Fasten your money belts: air travel in Africa

Hobbiton is Cheaper

Don’t get me wrong, I do love England. But looking out over its green and pleasant land, rolling meadows all fenced and portioned off into duvet-sized paddocks, my restless African heart always gets the gnawing feeling that this will always be Hobbiton, and I am Bilbo Jones. I long for the heartspace of Africa and the mad, bad, ‘n good people who call it home. Annoying then, that flying around Africa is exponentially more expensive. The upper African stratosphere appears awash with dollars, euros, and pounds. How else can you explain the eye-wateringly expensive cost of air travel in Africa?

Veuve Cliquot or Warm Beer

Take two 90 minute flights: For R1 100, Air France will fly you from London to Paris- the city of lights, exotic baguettes, and cheap Veuve Cliquot. Voila! SAA, on the other hand, will take R4 800 from you, and plonk you one and a half hours north of the Limpopo, in Harare- city of power cuts, bread riots, and warm airport beer. Blimmin…You don’t need champagne tastes or a single bead abacus to see the maths is skewed.

Luggage Theft, All Part of the Service

Sure, there are lots of “extras” included free of charge in African air travel. These may include, but are not limited to: endless, “routine maintenance” performed on aeroplanes built sometime before South Africa got television; interminable, will-to-live-sapping delays while pilfering baggage staff rummage through your luggage, then promptly lose it somewhere between OR Tambo and Dar es Salaam; and visa queues like a stampede as sheep dip.

The farmyard motif is continued by most African governments’ all-the hogs-to-the-trough approach to visa pricing. Visas, already hidden in a byzantine maze of red tape, are seen as a major money-earner, not as a way to grant foreign investors easy access to the country. This get-rich-quick-at-the-turnstile greed shows a self-defeating myopia to encouraging actual foreign trade. The goose that laid the golden egg remains stuck in immigration, and anyway the eggs have already been stolen at baggage control.

“YOU Try Harder”

Car rental companies are getting their oar in too. Once out of the frying pan of passport control you’re into the fire of a torrid car-rental gauntlet, a mystery tombola of hidden costs. Not only is the deposit is roughly the same amount as the replacement cost for the vehicle, Avis Harare has prepared a slew of charges hidden from your Internet booking that surface unknown, like molehills on a croquet lawn.

Nose out into the traffic, and your thimble-sized city car promptly vanishes into a pothole the size of the Zimbabwe deficit. Peering nervously over the edge like an edgy meerkat, and you’ll see an NGO 4×4 the size of a rowing team of rhino barrelling down towards you, like a fat American on his way to a pie-contest. These brand spanking white NGOs mobiles clog Harare’s roads like cholesterol in the city bloodstream. And they bring their appetites for excess with them.

I Blame Bono

Now that the entire American middle class has climbed Kilimanjaro, they’re more amenable to being harangued about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat. While I have no problem with humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education, or affordable drugs- the presence of NGOs and their foreign currency surely drives up the price of a travel, car rental, and various other whatnots.

Pimp My Land Rover

Unfortunately, few alternatives to a travel exist north of the Limpopo. Trains, when they run, are slow as lichen, erratic, and packed like cattle carts with pimply, Kilimanjaro-bound backpackers, grizzled travel writers, and the years intake of fortune-seekers on their way to Johannesburg. Going by road only really works if you’re Kingsley Holgate driving a pumped up, accessorized to the hilt 4×4, that makes you look like you’re filming season four of Pimp My Land Rover.

Africa rewards the intrepid traveller with skyfulls of heart space, and mornings of everyday something new, that quicken the senses with a rough gladness. It’s peopled with openhearted, larger-than-life originals, friends I cherish. Sad then, that citizenship of the United States of Africa carries such a highprice tag.

I blame Bono, and the conga of euros, pounds, and dollars in his wake. Foreign currency has inflated prices, and led governments to see visitors as ATMs, not welcome guests. Until we stop buying U2 albums, air travel in Africa will remain marginally less expensive than your child’s varsity education.

If you enjoyed this post on air travel, then you’ll love the Passenger’s Guide to Aircraft Etiquette