There isn’t really a “direct” way of getting to South Africa from Brisbane. The most direct way at the moment is to travel via Sydney on QANTAS. The flight leaves early in the morning (9:30) which means you need to come to Sydney the day before so that you can guarantee your connection to your flight.
Getting to Cape Town we are flying through Sydney, on to Johannesburg then a 4.5 hour lay over before a two hourish flight to Cape Town. We will get to our hotel about midnight tonight South African time (8 am Brisbane time) 23 hours from when we took off from Sydney. We’ve paid for one of the lounges in the domestic terminal in Johannesburg so that we can relax a little and maybe freshen up before we fly on to Cape Town. G Adventures who we’re doing the tour through have arranged a transfer for when we get to Cape Town. We’ll see Jayenne and Peter on Sunday morning then we hit the ground running with a Robben Island tour on Sunday at 11.
We flew down on Virgin leaving Brisbane about 1pm and got into Sydney just before 3pm. We stayed at the Pullman at Mascot. I have always thought that Mascot was very industrial and if it was it has been through a major bit of urbanisation. While there are lots of offices relating to the aviation and auto industry there are a lot of residential units as well. The Pullman has a lot of contemporary sculptures of rabbits, which I am not sure of the context of but I got a photo with one anyway.
We went for a bit of a walk and explored around the hotel. There are some very nice developments, lots of shops and restaurants in easy walking distance from the Pullman. After exploring we went back to the motel and had a drink. I tried a cocktail called a London which included Crème de Violet and was made on Tanqueray Gin. It was very delicious but very potent. We decided we were too tired to go back down to the restaurants so we ate at the Pullman. The food was very good, Stu had salmon and I had an eye fillet. It was all very nice, my steak was very tender, I am glad we got to experience the restaurant, the waitress was lovely and made us her special coloured water (water with cucumber, blood orange and lemon).
I think I was asleep by about 7:30 last night, we knew we had to be up by about 4:30 to get ready to head to the airport. We ended up taking the airport shuttle (our taxi didn’t show up). Getting through check in, immigration and customs was so quick, we were in the QANTAS club by about 7 and had a little bit of breakfast and a real coffee or two.
As I write the above, we are about an hour south west of Sydney sitting in our very comfortable Premium Economy seats, with about 13 and a half hours of flying before we get to Johannesburg.
As it turns out we flew over Tasmania and over the Southern Ocean skirting north of the Antarctic before heading over about 12 hours of nothingness. We are now in OR Tambo Airport in Johannesburg waiting for the three hours before our flight to Cape Town.
davstuholidays 