The flight was pretty uneventful and taking a couple of sleeping tables elevated my class up to an equivalent of first class which means that I actually slept for about 6 hours of the flight. We were traveling in premium economy which, I have to say, was really nice! It has just that little bit of extra leg and arm room so you don't feel quite so cramped. When the meals came around the hostess offered caron a choice of beef curry or vegetarian pasta which I thought was very civilised. The vege's are taking over; entering the mainstream as it were! When caron ordered the vegetarian pasta it turned out that there was chicken in it; strange vegetarian fare indeed. Maybe the cook was the fabled namibian farmer.
Disembarking at the famous terminal 5 was very efficient and totally uneventful, even the baggage all arrived pretty much as we got to the baggage travelators and the immigration had a two person queue and before we knew it we were out and found John who was waiting for us.
We had a bit of a job getting all our baggage into johns car but remarkably we actually managed it although I had to lean forward the whole trip to john and julies house because we couldn't quite get the seat into the normal position. This meant that I had to duck if we saw any cops because apparently it is quite illegal to drive like this here.
Arriving at johns house we met our transport for the trip which has yet to be named but since it looks a bit like a single humped camel will probably be something camel-like. John had kindly taken the day off so we spent the day driving around trying to find various things that we either couldn't fit in like foam mattresses or had been disallowed like the bottle for the MSR stove. The stove proved to be quite an issue and, despite what the shop assistant promised, it HAS to be a genuine MSR bottle so we ended up spending 10GBP on a bottle which we can't use. Shop assistants don't seem to change from continent to continent but by the end of the day we had most of the other items required.
We went for a drive in the dromedarius and within about 100m we knew that there was a rattle which was going to send caron ballistic so John and I spent a few hours locating the source and fixing it. It turned out to be a loose shock absorber which was quite easy to fix. We also fixed the spare wheel back into it's holder underneath the car so we don't have to have it floating around in the box and we also fixed the bicycle into the back of the van in what I hope will be a safe and secure manner. The photo below should show the ingenious method of method of restraint along with a stowaway who has followed us from south africa.
We were very glad to get to bed at about 21:00, not a moment too soon.
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