The one with the bonus whale</strong>

19 February 2020 (day 78)

We wake on our first day post-Absolute Africa with the main task being to relocate to our Airbnb. Check out at Ashanti Lodge is 10am (although I get the staff to agree to 11am for us) and check in at the Airbnb is 3pm, so we’ll need to store our stuff in the luggage room at Ashanti for a few hours. Unfortunately for me, the luggage room is in the main building, which means carting all of our stuff back from our guesthouse. Also unfortunately for me is that the fellow with the truck from yesterday isn’t around to help.

I leave Sara basking by the pool while I heft everything over and get it stored away. With the exception of Melissa, everyone stayed at Ashanti Lodge last night and we see them at breakfast and in the reception, so it’s a second round of goodbyes with the exact same people again this morning.

About six weeks ago in Tanzania I lost my UK SIM card so I ordered a replacement to my parents’ house, plus some other key items including Monopoly Deal, a new watch for Sara, and a neck pillow (to replace the one keen readers will remember I lost in Addis Ababa airport on the way to Africa over 11 weeks back). My trusty parents posted the package about five weeks ago with an estimated delivery timeline of 5-7 working days; however, on arrival at the hostel yesterday I find there’s still no sign of it, which is concerning.

The tracking information shows it’s in Cape Town and has been for a week, so it’s not clear why it’s being held or what the delivery timeline is. Since the delivery address is the hostel and we’re checking out today, I speak to the hostel staff and they suggest I head to the Cape Town Central Post Office to see if there’s something they can do to help. Two Ubers, a visit to the Central Post Office and a delivery centre, and some kind human beings later, I have the package and I’m back at the hostel. Under absolutely no circumstances am I losing this replacement neck pillow (she says, and then worries she’s jinxed herself!).

At lunchtime, we head again to Kloof Street, which is known for its eateries, to a Vietnamese place called Saigon and, as always, we order way too much food. It’s good though so we take the leftovers with us for lunch or dinner tomorrow.

Lunch at Saigon…this is just the starter

It’s close enough to Airbnb check in time now that we order an Uber and get everything out to the side of the road to be loaded. By happy coincidence, Nash and Steve are hanging out on the hostel’s patio and help cart everything out of the luggage room and down to the pickup point (absolute heroes of men). When the Uber driver arrives though, he doesn’t park near us and our piles of stuff but instead up the hill. I run up to ask him to come back down to where we are, explaining that Sara’s on crutches and we have a lot of stuff to load into the car. Apparently this is an unreasonable request, however, and he cancels our booking and drives off, leaving us and our mountain of stuff in the hot sun without a ride.

Nearly 15 minutes later, a different driver finally arrives to collect us. We say our final farewells to Nash, Steve, Silverback, and Ashanti Lodge and head off. After we regale the new driver of the previous driver’s bad behaviour he tells us in future we should book Uber Assist because those drivers are trained to help people with mobility issues and are much less likely to cancel a booking. Good to know!

Goodbye Absolute Africa crew, truck, and final hostel!

Our Airbnb is on Greenmarket Square, which I didn’t know when booking is right in the heart of the city and a really desirable place to stay. Our Airbnb host Lorin is wonderful, helping carry all of our many bags and boxes into the apartment, as well as walking me a couple of blocks to show me where I can buy packing materials to ship our souvenirs home.

The apartment too is lovely. It’s a nice sized studio apartment with all of the facilities we’ll need, but best of all is the view from the bed of both Greenmarket Square and Table Mountain. I doubt we could find a significantly better combination of location and view if we tried.

We’ve made plans with Jan and Melissa to have dinner together and meet them at 5.30pm outside a coffee shop less than a minute’s walk from our flat to travel together. I’ve made a reservation for the four of us in the wine cellar at Codfather in Camps Bay, and when we arrive we find this is easily the best part of the restaurant to sit in, as the main upstairs area is pretty loud and busy.

Codfather’s wine cellar. And yes, the excellent name was a factor in deciding to dine here.

We order some pink MCC (a sparkling wine made in the exact same way as champagne) to share between the four of us and are taken upstairs to order our food. Codfather doesn’t have a menu; the fish is set out in counters like at a fish shop and you select the things you want to add to your platter. It’s then cooked and brought to you with sides and sauces, and you can order more at any time if needed. There’s also a sushi conveyor belt like Yo Sushi for starters (or mains, if that’s all you want).

