I took a flight from the new King Shaka International Airport last week, and was bitterly disappointed.  Not by the airport itself, I hasten to add, which was everything that a gleaming, glass and chrome and concrete airport should be.  It is as sleek and futuristic as Johannesburg’s fabulous air-travel hub, OR Tambo International Airport, with acres of landscaped parking, smooth flowing walkways and echoingly cavernous spaces. When I arrived to check in, I was greeted by a nice-looking youngster in a suit, who gestured me towards a touch-screen podium, where I checked in all by myself (something I have never done before).  I still had to take my single suitcase off to the check-in counter, but the place was so empty that there was no queue and the bag was whisked off with a smile. The King Shaka International Airport could most certainly grace any large city in the world, and that’s exactly my point.  Durban isn’t any large city anywhere in the world, it is a tropical African port, with Miami-style beach-front hotels, Victorian mansions, Indian temples, and sprawling townships all lassoed together around a vast throbbing palm-tree-lined harbour.  It has a unique personality: happily lack-a-daisical with even the palm trees having a louche and lazy sway.  Durban is laid-back and easy-going, colourful and congested.  It’s impossible to travel far in Durban without being seduced by the smell of curry, the vibrancy of a bougainvillea leaning helplessly against a fence, the shouts of taxi touts and the feel of salt air.  So what is it doing with a state-of-the-art, slick and streamlined airport which is indistinguishable from any other vaguely prosperous city with pretensions of grandeur? The old Durban airport captured Durban’s shabby happy-go-lucky atmosphere perfectly.  Disembarking – invariably from Johannesburg – you first felt, as the cabin crew opened the door, the hot wet air that smelled of aircraft fuel.  Then you saw the vibrant green of the grass and the garish billboards.  Climbing carefully down those aircraft steps made you feel as if you had – well, arrived, but in a different sense.  There was a slight inclination to pose at the top of the steps, patting the hairstyle into place and holding onto hat and skirt a la Marilyn Monroe or the Queen when arriving at some exotic destination and preparing oneself for a cheeky breeze and the paparazzi.  Walking over the tarmac to the small terminal building felt so darned retro, harking back to the heyday of air travel. The buildings were slap-happy Art Deco, with orange and turquoise signage that immediately made you think of hot days on the beach, and the vast tropical fish-tank that greeted you was an indelible sign that you were no longer somewhere where deadlines, ringing phones and impatient bosses were anything to be taken note of.

Last May I conducted a survey for the Airports Company to find out what travellers thought of the old Durban Airport.  With only one exception they loved the fact that it was small and friendly, people-sized and manageable.  The comment was made, again and again, that it had a personality, a character, that set it apart from all other destinations.

One can understand and accept the need for vast echoing caverns and hallways at ORTIA in Johannesburg.  It is a hub of air travel, a transfer point, a gateway to Africa.  Its role is to welcome you to a bling-and-happening city, or to speed you effortlessly on your way to your next destination.

No-one arrives in Durban in order to take a connection to somewhere else – Durban IS a destination; it’s the city that serves our holiday coast.  So what’s with the enormous and featureless expanses of concrete and chrome?  These space age materials don’t get a patina over time, they just get grubby and then replaced.  Modern airports, unfortunately, are not built to be quaint.

I’m not even going to go into the wisdom of taking an airport that was ten minutes away from the city centre along a slick and quick road, and moving it to a piece of otherwise-scenic country an hour away in the opposite direction, along a road that is choked in rush hour.  I won’t mention the high parking costs, or the – gulp – toll booth that is quite blatantly placed in order to fleece supposedly-rich travellers.  Or the fact that, in my opinion, long-haul air-travel has seen its peak time and will slowly decrease as it becomes a) unaffordable; b) unfashionable and c) ecologically unfeasible.   The vast echoing caverns of KSIA are going to remain, I suspect, always too big and always too impersonal. 

So – even though I had an easy and effortless flight from KSIA, I couldn’t help but feel that something full of dotty charm and personality had been sacrificed for official convenience and profitability and, perhaps, some ivory tower attempt at aggrandizement.  And sadly, in the process, something important has been lost.