The Farewell of Hopelessness
To this day, the 5th of May 2000, remains to be the most heartrending day of my life. Yet, this day was a pivotal moment in my life.
The drive to Jan Smuts International Airport, felt as if it took an eternity. Ironically, however, it was not even 1/10th of the journey. Speeding along the concrete highway in painful absolute silence, with my entire family crammed in the car. The knowledge of what was to come was numbing. Looking out the window, I relived all the memories of my short life; it seemed my entire life flashed before my eyes as we drove through all I knew.
We arrived at the airport a good five hours before our flight departed. The recently tightened security seemed to halt the already inefficient airport. The security boy directed us in to a car park and carried our luggage to the door, where he accepted our tip and left with the words “See you soon”, as he went to watch our car. That always struck me as an odd thing to say, when clearly he wouldn’t. We checked in our luggage, five tightly packed bags that contained the entirety of our life for the next six months. After being freed from the burden of the baggage trolleys, whose wheels followed the trend of shipping trolleys, we found a Milky Lane, where we indulged in South Africa’s best waffles, yet the mood remained as heavy as Christ’s last supper, with everyone avoiding conversation and eye contact, to delay the inevitable tears.
The final boarding call for the flight to Kuala Lumpur hastened the farewells. We said our final goodbyes, clutched in each other’s arms. Some goodbyes were for eternity, and some were for an indefinite amount of time. This ritual was made even more difficult by the knowledge, that it was not final, even though the prospects of being reunited with our family was positive, the trepidation of having to loose them again was simply unbearable.
After a rather miserable sixteen-hour flight, we arrived at our stop over, the humid air almost as thick as the atmosphere during the farewell. Being the sceptical South Africans both my mother and father are, they disallowed eating and drinking anything from this foreign land, during the entire thirty-six hour duration of our stop over; with the exception of the bottle of natural soda water from Cape town, which we kept from the plane. Still besotted and overwhelmed from the departure, and excessively tired after an awkward flight sitting besides complete strangers; with my father, mother and sister being scattered around the plane, I was exhausted. However, a bed to sleep in was not possible, as some discrepancy with our South African status, forbade us from leaving the airport terminal. These thirty-six hours of being isolated in the departure lounge, being watched by passport control, provided much time for the reflection and contemplation of our lives. Our future was most uncertain. We had nothing, except our luggage and life savings, which was in the form of traveller’s cheques, hidden in our pockets; being AU$5000 below the tourist limit to bring into Australia.
Finally, after another nine-hour flight we arrived in Australia! Not quite at our final destination, our future home, of Adelaide, but we were an hour’s flight away, in Melbourne; where we endured another eight-hour wait. It was here that we faced customs and immigration. We passed through customs with relative ease; only being “randomly” selected for a complete baggage search, bomb exploration and drug inspection. Immigration was not quite so easy, the respectable officer seemed to have much difficulty in grasping the concept that our birth certificates had a different incorrect spelling of our names, as did our passports and visa application forms; something we grew up accepting as the “African way”. Nevertheless, this dilemma alleviated us of three hours waiting in the domestic departure lounge, instead we received the privilege of sitting on hard institutional plastic chairs, whilst we were interviewed and had our intentions questioned.
We arrived in Adelaide on the 6th of May, knowing no one we were, to say the least, lost. However, we made our first “friend” promptly, the poor unsuspecting man behind the AVIS hire car counter. After getting around the “South African” and “Australian” language barrier, we hired a two door Ford Festiva. Once in the car park, thunderstruck by the intensity of the forty-four degree heat, we began the rather delicate process of packing the “car” with our entire life. To this day, I can still not look at a Ford Festiva without remembering the sheer pain that both my sister and I endured on journey to the caravan park from the airport; pace pressed firmly upon the window. The transit itself was not without adventure, getting used to a “speed limit” of sixty, a mere half of what we were used to, and the principles behind a traffic circle which completely escaped my father.