And this is just the langoustines counter! 🤤

We agree to make a mega platter between the four of us with crayfish, langoustines, scallops, salmon, butter fish, tuna, squid, and kingklip to be served with chips and salad, and to each select one plate off the sushi counter to share as a starter (which sort of restricts us to plates with exactly four things, but it works).

The platter when it comes is epic, and the fish fresh and delicious. As we’re about to tuck in, the maitre d’ comes over with a bottle of red wine we haven’t ordered. It turns out to be the Mitre’s Edge Malbec Melissa bought in Stellenbosch as she wants to share and enjoy it with us at our last dinner together. The wine is poured and we each studiously examine the colour, swirl it around the glass, and inhale deeply. The wine smells incredible. I taste and oh my word it’s good! I look around to see the others’ reactions; yep, everyone’s momentarily speechless. I’m pretty delighted Sara and I also bought a bottle and have it to drink over the next few days!

Our epic seafood mega platter of deliciousness

We stay at the restaurant pretty late and enjoy a really wonderful last dinner as the four of us in Africa. It’s particularly sad to be saying goodbye to Jan and Melissa - we’re so glad to have met these two and we’re going to miss seeing them every day. With Jan in the Netherlands and Melissa in France though, at least they’re not too far away from us in London, and once Sara and I are back from our travels we’ll try to arrange a weekend together in Brussels or somewhere.

20 February 2020 (day 79)

We haven’t yet got any food in so for breakfast I run down to a coffee shop and grab us some coffees and pumpkin and feta frittata for breakfast. The frittata comes with a tasty looking side salad, but when I start eating it I quickly realise that there’s something terribly, horribly wrong with it. And then it dawns on me, it’s the thing I dislike more than basically anything else: dill. Fistfuls of disgusting dill. What maniac puts evil, awful devil-herb dill in, well, anything at all?! Way to ruin an otherwise perfectly good breakfast salad.

We take an Uber down to the Nelson Mandela gate and catch the ferry over to Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in incarceration for his role in the freedom struggle.

It takes us much longer to get off the boat than everyone else and by the time we get to the departure point for the bus tour around the island, the final bus has gone. We’re not the only people to have missed the buses however, and we’re instead taken into the prison buildings for that part of the tour.

Entrance to Robben Island Prison. The gate was built by prisoners with slate from one of the two quarries on the island.

Guard watchtower. Only one person successfully escaped from Robben Island Prison and managed to swim the 9km to the mainland.

Our guide, like all guides here, is a former inmate of the prison, and he talks knowledgeably, credibly and impactfully about life in the prison, the inequality in treatment between the white, black and coloured prisoners (those are his terms, not mine), and the race based grouping and tier systems governing clothing, food and bedding allocations. He himself was imprisoned at the age of 16 for the crime of sabotage as part of the freedom struggle and served 6 years of his sentence before the prison was closed down in 1992. When asked about the impact of his incarceration on his life now, it’s inspiring to hear him speak of the catharsis and personal healing he finds giving these tours and speaking about his experiences, and the importance to him of people understanding the appalling treatment of prisoners to try to prevent similar from happening again.

After visiting one of the gen-pop mass cells, we’re led outside to a yard where prisoners were forced to perform manual labour in the baking sunshine for hours every day. This was the yard for the most “dangerous” political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, and it’s where he hid the writings that went on to become his autobiography, Long Walk To Freedom.

The bush where Nelson Mandela hid his manuscript

From the yard, we enter the adjacent building to find individual cells, including the one that housed Nelson Mandela during his time here.

Cell number 5 - “I could walk the length of my cell in three paces. When I lay down, I could feel the wall with my feet and my head grazed the concrete at the other side.”

After the tour of the prison buildings, we’re taken out and loaded onto the buses. Because Sara’s in her wheelchair, we’re directed to a much smaller vehicle with space for maybe 15 passengers, so a much more intimate tour than on one of the main buses.

We first visit the “smallest prison on the island,” the house where Robert Sobukwe, a key figure in the freedom struggle, was kept in isolation because of the perceived threat he presented. He was prevented from contact with the other prisoners but managed to communicate with them by hand signals as they passed in buses being taken to and from other parts of the island.

