Visiting Telkom's world of fantasy

Saturday, 10 January 1998

The age of romance is almost upon us, but right now, it's up in the air

Blame Telkom. I dialled 1023, got put on hold, and found myself singing: "You fill up my senses, like a night in the forest, like a mountain in springtime, like a walk in the rain..."

John Denver lives on. Annie's Song is extraordinarily beautiful, written by Denver for his wife, who promptly left him. Music doesn't get any more tragic than singing about unrequited love.

In Telkom's world however, tinny electronic strains of Annie's Song interspersed with a Seffrican voice bilingually informing you that you are number 33 in the queue is like being stuck in the elevator from hell...

It was while listening to that maniacal serenade ("Come let me love you. U is nommer drie-en-twintig in die lyn") that I remembered another Denver song, Leaving On A Jet Plane, (which of course provoked a flood of black humour when he died in a plane crash late last year, but that's another story...), and that got me thinking about modern travel.

Remember when travel was inherently elegant? You got onto the train, and the conductor showed you to your cabin, and you dressed for dinner and went over to the dining car, and befriended that rather stunning brunette because they happened to seat you together since the table was full, and you ordered from the menu, and sipped cocktails, and then got up and went back to your cabin where the porter had converted your seat into an elegant double-bed?

(I didn't do any of this. I was too young, and all those trains were whites-only, but that's not the point.)

It was the stuff of romance, of intrigue. And not just trains - ships! I was six years old when my grandfather took me from East London back to Durban on the Pendennis Castle. After dinner, there were liqueurs and cigars and strolls on the deck...

Now, along comes the 21st century, and we're so much in a hurry that we don't have time for the romance. I mean, can you imagine a 747 as the setting for Murder on the Orient Express?

Face it, flying isn't as sophisticated as it used to be. I remember those SAA 707s with their assortment of perfume and the bottle of Old Spice in the loos, and little airplane picture postcards so that you could write happy thoughts to your friends on the ground...

But there used to be an even more elegant way to fly ­ airships. Ah, those Zeppelins. The pianist plunking away at the baby grand while you sat around tables, and they cut you loose from the ground and you rose gracefully into the sky, never so high that you could not see the ground...

Why did they die? Well, the Zeppelins used to be filled with hydrogen which was somewhat silly since hydrogen burns quite magnificently. (I found this out quite stupidly in chemistry class at university when I took a whiff of H2 and breathed onto a bunsen burner. Then again, I was a lot luckier than passengers on the Hindenberg).

Helium was the safe alternative, but the United States held a monopoly on helium and would not sell it to other countries until the end of the Cold War for "strategic reasons".

(Translation: the Germans were in the airship business, the Americans were in the airplane business.)

Helium is now widely available, and as a result, the airship is about to be resurrected. I mentioned recently that Jonathan Hamilton of Gauteng has been working on building the world's largest airship.

He will probably be pipped to the post by Germany's Cargolifter company out of Wiesbaden which plans to build three Zeppelins a year by the year 2000.

A return to the age of romance in air travel? Drifting lazily across the Orange River, over Victoria Falls, following the Nile, crossing the Greek Isles, champagne over Paris... (Indiana Jones, eat your heart out.)

"Telkom, can I help you?"