trade). The sad part is that out of the 21 passengers who missed the flight from the night before due to poor weather and domestic connections only 9 of us were able to get on the flight. Lucky for me, I bitched enough to Delta the night before that the one decent thing they did was confirm me on the next day's flight. Everyone else was on stand by....not fun. Eventually, after a brief stop in Dakar, Senegal, we all managed to make it to South Africa in various comatose states of rugby hangover and smelliness. I had missed my flight to Namibia and the next available flight was in the morning so I found a hotel near the airport and crashed. I managed to get on the Air Namibia flight the next morning with no hassles (South African Airways and Air Namibia should send customer service consultants to Delta or for that matter almost all of the American flag carriers!). I got to my lodging in Windhoek a few hours later where I promptly dropped my bags and ran out the door to my USAID meeting wearing sweats (I didn't get my baggage until that morning and I was wearing a pair of sweats I purchased at JFK...hey, at least they were DKNY sweats....very classy). C'est l'Afrique!