There were three prisons on Robben Island: A-Section where the gen-pop were kept, B-Section consisting of solitary cells (including Mandela’s), and this one, the Robert Sobukwe House

Next we visit the limestone quarry where Nelson Mandela and others were forced to labour in the blazing sun for hours each day. Mandela (and others) suffered permanent eye damage from the reflection of the sun off the white stone. There’s a small cave in the quarry that our guide tells us served not only as a rest and shelter spot but also as a university. The inmates created a system whereby each was responsible for learning and then sharing their knowledge with others. In the centre of the quarry there’s a small mound of stones, and our guide explains that some time after the prison was closed down, former political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, now president of South Africa, returned to the island. On visiting the quarry, President Mandela gave a speech and then picked up a stone, placing it on the ground. Other former prisoners followed suit and in so doing created the small mound, which now stands as a sort of memorial of the prisoners’ history.

The limestone quarry: a place of hardship and resistance

The rock pile monument which features on the back of the R100 banknote

As part of the bus tour, we’re also taken to the lepers’ graveyard (the island was previously a leper colony) and to the village where some former prisoners and museum staff now live before stopping at a viewpoint on the island’s coast with a clear view across the ocean to Cape Town and Table Mountain in the distance.

Robben means seal in Dutch/Afrikaans but, alas, there are no more seals on the island these days

After a short stop for photos and refreshments, it’s back to the boat for the return journey to Cape Town. As we’re cruising, a shout goes up from the back of the boat, and I rush out to see a couple of dolphins jumping out of the water in the boat’s wake, which is pretty awesome. Sara though can’t see from where she’s sitting and she obviously can’t rush outside so misses seeing them. Because it’s pretty fleeting, I also don’t get any photographs to show her which is a shame.

⛴ view from the ferry, heading back to Cape Town

We continue onwards until the boat suddenly slows right down, and again there’s a shout only this time from in front of us inside the boat. Passengers rush to the right-hand side of the boat, which happens to be the side we’re sitting on.

We quickly shift closer to the window to peer out and see something large in the water a very short distance away from us. It takes a moment for my brain to catch up before I register what it must be and shout, “Whale! It’s a whale! Sara, Sara, it’s a whale!” I fumble for my camera and raise it just in time to see the creature’s back breaching the water again, and take a photo at just the right time to get its tail in the air before returning under the water. Thankfully this time Sara doesn’t miss the action - we managed to pick just the right seats to get a first rate view.

The whale’s back breaches a couple more times before it disappears and the boat picks up speed again. Sara and I beam at each other in awe and delight at what we’ve just seen. Sara suspects it was a humpback whale and a quick Google confirms a visual, behavioural, and locational match. We realise we’ve also been very lucky - whale season for this area is really June to September, so in February our chances of seeing one were considerably lower. With whales being one of the Marine Big 5, we’ve been able to tick another of them off the list. Go us!

Marine Big 5 count: 3 of 5 seen (whale, dolphin, and seal; not yet sighted - leatherback turtle and sunfish)

We arrive back in Cape Town on a high from the unexpected whale sighting. It’s now past lunchtime and we’re hungry so head inside pretty much the nearest restaurant, Cape Town Fish Market. On examining the menu, we find there are oysters and sushi available. In a surprise to no one, that’s what we opt for and although the oysters aren’t as good as the Namibian ones, they’re definitely still plenty good enough for me!

Cape Town Fishmarket on the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront

After lunch, we take a stroll around the V&A Waterfront and into a handcrafts market selling all manner of beautiful things. We manage not to buy anything other than an ice cream cookie sandwich each and a wooden ornament for our travel tree. I very much want to buy an absolutely enormous bean bag chair but decide it’s probably too big to post.

View of Table Mountain from the V&A Waterfront

Re-enacting the lyric from Seal’s lesser-known follow up song Kissed by a Rhino on the Waterfront

Sara still hasn’t heard back from the orthopaedic consultant with the results of the MRI so follows up, and we get the good news that, although she’s torn some ligaments in her ankle, it’s not a syndesmotic injury and doesn’t require surgery, so as far as he’s concerned we’re cleared to continue travelling. At last we have certainty over things and can relax again!

