Living in Lesotho: Airport ponderin's and Cape Town photos

One day, three airports, two times at two of them, one time at the last.

For whatever reason, I wasn’t given the (supposedly) requisite 90, 30, or 14 days on my visa when leaving Lesotho for my much anticipated *treat yoself* trip to Cape Town, and the home affairs office that would supposedly extend the visa once I got to Cape Town was closed, and wouldn’t process my request within the week. So, I gratefully accepted my moms offer to pay for the necessary plane tickets in order to re-enter/exit Lesotho/South Africa and get a longer stay in South Africa, thus avoiding two more 15 hour bus rides and meeting her in Cape Town as we had planned.

You can gage a lot about a city or country from its airport, I’ve decided.

I gazed at the Cape Town one through bleary early morning eyes the first time at 5:30 AM, but noticed the second time that day that the same relaxed yet sophisticated cross-cultural feel that permeates this city I’ve come to like so much in the time span of a week, also carries through to the airport.

O.R. Tambo International airport in Johannesburg is fast, shiny, sophisticated, large, winding and packed with all manner of shops and treats one could ever want. Ultra cool and busy, just as Joburg is. Do you see a pattern here?

And Lesotho, dear provincial home of mine for over a year, has a near empty two storied box of an airport, with only a seating area situated near a bar and a nice man with whom I chatted to for a bit that makes fish and chips. No atm. No stores. No toilet paper in the single open bathroom (the other two were locked for the forseeable future because of water shortages). I was here once before, last October, but it was upon my arrival to Lesotho and I of course was too wracked with nerves, excitement and sleep deprivation to take in the details. Knowing nothing about the place I would come to call home, I couldn’t yet draw these comparisons.

But now I can. Here I witnessed an interaction that would have never occurred in Joburg, Cape Town or damn near anywhere in the United States with a sizeable amount of traffic:

There were only six people boarding my flight back to Joburg, and the man overseeing the miniscule line at the security check was personable and relaxed, jolly and skinny, and dressed entirely in varying shades of pink. No official uniform or false fronts about the seriousness of his job. When the woman behind me put her bag through the machine, it beeped. “Excuse me, may I just please have a look in your bag?”, he asks her unhurriedly. “Sure”, she replies. “What’s the problem?” “I just see one thing that I don’t like…it looks perhaps like a spoon or some such thing.” “Oh, yeah”, she replies, and retrieves it from the depths of her overstuffed shoulder bag. Afterwards, a pleasant conversation ensues about why she would be carrying a spoon in her bag at all. “I was just confused because I see a spoon but no food”, the man explains, smiling. “Oh it’s like, in case I get a yogurt, or something”, she replies good-naturedly. “Oh yes then, fine fine”. And her security check, which could have just as easily been a friendly conversation with a stranger on the street, was finished.

In as much as you really can’t claim to have been to a place if you’ve only hung out in the airport, you also can’t claim all airports to be exactly the same. Oh, the beautiful nuances of life that you notice when people at the border fuck you over.

Khotso, and happy 2016!

By the way,

Cape town was amazing.