We got up and started packing ready for the off, by this time we'd accumulated quite an amount of souvenirs, gifts and other non-essentials which needed to be squeezed into our baggage. For the first time since leaving Cape Town I managed to fit my own shoes into my own rucksack, until now poor old James had been carrying them but I decided it was time to start using my own hand-luggage bag. We left at about midday for Johannesburg International Airport, Bill drove us there telling us stories of the different areas we passed though on the journey (approx. 1hr). After check-in we had lunch at Juicy Lucy, selling toasties and fresh fruit juices - I had strawberry, the best fresh juice I've ever tasted and from an airport of all places! We didn't have long to wait until boarding - just enough time for lunch and to buy some newspapers in the kiosk. We flew British Airways for this internal leg of the journey and we had quite a bit more legroom than on the KLM planes but this was a short-haul flight so the comparison may not be totally fair.
We arrived at Cape Town Airport at roughly 16:30 and jumped in a taxi, the car was a dilapidated old Mercedes driven by the greasiest cabbie I think I've ever seen. He was friendly enough though and offered to drive us back to the airport on the following morning which I accepted to save us having to bother the next day, we arranged a time then paid him. When we arrived at the hotel (the Holiday Inn, Greenmarket Square) James told me he didn't feel safe with the driver and there were no seatbelts in the back so we decided to abandon the driver and get a cab from the rank on the next day. We checked-in and dropped the bags off in the room which had unmade beds and hadn't been cleaned, we mentioned this to the receptionist on the way out.
We went to Global Car Hire to try and sort out the mess and perform damage limitation if we could, but the woman there behind the counter was a tough one to deal with and it ended up half-discussion and half-argument. They showed us a quote for the repairs at R1600 (£100) which seemed a bit steep so we made sure she was going to get more quotes, it's always hard to know who to trust in these instances but as everything is cheaper in South Africa anyway (not just because of the exchange rate) this would be the equivalent of a much larger quote back home. We left having achieved little and got the feeling that either way they would end up winning as the damage was not specifically written down on the check-out form, this officious attitude was in stark contrast to their previous attitude of "as long as comes back with six wheels and five doors it's fine" (this is the moral of the story). We arranged to come back the next day to see another quote and finalise things then returned to the hotel, showered and went to Computeria (the Internet café).
For the evening we went to Kennedy's Cigar Bar; we had drinks in the bar and were looked-after by the waitress that James had met whilst I had been at the wedding, she kept making sure that we had drinks and then took us upstairs when we decided to eat. The bar area downstairs is decorated with enormous photographs of famous cigar smokers (pride of place being reserved for JFK himself) and framed covers of Cigar magazine, the restaurant area is decorated with a touch of class and gives the impression of an exclusive gentleman's club with smoking lounge adjacent to the dining area. The food was good though not the best we'd had throughout the whole trip and the service was reasonable, we couldn't find anyone to give us the bill so we transferred everything to our bar-tab downstairs so that at the end of the night the waitress got our tips and not the restaurant guys. We sat drinking cocktails in the downstairs lounge until we could drink no more, a cigar seller kept offering us a wide selection of cigars but we both declined.
Back at the hotel we made
a list of the things we had to do the following day and the most efficient order
we could do them in, this took a while as we had lots of things to do, little
time to do them in and we were drunk.