As we’re returning to our apartment, Sara asks me to go check out a nearby indoor mini craft market she’s spotted to see if it’s worth her going in to look around. After a quick circuit, I assess that she’ll want to see it and collect her from where I’ve left her. We spend a good hour or more wandering around, finding a couple of things we may want to come back for tomorrow, plus three little carved soapstone animals for our three nieces to give them when we get home.

We head back to our apartment and decide on a quiet evening of playing Monopoly Deal and having yesterday’s Vietnamese leftovers with the bottle of Sholto we bought back at Mitre’s Edge. The Sholto, like the Malbec last night, is a delight. If only Mitre’s Edge was within easy travelling distance from London!

21 February 2020 (day 80)

Our apartment is right on Greenmarket Square, which is home to a large outdoor daily craft market. Today we head down to take a look around and see if there’s anything there we’d like to buy before we send home the things we’ve accumulated along the way so far. The answer is a resounding yes, yes there is. There’s a lot of generic stuff on sale that we’ve seen both around Cape Town and on the journey down from Kenya, but there are also some really lovely new things. Sara and I are enablers of each other when it comes to this sort of thing, which bodes badly for our finances.

The art on the walls was all done by this man and his family members - we bought two pieces.

After many hours looking around practically every single stall at the market (and my best estimate is that there were probably at least 100 stalls, if not more), we’ve bought two large beaded rhinos, one white and one black, from a Zimbabwean called Godfrey; two beaded giraffes, a flat wire baobab tree, a wire ostrich, a large beaded hippo, and a beaded elephant, from Margaret, who works with a collective of five women calling themselves Girl Power and gave us high fives; a large beaded springbok; and various other small souvenirs.

Godfrey and our black rhino. He’s a lovely man and has offered to make us any animal we want and ship it straight to the UK…this is dangerous information for us.

Some of our South African souvenir haul. The colourful wad in the bottom left corner is our large giraffe which Margaret folded for packing purposes.

Somehow in all of this, we’ve skipped right past lunch and are now at risk of being late for Sara’s appointment with Inge, the Cape Town physio, so I run up to the apartment to drop off our haul and we jump in an Uber down to the Westin hotel where Inge is based.

Inge’s great, unsurprising given she was recommended by our rock star UK physio and she’s physio to the Springboks. Inge spends over an hour working Sara’s leg to loosen the muscles, doing ultrasound on the ankle injury to promote healing, and applying an ankle brace ice machine thing to allow icing of the ankle while raised. Sara describes it as feeling like her foot was in a bucket of ice, except elevated and dry. It sounds cool (HAHA pun intended).

We made it onto our UK physio’s Instagram page to advertise that Ultra Sports Physio has great connections and will help clients out no matter where they are in the world 👍

The physio session has gone longer than we’d anticipated, and we’re now late for our evening plans with Ryan and Taylor. We hop into a cab to Big Box Cafe and find them already there and in the process of setting up what looks to be a very complicated game. After a noble attempt, the game proves too complicated for us all to pick up quickly and enjoy so we abandon it and opt instead for Codenames and then Dobble, both of which we love and own but the boys have never played. The four of us have spent the last couple of months discussing board games and it’s really fun to finally get to play some, particularly as the only thing we’ve had available to us over recent weeks has been Skip-Bo (thank you Trina for supplying this).

Welcome to the wonderful world of board game cafes, Ryan and Taylor!

The evening passes too soon and the cafe closes much earlier than its London counterparts. With that, it’s goodbye to Ryan and Taylor for the last time in Africa. It’s been a fun final evening with our gaming buddies / souvenir shopping pals and the only other couple to have travelled with us all the way from Nairobi.

22 February 2020 (day 81)

This morning passes in a blur of buying packing materials, packing souvenirs, repacking souvenirs better, then repacking again with more padding. Once everything is in and we realise we have some spare space at the top of our giant box, I run down to the street market and up to the indoor market to pick up a couple of last things we wish we’d gotten, including a painting of one half of a giraffe’s face and neck (or a girhalf as I call it, feeling pretty pleased with myself), an elephant head made of recycled metal, and some township art (Sara has gone to this stall to make a shortlist for our agreement while I run around everywhere else doing the rest).

