We are about three hours from landing at Johannesburg. We have been in the air or in an airport for more than 24 hours and miraculously I have slept for a few hours and am remarkably refreshed. This may be because thanks to my careful planning, Tom and I each have had three seats to ourselves—enough room to almost lie down flat. Sleeping sitting up is not an option, for me at least, all though Tom could probably sleep standing up. When we get to Johannesburg we have a short layover and then fly to our first destination, Cape Town.
The long leg of this journey has been broken into two parts: Atlanta to Dakar, Senegal, and from there to Johannesburg. We sat on the ground for more than an hour in Dakar to drop a few people off, to refuel and to pick up a new crew, but in the meantime a team of security types came in and looked for contraband. How it could have gotten through security and onto the plane in the first place is a mystery to me but the search was quite thorough. A group of men in bright red jackets took each of the seats apart and ran their gloved hands under and behind the cushions. They checked the seat pockets and the overhead bins and made sure that each item could be linked to an actual passenger. According to one of the passengers in the know, they never find anything but they persist in looking anyway. Once we were in the air again, a crew member announced that the cabins would be sprayed with insecticide—a South African law that applies to all aircraft coming into the country. I suppose we should be reassured by these precautions, but I am vaguely uneasy. This never happened in Asia.
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