Going to Africa takes a long time.

The nonstop flight to South Africa from New Jersey takes 14 to 15 hours.  It looks good on paper because it's a nonstop but that really is an unGodly amount of time to spend on an airplane (I'll acknowledge that before the Jet Age people spent even more time on flights).  

These are not comfortable seats to occupy for any length of time.  There isn't really any ability to walk around during the flight.  The flight crew tries hard to make it tolerable.  Whatever sleep deprivation you endure will need to be made up for when you arrive.  In our case we were over the South Atlantic, 8 hours in, when the sun came up, and we still had Six hours to go.

In our case we arrived around 5pm, got through customs and passport control, and checked into an airport hotel, a nice, clean comfortable room to take a shot at reclaiming lost sleep.  But not before trying to get fed in the hotel restaurant that evening.  They only served us one of the two meals we ordered, and we shared it.

But we were happy we had arrived:

I've decided to ask all waiters to bring me what they think is best in the way of beer or wine while on this trip.  Here I asked him to bring me a good local beer.  This is what I got:

In South Africa, this is the beer of "Champions," but for me it's "Mabel, another Black Label."  A PBR level product.

So we slept in a real bed and got ourselves up the next morning to much shorter flight in a much smaller jet to Kruger National Park.

Safari.