With the final few bits in the box, which is now stuffed to its limits and covered in “Fragile” tape, I go to lift it and find it’s really, really heavy. But wait a second, didn’t we rent Sara a wheelchair? I lift the box in and it fits like a glove. I look at Sara hopefully and she agrees that yes I can use the wheelchair for the box and she can hobble on crutches until then. Patience of a saint, that one!

At the post office at the V&A Waterfront, I heft the box up onto the counter for weighing, and it comes in at 22kg, nearly 50lbs! Somehow though it only costs around £60 to ship it home, which is very cheap! It’ll take up to 16 weeks to get there but we don’t expect to be home until August or September so it should still beat us by some margin.

Sara reclaims her wheelchair and after a bit of a look around we decide on a return visit to Cape Town Fish Market for lunch. More oysters - yay!

We each pick up a pair of joggers for our upcoming epically long journey from Cape Town to Auckland before heading back to the flat to start sorting through all of our stuff to get things ready for travelling. Sara won’t be able to help carry anything at all so it’s going to be all on me. The fewer bags, therefore, the better! A few hands of Monopoly Deal then rounds out the day nicely.

23 February 2020 (day 82)

It’s our last full day in Cape Town. Does this mean we’re out enjoying the sights like good tourists? No, it does not. We decided a couple of days ago against going up Table Mountain because of Sara’s reduced mobility (and the weather, although sunny all week, has been a bit windy and / or cloudy at the top on a few days and thus not ideal conditions anyway) so that goes on the list for next time we come. Instead, we’ve been reading up on the biosecurity requirements to gain entry into New Zealand, and realise we need to spend a considerable amount of time today cleaning all of our camping and hiking equipment to remove all traces of soil and minerals to avoid our things being confiscated at the border.

Hours of scrubbing with toothbrushes later and everything’s as clean as we can reasonably make it, including Sara’s moon boot. If they find anything in the soles after the rigorous cleaning we’ve just given all our shoes, I’ll eat my hat (which, along with all our other clothing, has also been washed).

We’ve lost nearly a whole day to cleaning and packing up our things for leaving tomorrow but it feels good to have everything prepared. We head out for our final Cape Town dinner at Nelson’s Eye, a restaurant Sophie recommended with the proviso “it looks like a working men’s club but the food is incredible”.

We arrive and both agree with Sophie’s assessment of the visuals. It’s working men’s club meets Wetherspoons in terms of decor but smells extremely enticing. We order kudu carpaccio and bobotie, apparently the national dish of South Africa consisting of spiced ground beef and fruit, to share for starter, and Hollandse Biefstuk, a flambé speciality each for mains. It’s BYO and tonight is the night for our Mitre’s Edge Malbec, which we’ve been saving for our trip here.

Be sure to read the slightly sexist but also mildly amusing placemat

The carpaccio is obviously good - we’ve known we like kudu since The Boma back in Vic Falls - and the bobotie is also surprisingly tasty despite the ingredients sounding like Rachel from Friends’ botched Thanksgiving trifle. Beef - good; fruit - good; custardy topping - good!

The steaks arrive and they are melt-in-the-mouth delicious, some of the best steak either of us has ever had and certainly within recent memory. The chips and crispy onions too are divine and although we both want to finish everything, the portions are huge and we have some to take home for later / tomorrow if we’ve time. There’s obviously room for desert though and we unnecessarily get two to share, a malva pudding and a chocolate mousse, as well as a single brandy to share (because neither of us has ever tried brandy but apparently SA does it well). The desserts well and truly end us and I realise someone’s going to need to roll us both to the taxi back to our apartment. It’s been the perfect dinner to end our time in Africa and without question we’ll be visiting Nelson’s Eye again on our next trip to Cape Town!

24 February 2020 (day 83)

It’s our last morning in Cape Town and I don’t want to go! With everything packed up and stored in our Airbnb host’s storage room in the building, the final few bits and bobs posted home, and Sara’s wheelchair collected from us by the rental company, we go to Tiger Milk for a light lunch (and final local beer) before catching an Uber to the airport.

