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It’s like being sloppy drunk without drinking. That is how I would describe long-distance international travel. My eyelids are leaden and I feel icky. Clothes smell of yesterday and – the HORROR – hair is mincing. All this is the consequence of being unschooled in the sophisticated art of long-distance travel.
It feels rather like coming down from an evening of reckless jaunting. I am groggy, disoriented and pretzelled on a stranger’s couch (seats 61A to C on flight EK201, to be exact). There’s a threadbare blanket twisted into the folds of this makeshift bed and my lips are cracked AF.
The scenario bears striking similarity with what might have followed a night about four years ago. Then, I was coming down from my pretty disastrous early twenties (puppy fat, ill-advised flings, a bad dye job, and way too many nights of Tall Horse at a bohemian bar in Cape Town’s Observatory).
The bender comedown checklist features: glassy eyeballs, crusty soot on the cheeks from dissolving eyeliner and the inability to walk in a straight line. In this context, however, it’s all thanks to being in transit.
It’s different, way different. As different as David Mahlobo’s statement on Monday during an International Security Studies briefing when he spoke of having Mcebo Dlamini over to his house “several times”, compared with Mahlobo’s denial of any Dlamini visitations in Parliament on Wednesday. That different.
This time I am not reeling from a night of poor decision-making. This time I am flying to New York. South African political satire Puppet Nation ZA has been nominated for an International Emmy for Comedy the second year running and I am tagging along as volunteer writer-media-type-publicist-fan.
The likes of Shonda Rhimes and Dame Judi Dench are attending events around the awards at the Sofitel Hotel on Monday, November 21. Naturally, I intend on hounding them both for comment and matrimony during the preceding television festival.
I would like to give the impression that going to the famed Big Apple leaves me unmoved. It would be pretty cool if I could act cold at the prospect of being in the same room, breathing the same air, furtively snipping off a lock of hair from the likes of Rhimes and Dench. Only that would be a big fat fib. Since I found out this trip was locked down I have had bouts of entirely losing it, guffawing in public and singing snatches of New York! New York!
Sure, it probably won’t be the New York City of Girls, Sex and the City or Breakfast At Tiffany’s, or The Newsroom, but it should be one of those unforgettable journeys, not least in light of the seismic shifts underway in US politics. Already, hints of the new mood appeared on TVs in the waiting lounge at the US Consulate in Tokai.
My visit for visa interviews was bizarre. On that first appearance I was met by a slightly dated poster of a Midwestern state, I thought imbued with an arguably misplaced nostalgia for the Midwest of old. That poster hanged next to CNN footage of anti-Trump rallies in New York following the election results.
On my second consular visit, after a sombre conversation with a towering official, I bumped into a former schoolmate having trouble obtaining a study visa. He said he had come under scrutiny from the same stern official for admitting to using medicinal marijuana in a US state where such use is legal, for chronic pain endured thanks to cerebral palsy.
This schoolmate has a PhD to complete back in the US and still lacks, I think, his visa. The sad moral of his story is probably to never concede any use of medicinal marijuana, even if it was for a chronic condition, even if it was in a state where that is legal, even if it was only that one time.
After completing some mind-aching pernickety application forms online and the agony of coughing up almost R3 000 for a piece of paper hardly bigger than a PostIt®, I had my visa. To their credit, the consulate swiftly processed the application. Just days after picking up my passport from a local DHL office, I found myself bleary-eyed at 40 004 feet cruising at 567 miles per hour on the seat of double-decker Emirates Airbus E6-EDM from Dubai to New York.
It is same model of double-decker Emirates craft you may have seen in a recent advertisement with Jennifer Aniston (it plays on YouTube, like, all the frikkin’ time). Daisy fresh Aniston takes a shower on board, emerges her brassy locks poker straight to find a child at her business class seat. She and the boy soon become chums and she happily spends the rest of her flight in economy while the boy’s parents enjoy the luxuries upstairs. Yeah, right. I would keep the extra legroom.
According to a South African cabin crew member – Soweto-born and in airline work for over two years – the rabble can’t simply go upstairs to the mini bar for carrot juice with some newfound child friend (or, in my imagining, a witty Ivy League graduate). I contemplate snooping in the public interest but, as we established early, straight walking is proving tricky at present.
We are seven hours into the second leg of a journey from Cape Town to New York City via Dubai. It’s the furthest I have travelled outside South Africa. Over the last four years, I have done a fair amount of local gallivanting for the sake of stories on local politics. Think: anti-rhino poaching day in the Kruger National Park last year or an ANC rally at a stadium in Giyani, Limpopo before the August elections this tear.
Recently let loose of my employ at a leading national news site (and boy did this New York trip ruffle some feather there), I have gone rogue. Here’s hoping South Africa’s show wins at the International Emmys on Monday. In which case, I might get mildly tippled for real to celebrate with the team.
Biography
Erin Bates is a lapsed bookseller and journalist gone rogue. She counts radio, television and digital news among stints, at the likes of CapeTalk and 702, eNCA and News24. She is now on the hunt for a decent 1990s pantsuit having recently become a vagabond writer with a corporate day job. Find her on Twitter @ermbates.
