I can’t remember where I heard this. Just a bit of trivia I hoovered up under society’s sofa I guess but it seems the pineapple we have on one of our suitcases has rather a salacious significance when used in a certain way. Apparently a pineapple shape outside your door means there’s shenanigans of a swinger variety occurring on the other side of said door. Our pineapple is so we can identify our bag on a carousel loaded with similar bags. Remind me not to leave this bag outside our door on the cruise because cruises are supposedly rampant with this behaviour. Who knew? It’s rather perplexing when I think the CB and I have been amongst the youngest passengers on our cruises. Most of our cruise-mates have struggled to stay upright let alone impress a stranger with their horizontal tango expertise.

This could  be the least of our problems however. I just read a news article that suggests South Africa is about to become a failed state. Not a good state of affairs if you’re landing there tomorrow, as we are. Now before we get too excited about this it has to be said I read this on news.com.au which is where Rupert sends his work experience kids to pretend they are journalists. It’s hard to take their dross with anything more than a grain of salt when usually 6 of the first 8 articles are about The Block or Married at First Sight. These worldly hard-bitten cynical journos think Josh giving Bree a good sorting-out when we were all hoping against hope that he’d play hide the sausage with Summer, is breaking news to them.

I’ve been a South Africa watcher for decades. They are a major producer, exporter and consumer of coal which is my thing (let the debate or abuse begin). Their state-owned power producer Eskom is about to precipitate a collapse of the electricity grid causing even more mayhem than usual. Fortunately I’ve also been watching The Last of Us so know how to survive in a dystopian shit-storm and as previously mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I can run faster than the CB if the shit-storm shit hits the fan (just joking, yuk yuk). It’s not unexpected though. Mandela stepping onto the mainland in 1990 was the high point and it’s been more or less downhill ever since. As long as we get up Table Mountain on Thursday without a power-cut stranding us half-way and get to sample what I am reliably informed are excellent wines on Friday, all will be well. We escape on Saturday.

When I worked full-time for a living and spent a large proportion of that time on the road (or in the air to be more accurate) we used to say that the countries you least wanted to go to were the ones that made it hardest for you to get there. For me that was Iran, Pakistan and at least the first few times, India. The child bride and I are about to embark on a cruise up the West African coast from Cape Town to Lisbon and obtaining visas for the various stops is proving somewhat problematic. But first let me recount a story in a similar vein.

Back in the day I spent an awful lot of time in India. It wasn’t always awful, in fact it rarely was except when a severe bout of the inevitable descended. Descended right through me in fact. But that’s a different and not really worth revisiting, story. So on this particular trip I was looking forward to coming home in a day or so when I got a call from my boss. I know he’s going to read this so I’ll keep the abuse to a minimum. If you are a regular reader of this blog you will have read the story about when he asked me, on a Sunday night, to go to India on Monday during the 1989 pilot’s strike and I didn’t have a visa. This was a bit different – he wanted me to go to Pakistan.

Not such a big deal you would think because it’s next door. It is though, when your passport’s almost full. Going back a step, I was pretty pally with the Austrade Senior Trade Commissioner who worked out of the Australian High Commission which is next door to the Pakistan High Commission as luck would have it. He gave me the name of the Pakistani senior visa guy so I walked next door, told the security guys who I needed to see and one of them escorted me to his office. That’s when I was told I needed a full blank page in my passport (which I didn’t have) for the visa stamp (no sharing it seemed) and the inside back cover, the bit stuck to the cardboard, wasn’t good enough.

Back to the Aus High Commission I went and an hour later after rushing off to find somewhere that did passport photos I had a brand new passport in my hot little hand. It was hot because the passport has hot – straight off the presses. So back next door I went.

On arriving back at the Pakistan HC it seemed all of the security guys had gone to lunch and not only had they left the gate unlocked, it was wide open. In India! So I walked in completely unmolested. I knew where the visa guy’s office was so I walked across the courtyard and into the building like the invisible man and knocked on the visa guy’s door. He didn’t seem too perturbed to see me and proceeded to get my visa stamped. Somewhat bemused I was thinking to myself that a James Bond gig would be pretty easy if all you had to do to break into a foreign embassy was wait until lunch-time. This was some time ago and there has been a bit of ugliness between the two countries since then so I am sure they have beefed up security by introducing staggered meal times.

That was that although as an epilogue to the process, when my Pakistan Airlines flight took off it felt like we had been fired out of an almost vertical cannon. I have only experienced similar prolonged steepness, like sitting in the space shuttle, when flying over the Andes from Santiago in Chile where the ground seems to be only a few hundred feet below you for about half an hour. The relationship being what it is between India and Pakistan I guess they wanted to get out of missile range as quickly as possible.

I can’t remember whether all of that aggravation was worth it. I never managed to sell a tonne of coal into Pakistan (with that company – I did later with another) so I guess ultimately, it wasn’t.

Back to our trip. We are visiting South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Gambia, the Canary Islands, Madeira and Portugal. As with most e-applications these days you are presented with drop down menus and limited choices. Interestingly most of these guys are not with the multiple gender program yet because you only get two choices in their genetically based application process. Not even three let alone the 74 listed on most university application forms! Guess they’ve got more pressing issues. The menu for port of entry for one country provided for three land based and two airports. Problem. Problem has not gone away and their embassy with responsibility for Australia which is not in Australia is, like Joe Biden, not taking questions. And I was getting as much sense out of one of the others as journalists get from Joe Biden’s press secretary (but she is the first black, immigrant, lesbian press secretary, so it’s alright). I actually completed this application before an administrator asked for our flight itinerary. After explaining three times that we would arrive by boat so we didn’t have flight itineraries, they eventually explained they only issued visas for entry by air. Now I’m politely explaining to them why they need to reimburse the visa fees I paid to complete the process (or so I thought). I could be the victim of a very elaborate scam here.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. We spent three days in Russia off a cruise a while back and it was the only place in Europe that wanted us to buy (the operative word) a visa. We got off and on the boat numerous times without an immigration officer in sight. Maybe this trip will be the same. Stay posted to find out.