I’ve found Sara a wheelchair and at the check in desk, the Emirates representative asks if we need assistance through the airport. I say no I’m fine to push Sara, and we head off towards security. When we arrive there though, we see someone in a wheelchair being escorted past the general queue of passengers and I realise that assistance doesn’t just mean pushing, it means avoiding the serpentine queues and stress of trying to prevent people from accidentally bashing into Sara’s leg. We return sheepishly to the Emirates desk and tell them on second thoughts some assistance would be super! A few minutes later, we have our assistance person and bypass the line for security and passport control and almost quicker than you could make a cup of tea we’re sitting in the departure area.

Our assistance lady tells us she’ll be back to collect us in around 90 minutes to take us to the gate, so I go to see if there’s anything worth Sara seeing around the shopping area (there isn’t) while we wait. When Mrs Assistance comes to collect us, we again avoid the queues to get onto the plane and instead are escorted outside to where a truck with a loading lift waits for us. We’re raised inside the truck to find a handful of seats and lots of space, plus another few passengers with mobility assistance needs.

Once we’re all settled, the truck takes us off to the plane, but instead of stopping by the steps in the normal way, it goes around to the other side and pulls up perpendicular to the plane. I’ve no idea what’s happening but the driver jumps on, a door opens at the front end of the truck, and the whole back section of the truck starts to rise into the air on a lift system I didn’t realise was there.

We rise up and up until we’re level with the body of the plane. I had no idea this was a thing! The driver and another crew member extend a platform out towards the plane but it comes up short. They kick at it, good solution, but to no avail, so it’s back down to the ground again on the lift system. The driver hops out, moves the truck forward a few inches, hops back up again, and we repeat the process. It’s still not close enough to the door. Attempt three goes better, but when the flight crew go to open the door from the inside, the alignment with the truck isn’t quite right so they close it again, and we’re heading back to the ground and into attempt four.

A new experience - entering a plane directly from a jacked up vehicle through a door on the right hand side

Fourth time’s the charm and at last the door to the plane opens to let us board. We called Emirates ahead of time to see what could be done to accommodate Sara’s injury and the best they’ve been willing to do is to move us to bulkhead seats with more space for Sara’s leg to stretch out in front of her. It’s far better than being in standard economy seats, not least because Sara wouldn’t be able to fit her leg in there, but it’s still going to be an uncomfortable journey for Sara as she can’t really elevate her leg for the duration.

The trip is pretty uneventful. We watch Supersize Me 2 (great film!) while eating our food, sleep surprisingly well for being on a plane (the benefits of learning to sleep upright while overlanding!), and watch most of Tea With The Dames before the screens are switched off for landing.

25 February 2020 (day 84)

Good morning, Dubai, country number 11 on our grand adventure! We land just after 5am local time, and our assistance person meets us off the plane and wheels us through the airport to the assisted passengers lounge. There’s a whole private lounge for people in need of assistance through the airport here - who knew!

Dubai airport: shiny and showy, as expected

After the flight, Sara’s leg and ankle are predictably sore and swollen, so we find a couple of the reclined chairs and elevate and massage her leg to help the swelling reduce.

We’re in two minds around whether to go into Dubai city or stay in the airport. The original plan when booking this route to New Zealand had been to go to a water park and up the Burj Khalifa, but with Sara on crutches even just getting around will be so much harder. After resting for a few hours though, Sara’s leg looks and feels a lot better than it had immediately after the flight and she’s keen to go see the city. There’s a hop on / hop off open top bus tour we can take to see the main highlights, which seems like a good option, although it’ll be more of a hop on / stay on tour for us in view of the leg situation!

I summon the assistance person who brings a wheelchair and escorts us through immigration to the Dubai metro, a monorail like train connecting the airport to the city. It’s a smooth easy ride and within a very short trip we arrive at Deira City Centre, a shopping mall with a hop on stop for the bus tour.

Our body clocks are out of whack after the flight and we’re both ravenous so I find a wheelchair in the mall, collect Sara from the low wall I’d left her on, and we head into the mall proper in search of food. Neither of us has ever been to Dubai or UAE before and it’s a surprise just how many American brands and chains are here. Wandering through the hall, we find a PF Changs, a Chinese-American chain neither of us has ever been to in the US. It sounds like exactly what we need right now though so head in for a just-after-11am lunch. Dessert is utterly delicious ice cream from the Jelly Belly ice cream shop (didn’t know that was a thing either - every day’s a school day). Dubai day off to a good start!