Once we arrived at our caravan park, we were sh
To this day, the 5th of May 2000, remains to be the most heartrending day of my life. Yet, this day was a pivotal moment in my life.
The drive to Jan Smuts International Airport, felt as if it took an eternity. Ironically, however, it was not even 1/10th of the journey. Speeding along the concrete highway in painful absolute silence, with my entire family crammed in the car. The knowledge of what was to come was numbing. Looking out the window, I relived all the memories of my short life; it seemed my entire life flashed before my eyes as we drove through all I knew.
We arrived at the airport a good five hours before our flight departed. The recently tightened security seemed to halt the already inefficient airport. The security boy directed us in to a car park and carried our luggage to the door, where he accepted our tip and left with the words “See you soon”, as he went to watch our car. That always struck me as an odd thing to say, when clearly he wouldn’t. We checked in our luggage, five tightly packed bags that contained the entirety of our life for the next six months. After being freed from the burden of the baggage trolleys, whose wheels followed the trend of shipping trolleys, we found a Milky Lane, where we indulged in South Africa’s best waffles, yet the mood remained as heavy as Christ’s last supper, with everyone avoiding conversation and eye contact, to delay the inevitable tears.
The final boarding call for the flight to Kuala Lumpur hastened the farewells. We said our final goodbyes, clutched in each other’s arms. Some goodbyes were for eternity, and some were for an indefinite amount of time. This ritual was made even more difficult by the knowledge, that it was not final, even though the prospects of being reunited with our family was positive, the trepidation of having to loose them again was simply unbearable.
After a rather miserable sixteen-hour flight, we arrived at our stop over, the humid air almost as thick as the atmosphere during the farewell. Being the sceptical South Africans both my mother and father are, they disallowed eating and drinking anything from this foreign land, during the entire thirty-six hour duration of our stop over; with the exception of the bottle of natural soda water from Cape town, which we kept from the plane. Still besotted and overwhelmed from the departure, and excessively tired after an awkward flight sitting besides complete strangers; with my father, mother and sister being scattered around the plane, I was exhausted. However, a bed to sleep in was not possible, as some discrepancy with our South African status, forbade us from leaving the airport terminal. These thirty-six hours of being isolated in the departure lounge, being watched by passport control, provided much time for the reflection and contemplation of our lives. Our future was most uncertain. We had nothing, except our luggage and life savings, which was in the form of traveller’s cheques, hidden in our pockets; being AU$5000 below the tourist limit to bring into Australia.
Finally, after another nine-hour flight we arrived in Australia! Not quite at our final destination, our future home, of Adelaide, but we were an hour’s flight away, in Melbourne; where we endured another eight-hour wait. It was here that we faced customs and immigration. We passed through customs with relative ease; only being “randomly” selected for a complete baggage search, bomb exploration and drug inspection. Immigration was not quite so easy, the respectable officer seemed to have much difficulty in grasping the concept that our birth certificates had a different incorrect spelling of our names, as did our passports and visa application forms; something we grew up accepting as the “African way”. Nevertheless, this dilemma alleviated us of three hours waiting in the domestic departure lounge, instead we received the privilege of sitting on hard institutional plastic chairs, whilst we were interviewed and had our intentions questioned.
We arrived in Adelaide on the 6th of May, knowing no one we were, to say the least, lost. However, we made our first “friend” promptly, the poor unsuspecting man behind the AVIS hire car counter. After getting around the “South African” and “Australian” language barrier, we hired a two door Ford Festiva. Once in the car park, thunderstruck by the intensity of the forty-four degree heat, we began the rather delicate process of packing the “car” with our entire life. To this day, I can still not look at a Ford Festiva without remembering the sheer pain that both my sister and I endured on journey to the caravan park from the airport; pace pressed firmly upon the window. The transit itself was not without adventure, getting used to a “speed limit” of sixty, a mere half of what we were used to, and the principles behind a traffic circle which completely escaped my father.
Once we arrived at our caravan park, we were sh