The flights were pretty uneventful, but felt long - 17 hours flying time, with a few hours stopover in Dubai. My flight had been due into Dubai just after midnight with my connecting flight due to leave just before 4am. I had been expecting to spend a few hours in an empty airport with maybe one coffee shop still open - how wrong could I be! With flights scheduled to depart all through the night, the airport was busy, all the bars and restaurants doing a busy trade, and the designer shops selling their designer labels at vast prices. I resisted the temptation of buying a $5000 mobile phone, passed on the caviar, and settled for a Heineken instead.

I'm sure that many people are going to surprise me on this trip. The first was the lady set next to me on the flight from Dubai to Cape Town. She was probably in her mid-fifties, well dressed, obviously well educated and talked proudly of how her 3 sons were doing well in their careers in law and medicine. We got talking about my trip and she said she had never been on holiday or travelled anywhere in Africa outside of South Africa. She said that she would like to see more of her continent but couldn't as the other countries would be populated by black people. While she accepted and had embraced the changes in South Africa following the end of Apartheid, she explained that for so long it had been ingrained into her that black people were a danger and not to be trusted. While she could see that this was not the case, she felt she would never be able to visit a country with a majority black population - she just wouldn't feel safe. Apartheid was abolished just 17 years ago. While no one would doubt the level of change that has occurred since then - to go from a society where everything - buses, shops, cinemas, beaches, suburbs - were segregated, to a free democracy with a black president is a remarkable achievement, but I was surprised that the old mindset still remained.