An endless road home from Argentina

TALI FEINBERG

Speaking from a quarantine hotel in Johannesburg, Brivik told the SA Jewish Report that it took a leap of faith to get himself on a flight home.

“When we last spoke at the beginning of April, I was low and frustrated. I watched as a fellow South African citizen maxed out his credit card on a ticket for a flight home from Argentina, only for it to be cancelled literally while they were boarding on the tarmac. That man was stuck at the Sao Paulo airport for 12 days! He alternated sleeping one night in the airport and one night at a hotel.”

Brivik and other South Africans stuck in Argentina decided they couldn’t go through that, and should stay put and wait it out. He formed a close connection with two older South African citizens stranded in Buenos Aires, and they joined forces to find an alternate solution.

They tried to raise funds for flights, and were given endless promises from embassies that always fell through. They even considered contacting a cruise-ship captain they had heard about who was collecting stranded people and dropping them off at ports where they could catch flights home, or hiring a bus to take them to another location. However, none of these plans came to fruition.

“You stare at the same four walls for days on end, and you start to go nuts,” says Brivik. He left home only every 10 days to stock up on food and supplies, and said Argentineans treated him like an alien, suspecting he was a foreigner who had coronavirus.

Brivik eventually heard about a possible flight from Qatar to Sao Paulo to Doha to Johannesburg. He and his South African comrades decided they had waited long enough and should try to get on this flight. It looked like it would be the last flight to South Africa for a long time.

Brivik finally took off from Buenos Aires on 24 May. He spent a small fortune on the flight, but realised the longer he stayed, the more expensive everything would become. He and his South African friends shared a room in the Sao Paulo Airport hotel for two nights where everything was exorbitantly expensive. “A bottle of water cost R100!” he says.

On 27 May, they boarded their flight for Doha, where one of his South African comrades was turned away because she didn’t have a South African passport even though she had been a permanent resident since 1989. She was only able to fly a few days afterwards.

“The flight was about half full, and took about 15 hours. In Doha, we had to wait another 10 hours at the airport, where everything was even more expensive.”

The flight to South Africa had about 280 passengers crammed into economy class, and took another 10 hours. “I think we travelled for about 40 hours, excluding the two-night stay in Sao Paulo,” says Brivik.

Now under quarantine in Johannesburg, he plans to drive back to Cape Town when he is released. Looking back on his ordeal, he estimates he spent about R220 000 on accommodation, his rent back home, food, four flight tickets that fell through, and the final flight ticket that got him home.

“I’m definitely not travelling again anytime soon!” he says. And even though he is thrilled to be on South African soil, he doesn’t know when he will see his girlfriend again, as she lives in Mexico. In a new world order with air travel off the cards, this is the next challenge he will have to face.