Lunch - we didn’t manage to get a picture of the delicious food because as soon as it hit the table we started scoffing

We find the bus stop and don’t have to wait long before the next bus arrives. Sara’s feeling all ambitious so bum-shuffles her way up the stairs to the top deck for the best views, the driver generously waiting for her to be seated before setting off again. The guide begins the tour and we establish pretty quickly that Dubai evidently has aspirations to be the “-est” city in the world, with as many of the biggest, tallest, largest and randomest (yep, I know, not actually a word) as it can manage. Along the route we see:

Dubai’s answer to the Sydney Opera House at the golf course on the banks of the river;
Dubai’s answer to Ancient Egypt at Wafi Courtyard, a mall and complex with pyramids, columns, and images of pharaohs, all for no obvious or specific reason;
Dubai’s answer to any country with tall building aspirations, with the Burj Khalifa and 12 of the tallest 75 buildings in the world, plus construction underway for what will become the new tallest on completion;
Dubai’s answer to consumerism, with the Dubai Mall, the second largest mall in the world by land area;
Dubai’s answer to unexpected architecture, with the Dubai Frame, the world’s largest picture frame, and the egg-shaped Museum of the Future (which is still under construction);

Wafi Courtyard which is next to Raffles, a 5-star hotel shaped like… you guessed it - a pyramid

Skyline through the infamous and ubiquitous Dubai haze

View down to Sheikh Zayed Road (the main drag with all the super tall buildings)

Burj Khalifa looming and glistening in the distance

Under construction: this egg- / rugby ball- / crab claw-shaped building will be an innovation and design museum aptly called The Museum of the Future

The largest picture frame in the world (150m/492ft tall) - looking through one side shows modern Dubai and looking through the other shows the historic area of the city

The bus route also takes us through the old town, by the souks and blue mosque (more formally called the Al Farooq Omar Bin Al Khattab Mosque), and the marina. I’ve always been pretty disinterested in Dubai compared with many other places in the world, but I’m surprised to find there’s a fair bit more to it than the mental image I’d had of an unnecessarily showy and expensive city in the desert. It is also unnecessarily showy and expensive of course.

The less shiny and more soulful part of Dubai

Quite different from the Cape Town waterfront but still beautiful and the sound of calls to prayer from many mosques simultaneously filled the air

The most exciting part of the bus tour is when suddenly Sara yells and points to a small area beside a traffic light we’re waiting to turn green. There on the grass is an unexpected hoopoe! After I saw that one in Botswana and took a hurried photo so that Nash could identify the bizarre little bird for me, Sara fell in love with them but never managed to see one in Africa. Dubai, however, delivers, and Sara’s absolutely delighted to see one in the flesh (in the feather?). Just as I’m scrabbling for the camera though, the light turns green and the bus leaves the hoopoe behind before I’m able to take a snap.

We stay on the bus until it loops back to Dubai Mall for the second time and disembark there. I leave Sara at the entrance and go off in search of a wheelchair for her. After marching probably halfway across the mall, stopping very briefly to admire the massive aquarium with rays and sharks, I find the information desk I’ve been directed towards and, leaving my driving licence as collateral, pick up a wheelchair. Back past the aquarium, I find Sara, get her seated, and set off towards the Burj Khalifa.

The entrance to the tallest building in the world is inside the mall, and happily for us we’re allowed to take the mall’s wheelchair into the building and up to the viewing platforms. I pre-bought our tickets so after a small amount of faffing, we’re accelerated through the queues and shown into the lift.

The lift is super fast (10 metres/sec) and extremely smooth, and one minute after setting off the doors open to let us out on the 124th floor. There are inside and outside viewing areas, and we find a spot to watch the first of the evening fountain shows from above.

Unsurprisingly, The Dubai Fountain is the largest choreographed fountain in the world 🤦🏼‍♀️

The view up…because 124 stories clearly isn’t high enough

A slightly different view of more tall buildings and haze

Meet Dubai’s newest superheroine: Sticks & Boot

We’ve come for the sunset slot and manage to get a decent spot on the west of the building to watch the sun fall below the horizon. We can see a glimpse of The Palms along the coast, and I mentally add Dubai to the list of places I’d like to skydive because I’d love to properly see The Palms from above.

