Eastvaal District Municipality

We boarded our flight from Schiphol at 10:20am with no problems. This was the big one. 10 hours and 25 minutes and we weren’t looking forward to it.
Ellie had managed to book me a window seat and herself an aisle seat with a space in the middle but unfortunately the aircraft was completely full and she ended up moving up a seat to let a young black girl take the aisle seat. She was very nice and quite chatty to start off with but once we had taken off she fell straight to sleep and she slept like the dead not waking up even for food or drinks.
The first few hours passed unbelievably slow while I watched my tablet and Ellie watched documentaries on her phone and once our meal was served I managed to close my eyes and fell asleep.
I managed 2 straight hours until 2 gentlemen 5 seats away struck up a conversation for the rest of the aircraft to hear, in fact it was more of a shout than a conversation.
Our aircraft food was up to it’s normal awful standard, I had a vegetarian pasta which seemed to have completely dried out during the cooking process and the pasta had rehardened itself and Ellie had the chicken sausage and mash which had one persons daily salt allowance in just the sausage. Both were disgusting.
3/4 of the way into the flight we hit turbulence that was so bad the aircraft staff all sat on the floors in the aisle as they couldn’t get back to their seats, it was quite scary and even I started to feel ill. That lasted around 20 minutes.
Just as the flight was becoming really unbearable we stated to decend into Johannesburg and we finally arrived at 10:30pm South Africa time and we couldn’t get off the plane quick enough.
We sailed straight through customs and Ellie messaged our hotel for the night and the taxi driver was sent out. Then while I collected our one bag from the carousel, Ellie went and drew some cash out from the atm. Then we had to find our way frantically to parking lot 2 to the collection point as our driver only had 30 minutes of free waiting.
We found our driver Lawrence with just a few minutes to spare and we put our bags in the boot and then he tied the boot shut in typical South African fashion and then we climbed into the car where half the head lining was missing. Now I knew we were back.
Lawrence thought he was driving a rocket but we knew when he was slowing down thanks to the loud screeching coming from the brakes and within 20 minutes we were at our first stop for the night. The aerotropolis motel.
It was now 11:30pm and after locking ourselves in, I had a cold shower and then put the fans on. It was still 20°c at this time of night but we were both so tired and it didn’t take long for us to fall asleep.
Day one was done we are in South Africa.Read more