Day 3

Thursday, June 25, 2026

Cape Town to Johannesburg

There are no photographs of this day. I have looked. Bonnie has looked. Between two people with two phones and three weeks of otherwise relentless documentation, June the twenty-fifth produced nothing at all — not a bad photo, not a blurry one, not an accidental shot of somebody's shoe. Nothing. What survives instead is paperwork. And the paperwork, it turns out, tells the story better than the photographs would have.

What the Paperwork Says

The morning was breakfast at Sweet Orange: small muffins, fruit, a cookie, coffee. I had a muffin and an orange, which felt like the correct thing to eat in a pink guest house named Sweet Orange. Then we put the twelve and a half kilos back in the bags, took an Uber out to the airport, and left the city.

I booked that flight in March, three months out, and the receipt is a small comedy of its own. Two air fares: R2,302. Then: two checked bags, free. Two SMS confirmations, R15.66. Two travel insurances, R55.66. Two bag insurances, R22.60. Two prebooked front seats, R86.96. Two priority boardings, R86.96. Total, everything in, for both of us: R3,264.62. Somewhere around a hundred and eighty dollars to cross a country. The passenger list reads robert jansen, 4C and bonita jansen, 4A. Aisle and window, with the middle seat empty between us. That was deliberate. It is the oldest trick in economy: two people book the window and the aisle and leave the middle seat sitting there unloved, because nobody chooses a middle seat — and if nobody chooses it, you have bought a whole row for the price of two. Somebody chose it. We were already settled, me on the aisle and Bonnie at the window, when she appeared holding a boarding pass for 4B and looking at the one empty seat in the row. There was a pause. And then Bonnie stood up, gave her the window, and sat down in the middle seat herself. Which was not the deal. The deal, such as it was, had Bonnie at the window and me on the aisle and a stranger enduring the middle. Instead she took the worst seat on the airplane so the two of us could still talk — and so that this woman did not have to spend two hours wedged between two people who obviously knew each other and obviously wished she were somewhere else. She got a free upgrade to a window. I kept my aisle. Bonnie got the armrests of two strangers and the middle of a row, for two hours, over the Karoo.

The Hinge

This is the day the trip turns over, and it does it in an airport. Everything before it was a city: restaurants, a promenade, pavement, a mountain you look at from the road. Everything after it is animals. The thing in between is two hours in a narrow seat above the Karoo, a bed near a runway, and an alarm set for something inhuman. We stayed at the Airport Tower Lodge — 29 Porto Amelia Avenue, Bonaero Park, Kempton Park — which is close enough to Johannesburg's runways that the planes are less a sound than a fact of the building. And that address is worth a second look, because it is also printed on the safari voucher, under Pickup Point. The two documents agree. The van was not coming to fetch us from somewhere; it was coming to the door we were already standing behind. There was nothing left to arrange. Everything that had to be booked had been booked, months ago, from a desk in Virginia, and now all that remained was to sleep and be downstairs at seven. We ate something. We went to bed early. That is the entire content of a day that no camera saw. And I have come to like that this chapter exists. A trip is not a highlight reel. It has hinges — days that are nothing but a boarding pass and an early night — and this book would be lying if it pretended every one of them had a lion in it. Tomorrow has a lion in it.