This is not about my recent trip to South Africa, a very beautiful country, but about the pleasures and pain of international travel.
It had been a while since I travelled business class, so it came as a pleasant surprise when a chauffeur-driven limo came to my home to pick me up for the drive to the airport.
My driver, Aadam, an expatriate from Chennai in India, wore a navy-blue suit, a crisp, white shirt, shiny black shoes, and had parked a jet-black Volvo with tinted glass at the entrance of my building.
Silently zipping along Shaikh Zayed Road, I sadly realised that I had missed out on the good life most of my life. We reached the airport so fast that I had loads of time to kill, so I decided to check out the Business Class Lounge.
When I usually travel ‘cattle class' or economy class as it is politely termed in airline parlance, I am shocked to see the behaviour of my fellow middle-class passengers and how they pile up on the free beverages as if the world was ending within 72 hours.
A business class lounge is for the privileged few who pay double the price of an air ticket, or so I thought. I felt a bit intimidated walking into this exclusive area where people were lounging on sofas and daintily drinking espressos or getting their shoes polished or playing with their iPads.
But when I showed my boarding card, the receptionist smiled at me largely and said I would be informed when the time comes to board my flight.
It was 9am and I had eaten my breakfast before leaving home, but everything here in the Business lounge was for free! A massive buffet was laid out on one side and waiters moved silently to replenish the food as it finished.
Doctors say that you should not drink alcoholic beverages before and during a flight as it tends to dehydrate you. As dehydration hits, you start looking like a zombie with shrunken eyes, you get a dry and sticky mouth, your blood pressure drops and all sorts of nasty things happen to you.
Computer glitch
If you are rich, you are usually knowledgeable and know what's good or bad for you. But everyone here was piling on the free beverages as if this was their last flight. Pretty flutes were floating on trays to the lounging passengers and someone even had ordered a really killer beverage this early in the morning.
(Now we know the background to the events we read in newspapers where the pilot on a long-haul flight has to take action to offload a disorderly passenger).
Our eating continued even as we boarded the flight. The pretty stewardess asked me what I would like to drink and asked whether I would like chicken or fish. But when I pointed to the menu and said I wanted a hot steak pie, she said that is a snack that comes later after lunch.
The passenger on my left was a French lawyer travelling to Jo'burg for an arbitration case. "We always complain about French companies, but this (an airline of a neighbouring country) sucks," he said. He had been travelling since Thursday and today was Saturday! Because of a computer glitch he was put on a Paris-London-Dubai-Jo'burg flight.
Then to add to his woes our pilot was warned of wind shear on the runway as we prepared to land. The pilot suddenly revved up the engines took the aircraft higher, popping our ears and making the sleeping children cry.
He then circled the airport and as I held on to the seat as this was getting quite dramatic, we ran out of fuel so we had to land at a very tiny strip in neighbouring Botswana.
