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Travelling from Johannesburg to Dubai: Sunday, 30th April 2006

Karen (bless her soul) woke up around 6am to book our seats on Emirates. Emirates allows you to book your seats online for about 11 hours before your flight. We've booked our seats near the back of the plane where the column of 3-seaters turns into a column of 2-seaters. So its just the two of us, we have a window seat and an aisle seat, we're not too close to the toilet, and the 3 seater column in front of us will help block traffic from walking into my legs if I stretch them out into the aisle.

30 April 2006

Johannesburg

1 May 2006

Dubai

EK762

In transit

N/A

Chris & Lorna dropped us off at Johannesburg International. As we arrived at the airport we saw a looooooong queue stretching across the airport - as I entered I thought...I hope we're not in that one...Murphy's law...we were in that queue!

Air Emirates's long queue at Johannesburg International A long queue at Johannesburg International

Karen waiting in Emirates's queue at Johannesburg International Karen in the queue at Johannesburg International

Robert waiting in the Air Emirates queue at Johannesburg International Robert waiting in the queue at Johannesburg International

After much waiting in the queue it dawned on us that we could queue-hop because we had booked in electronically. At the emmigration counter a rather large lady was sitting there with her newspaper scrunched up next to her. She motioned us over and after what seemed ages of tapping at her computer realised that it wasn't working...eventually she went over to the next counter and managed to get that computer working and got us in (the service there pales in comparison to the efficiency I've seen both at both Dubai and the USA).

We stocked up on some magazines and sweets and boarded. The flight took off on schedule, and I'm writing this as we fly along the west coast of Africa, somewhere I've never been before - over places like Beira, Zanzibar, Mombasa & Lamu. At Lamu Emirates sensibly stopped following the coastline and headed northwards and inland, no doubt to avoid that mad country called Somalia and towns like Mogadishu. We passed Dijibouti, the country with the funkiest domain name extension, ".dj" .... I liked it so much that I am the proud owner of the domain CapeTown.dj - it still needs some work but give it a look through if you like - and I'm always hunting for ways to improve the webs I own.

On passing the land of the ".dj" sites, we left Africa (byeeeee) and started flying over the Golf of Aden, heading for the Middle East. All new territory for both of us. We flew over the darkness of the middle-east, approaching Dubai we started seeing lights appearing, and we landed in Dubai at about midnight.