Nowhere Near Nairobi

It’s a funny sort of world when you realise that in order to be where you are, you could have stayed in your own bed another night and left for where you are today tomorrow.

Let me explain. I’m in Limbo, a sprawling wasteland also known as Gauteng [chaoteng] - the area around Johannesburg of Pretoria that looks a little bit like a piece of the American Midwest. I’m not supposed to be here. It’s all a horrible cock-up, involving hour-long delays, 40-minute transit times at Nairobi airports, and – yeah, you get the idea.

I’m on my way to Alexandria for a conference of African scientists – a big one, and I was looking forward to a leisurely day in Cairo before boarding the Nile-bank train for the Emperor’s city.

Alas, fate had other plans for me. What with the lack of flights actually connecting cities on this continent, it was either this dismal suburban guesthouse near the East Rand Mall near Johannesburg International or a night in Nairobi, risking more delays on my journey.

I’m instead catching the Air Egypt direct flight tomorrow, which leaves at 10 pm and lands in Cairo at the crack of dawn on Friday. Then I’ll catch the 3 hour train direct to Alexandria and the conference, hopefully only missing a couple of hours.

That way, I won’t have a night at the Nile Hilton, which I’m sure will be a sour loss, nor will I see the Egyptian Museum I missed when I was there over a decade ago. But at this point I will only trust non-stop flights.

It’s a headache that comes on top of other headaches. As I mentioned before, we did get the funding for a reporter, so I’m recruiting one in the coming months. But actually posting an ad in the Mail and Guardian – something which will earn them thousands of rand out of our pockets and therefore must be seen by them as a priority not to cock up – was a nightmare involving phones with nobody at the other end and undelivered messages. Sales people shouldn’t be hard to get hold of, but these were.

There was also the issue of the computer people not even having started replacing my bust optical drive by the time they had initially said it would be ready, and then getting a bollocking from London for typos in the last edition. Some weeks, it seems, you just can’t win. Oh well, at least the weather is nice (read sweltering).