South Africa Part 1 - Outward Bound

I'm going to split this into sections, for easy readability.

First up, the journey there.

Esther and I met Katherine at Heathrow on 31st March.

We flew Iberia, via Madrid, to Johannesburg, uneventfully. However, the food was awful, you had to pay for it on the short haul flight, and the meals on the main flight were manky - grey chicken for dinner, nasty looking cold meat for breakfast.
And the flight attendants were grumpy. And old. Hollywood lied to me.

We arrived in SA late, and we rushed from the international terminal to the domestic, to be told our connecting South African flight had closed. The man then tried to check us onto the next flight, only to discover the tickets we had were blacklisted.

We originally bought our tickets from MAS Travel, who took money from people, issued tickets, then ran off to Pakistan with the money, without paying the airlines. In December, Iberia contacted us about it, and they honoured the tickets, issuing new e-tickets, including the last leg with SAA.

However, SAA blacklisted the tickets without telling us, and we were forced to buy new tickets to Durban, hopefully we can claim back from the travel insurance.

We got on a later flight, picked up the hire car, and I drove the 300KM from Durban to St Lucia in one hit, arriving at about 7pm on the Sunday.

Morals to the story:

Beware of cheap tickets from small travel agents
Don't fly Iberia
Don't travel on April 1st