Not as amazing as an African sunset but still pretty great

The sky darkens and buildings begin to light up in colourful neon all around the Burj Khalifa. It strikes me that Dubai is in some ways a lot like Las Vegas (minus the alcohol).

We take the lift up to the 125th floor and briefly admire the exact same views from fractionally higher up before heading to the gift shop to get an ornament for our travel tree plus the obligatory fridge magnet.

We take the lift back down to earth, again impressed by its speed and smoothness, and realise we’re both ravenous because it’s now 7pm and lunch was nearly 8 hours ago. It’s been a pretty expensive day (Dubai is ridiculously pricey!) so we opt for some ramen in the food court only to find when it comes that the broth tastes a bit weird. It takes a moment to realise that it’s because we’re in a Muslim country and the traditional pork broth has been replaced with chicken. Disappointing.

Our flight isn’t leaving until nearly 2am but we decide to head back to the airport as it’s been a long day and we have an 18 hour flight coming up to New Zealand. Dubai Mall has a metro station, and after a brief internal debate I decide it’s probably better to push Sara to the station in the chair and then return it to the desk in the mall rather than Sara try to walk the likely short distance to the station. This proves to be an extremely good decision: it turns out to be nearly 1.5km from the food court to the metro station, and it takes almost half an hour of pushing to get us there. I leave Sara sitting in a photobooth with the two backpacks (there are no seats and she can’t stand for any length of time) and power off back towards the information desk in the mall.

Nearly 3km and 40 minutes of power walking later, I arrive back at the metro station, glad we’d decided against dessert at The Cheesecake Factory given how much longer it’s taken to get to this point than I’d ever expected. On the plus side, I definitely got my exercise in today!

We take the metro back to Dubai airport and are escorted back to the assisted passengers lounge. We head out of the lounge to grab a bite before the flight and are collected by one of the assisted passenger helpers to take us to the gate for boarding.

On the plane, we find we have bulkhead seats again, but this time ones with less space and it’s two seats across the aisle from each other. After a bit of trial and error, we establish the best option for Sara is to have the aisle to her left so that her injured leg can stretch out. The staff assure us that no one will walk past or knock Sara’s leg because business class is immediately in front of our row so, with the exception of a couple of staff members from time to time, nobody will be going between the two classes.

It quickly becomes clear that business class is extremely quiet on this flight - only a few of the seats are occupied and the rest are vacant. I’m hopeful that perhaps the staff will take sympathy on Sara and let her use one of the lie-flat seats to enable her to elevate her leg, something which is medically necessary. Apparently though this is outwith the realms of the possible and instead the surplus seats are used to upgrade other economy passengers who are presumably more frequent fliers with Emirates.

Although I wasn’t expecting a free upgrade for Sara, I am still disappointed at this outcome and spend the flight worried about the level of her discomfort and elevated risk of blood clot from being immobilised in the boot.

Beside me on the plane is a family of four, a mother and father plus two very small infants of probably 1 and 2 years old. There’s a bassinet for the youngest child, and then the mother and father sit together with the probably 2 year old beside me. Both children are understandably fidgety so the parents put a screen on and both kids into the seat next to me then promptly fall asleep, leaving two very young children awake, unsupervised, and constantly wriggling up against me. I don’t understand why the parents haven’t put the children in between them so that they’re effectively fencing the children in (thereby reducing the chances of a child escaping into the aisles unattended) and I feel as though there’s almost an implied expectation that I’m responsible for keeping the children contained on my side.

Both the constant wriggling and the feeling of discomfort at the idea of one of the children slipping past me and away mean I don’t sleep well. I spot that the mother is awake and ask her if she could possibly swap seats with the children for these reasons, but no, and it continues for the vast majority of the flight to Bali. At some point, the smallest child is put into the bassinet and the mother has disappeared with the older child when Sara sees the baby trying to make an escape bid. Sara manages to catch the attention of the person on the opposite side of the plane, who in turn wakes the sleeping father, who reacts quickly and grabs the baby to prevent it from falling / clambering out. It’s a relief when the announcement comes that we’ve begun our descent into Bali, the parents are both fully awake, and I can relax!