Tales from the Desert

Forging ahead

**************

I've always considered myself to be a fairly honest
and decent person. That is perhaps until I came to
the Middle East.

It all started with planning a trip to Kuwait to visit
my good friend, Dave who lives there. Kuwait had recently
changed their visa laws, so that anyone in possession of
a valid GCC country residency visa (this includes the UAE),
would receive a visa upon entry into their country.
This does not count if you carry a South African passport,
it seems. In addition to your valid GCC residency visa,
South Africans must also provide proof of their
academic qualifications. It is notoriously difficult
to travel with one of these dark green passports.
I can count the countries we don’t need a visa
for on my two hands.

It is against this backdrop that my entry into the shady
world of forgery and smuggling illegal meat substances
into a Muslim country are set. To exonerate myself,
I would like to say that I did indeed study and obtain
my academic qualification over a three-year period.
I am also still a strict vegetarian.

As someone who has travelled extensively for a few years,
I naturally, did not have the slightest idea where
my original degree certificate was. I set about utilising
my aforesaid legally obtained, by-the-sweat-of-my-brow,
graphic skills, and created a document which as closely
as possible resembled my degree. I also came up with
a story to match why it seemed a bit pixelated.
'It had to be emailed to me, post-haste as an jpeg
attachment from South Africa'.

On Thursday night, I finally set out for the airport.
I then proceeded to charm and cajole my way onto the flight.
Various phone calls were made to and from Kuwait by a
very helpful Emirati man, pixelated certificate in hand.
Still, this took up the best part of an hour.

My flight was already flashing an urgent red,
'gate closing, final call', by the time I finally got
through passport control.

I was growing more nervous by the minute. And then,
I hit the fourth and final carry-on luggage check.
Once again, I had to put all my bags and appendages
through the x-ray machine, except that the painting
I was carrying to Kuwait for Dave would not fit through
the x-ray! Why was this machine suddenly smaller?
So I was pulled out of line, and the stony-faced airport
security officials would not let me through.

'What's inside box?' they demanded.
It's a painting, in a frame with glass, I answered.
'No! No glass, you can't take on plane.
Must take back outside, or leave here, and lose it!'
I was growing a bit hysterical at this point,
trying to reason that there was no way that
I could go back outside, through passport control,
check-in and various bag-and-body-scanning procedures
to leave the painting with someone, on the 'outside'.

I started to gesture wildly and make clear that I
would miss my flight! The three Arabic men started
to back away from the hysterical red-haired woman,
who was clearly intent on making their Thursday night,
a difficult one. In the meantime, the dead pig was
sweating silently, but determinedly in my carry-on luggage.

In a flash of what I thought was a theatrically
impressive performance, I suddenly seized the box and
started tearing off the tape with my hands.
This display was possibly made even more ridiculous
by the fact that the confiscated sharp objects box,
containing roughly about 200 pairs of scissors in assorted sizes,
was less than half a metre away from where we were standing.
Still, I opened the box, pulled out the painting and said,
'Look, this is what it is, ok?'

The senior-most official stepping forward,
knocked on the glass covering the painting and looked over
at me disapprovingly.
'Why you say "glass", this no glass, you go!'
he said, pointing to the escalator.

Two ladies helped to tape up the box and I started running
across the length of Dubai International Airport.
At a brisk walk, this normally takes around 15 minutes.
I must have legged it in 5, half-dragging, half-lifting
the massive painting in the one hand, whilst my carry-on bag,
camera bag and handbag were flapping about my person.

I arrived at the gate, red, sweating and panting.
'You must be Miss Swart?', the smiling airline official said
as he took my ticket. I was the last person to board the flight.

I sank into my seat, with the runway disappearing
underneath us into the night. As the events of the previous
two and a half hours ran through my head, I thought that
the next day, airline security would probably be running
that tape in their break-room, laughing and slapping their
thighs at the spectacle I had created.

And I thought, I wonder who does have the last laugh in
this case? Since I was the one on my way to Kuwait with a
forged degree certificate, a dead pig, AND a painting that
was damn-well covered with glass.


*Countries South Africans DON'T need a visa for:
Malta
Switzerland
New Zealand
Israel
Mozambique
Botswana
Singapore
UK (and then ONLY after they're decidedly rude,
make you spend 4 hours in customs,
and do chest x-rays to check for TB)

(These are the ones I know about. Feel free to add
any others you're aware of. If any.)