21
A Day of Madness
“Most journeys begin at check‑in and end at baggage claim. Mine live in the thin strip between—where you hug one story goodbye at a gate, rise into the quiet at forty‑one thousand feet, and land already holding the next hello.”
John Sparks
GOODBYE IN FLUORESCENT LIGHT
Some endings happen around campfires. Others happen under fluorescent tubes.
OR Tambo is in full mid‑morning performance when the minivan noses into the drop‑off lane: trolleys clattering, porters weaving, announcements spilling from speakers in an accent that belongs to no single language and all of them at once. After the quiet of Madikwe—the red sand, dogs running, lion in late light—the airport feels like someone turned the world up three notches too loud.
Half an hour ago we shut down the King Air at the private stands. A driver ferried us across the apron, through a side gate, and into the slipstream that leads here. While I walk these two as far as I can toward Departures, the pilot who brought us in is already back on the general aviation side, refuelling and filing, getting the Citation ready to take me south the moment I return.
We step out of the van into a different kind of air: recycled, perfume‑heavy, edged with jet fuel. The couple carry small bags and something else that doesn’t fit in luggage—twelve days of lions and cliffs and whales and wine sitting just under the skin.
We join the sliding‑door current.
Check‑in counters in long, bright rows. Screens spelling out cities that have been words in conversation for days: Doha, Frankfurt, home. There’s always a moment when the human part of goodbye has to make space for the admin. Passports. Bags. Security questions. Seats. All the small absurdities between one life and another.
We hover at the edge while they juggle documents, shoes, liquids, laptops—the choreography of leaving.
Then it happens the way it always does: there is simply nowhere else I’m allowed to go.
The line into International Departures is a piece of theatre I know too well. You reach a point—sometimes glass, sometimes a rope, sometimes just tape on the floor—where only passengers can continue. The airport claims them; my job stops.
We stand there a few seconds longer than strictly necessary.
She hugs me first—hard, no half measures.
“Thank you,” she says. “For looking after us. For…all the rest.”
Her husband’s handshake turns into its own brief embrace.
“We came for Africa,” he says, and then pauses, as if he’s searching for the exact words. “But I think we also came to check whether the stories people told us about you were true.”
There’s no clever reply to that that doesn’t dent it. I just nod, swallow once, and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Travel well,” I say. “Go home with more stories than photos.”
They turn, passports in hand, and step into the queue.
I watch until they disappear around the corner—one last wave, one last glimpse of her hair tucked behind an ear, the familiar jacket, the way he keeps a hand lightly at her back as if the airport might try to steal her.
Then they’re gone, swallowed by security trays and duty‑free perfume and the strange no‑time of departures.
The automatic doors breathe open and closed behind me. The arrivals and departures boards flicker. Somewhere out on the apron, a wide‑body tops up its tanks for the long north, preparing to lift them into that pressurised world where champagne appears before you ask and the map on a screen draws a neat line between “here” and “home”.
I stand for a moment in the middle of the terminal, suddenly light and strangely heavy at the same time.
Then I look at my watch.
If we turn quickly, I’ll be in Cape Town in time to meet the next pair when they land.
THE THIN STRIP BETWEEN LIVES
There’s a kind of day only guides and pilots really understand.
You wake up in the bush. You say goodbye to people who now feel like friends at an airport. You climb straight back into another aircraft. You land in a different city alone and start preparing to say hello again.
Today is one of those days.
The same driver who dropped us at Departures appears at my elbow as if conjured.
“All good?” he asks, taking my overnight bag without waiting for the answer.
“Big,” I say. “The kind of trip you wish everyone could have once.”
We slip back out through a staff door, down a quieter corridor, and into the minivan again. Ten minutes later we’re weaving through the maze of service roads and security gates to the private side of the airport—hangars, fuel farms, small aircraft sitting in the sun like they’re waiting for permission.
The Citation is exactly where we left it, tucked slightly apart, steps down, door open. The pilot stands at the bottom, headset around his neck, sunglasses pushed up.
“Refuelled, filed, cleared,” he says. “Just needed you.”
That’s the thing about days like this: while you’re standing under fluorescent light swallowing a goodbye, someone else has been doing the quiet work that lets your life slide from one story into the next without a visible seam.
I climb back into the cabin with the same bag I carried out of it less than an hour ago. The seats still remember the couple’s weight. Their coffee cups are gone. Their voices aren’t, not yet.
The aircraft feels briefly like a room that hasn’t decided which chapter it belongs to.
We close the door. The engines spool up with that smooth, contained surge that still makes some part of me feel eight years old. The Citation pivots, noses toward the taxiway, and before my mind has caught up with my feet, we are rolling.
Goodbye and departure, almost the same breath.
LOW ABOVE THE GRID
From up here, Johannesburg looks like an argument between order and life.
Streets lay themselves out in hard lines. Office towers catch the light. Townships spread in dense ribbons beyond highway loops, the geometry tighter, the colours different. Old mine dumps sit like pale scars. In between, an occasional golf course splashes green across brown.
Then the city loosens. Suburbs give way to fields. The land becomes a patchwork of circles and squares—pivots greening some patches, others lying bare. Rivers underestimate themselves from this height, just faint dark threads stitching through the land.
In the quiet of the cabin, the last twelve days replay in pieces.
Whales lifting tails in Walker Bay. Horses throwing spray on a white beach. Helicopter rotors thumping along a coastline. The slow, deliberate step of eland in the Cederberg. Wildflowers turning West Coast sand into spilled paint. A lion’s head lifting in late light. Wild dogs switching from play to purpose.
And then the smaller, more personal pieces—the ones that never show up in itineraries: the way she went silent after the first lion roar, the way he stopped asking questions for ten minutes and simply stared at elephants, the way the kids started naming things softly as if naming made them real.
Somewhere above Africa, they are probably leaning back in business‑class seats, clinking champagne glasses over an airline tablecloth, the last dust of Madikwe still on their boots while the screen in front of them draws a neat line between “here” and “home”.
An hour ago I hugged them at a barrier. Now I’m alone in a leather seat with apple juice in my hand and a jet engine singing behind me.
Guiding lives in these thin strips between lives. Guests travel in blocks of time; mine is the thread that stitches blocks together.
The estate’s private dam sits in a fold of the land, edged with reeds, its surface so still it holds the sky and the mountain we have just crossed.
Horses. A long white beach. The sea again, but from a different height.