Our Flights to Gaborone

Look who we met at the Dulles Airport.....

We left Newark early for our largely uneventful drive to Dulles International Airport. We got there in plenty of time to have a bite to eat and enjoy the quiet, rather empty airport. Our flight to Amsterdam was about 6 or 7 hours and marked our first introduction to pretty terrible KLM food. They did come around with glasses of champagne early on in the flight to welcome in the New Year. That was a nice touch. We were late leaving Dulles, cutting down on our already short layover in Amsterdam.

At the airport in Amsterdam we had to go from one terminal to another and were given the impression that we should board our next flight immediately. Knowing how bad the food was we tried to pick up something to eat; used some remaining euros to buy pringles and orange fanta. On the 11 hour flight to Johannesburg we at first had miserable seats; a back row of four seats which meant that the seats could not lean back though those in front of us could lean back on us. Fortunately, the flight was not all that full and we were all told that we could move around once airborne. We were fabulously lucky to find seats in a nearly unoccupied front section where each of us was able to claim a row of two seats with lots of leg room. There were also windows from which to view our trip. We had a magnificent view of North Africa and the Sahara Desert, though cloud cover seemed to move in as we moved south. As we got farther south still it became dark and we could see little. Again, while the snacks were good and plentiful the meals were terrible and when we arrived in Johannesburg late at night, in the middle of torrential rain and thunder and lightning we were tired and hungry. It took quite a while to get through passport control but then our luggage was right there much to our relief. Next we had to locate the shuttle that we had reserved to take us to the Garden Court Hotel. There was no one there with a sign to ‘greet’ us but there were a small bus and driver waiting for us in the hotel shuttle area. People at the hotel were very welcoming; because it was so late the restaurant and room service were closed and since we had no rands we could not even buy snacks from the vending machine. We made some tea and coffee in the room and were happy to have showers and beds to spread out on. We were all awake and ready to go by 7 in the morning when the breakfast buffet, included with the room, opened up. There was a great spread, though not very good coffee, and we all filled up. The weather was gorgeous though we spent most of the morning in the hotel room just relaxing before the final leg of the journey.

The Johannesburg airport was quite busy in the morning and we had to pay about 250 rand for excess luggage, having just made it under the 50 lb per bag requirement at Dulles. Oh well. If we had flown South African Airways the whole way it would not have been a problem but we had tacked on the last portion of the flight at the end. The flight to Gaborone was one of those small express planes and took just about one hour. When we got off onto the tarmac at Seretse Khama International Airport the sun was blazing; definitely the low 90s that we had read about in the weather forecast. We passed easily through passport control with no questions asked and were again happy to see all of our bags. Again a shuttle to the hotel was waiting for us and we were off to the Cresta Lodge where we had stayed on our first and last visit to Gaborone. When we got to the Cresta Lodge we were truly exhausted. After a bit, Kuno and I ventured out to the shopping center around the corner to get some vital groceries like water, coffee, evaporated milk, rusks and bananas. Food prices, like everything else, seem pretty high though fruit and vegetables seemed pretty cheap. After hanging out some more we went to the hotel restaurant, again in the middle of a thunder storm and had some dinner; Moses ordered a Botswana favorite: seswaa with morogo (greens) and pap.