Never had a problem flying to and from Africa so far, fingers crossed.

My first international trip was from Adelaide to Melbourne, then Hong Kong for a week, then to London where I was to live for at least a year or two.

My luggage was sent to Sydney, the flight landed in Melbourne then flew to Sydney. I know the ticket handler put the wrong tag on the suitcase, as he insisted my cabin bag also be checked and I saw him put a Sydney tag on it. It was retrieved and changed, but the suitcase was already gone, and the bastard would have known he had mistakenly tagged it for Sydney as well.

As it happened my wife was flying on the same flight but heading to Syndey. A few weeks later would fly to the UK to join me. She saw my suitcase on the luggage conveyor and had it sent to me in HK. The useless airline was only going to send it back to Adelaide ... she insisted it had to go to HK and after a long argument the airline agreed. It arrived several days later,

Johannesburg though is notoriously bad for 'misplacing' luggage. Louis of the Afton Guest House years ago discovered a warehouse existed with over a hundred safari rifles in storage that had got "lost" over several years ... he put out messages on the internet so people could try to track down their "lost" firearms.

While I was hunting in Zimbabwe for elephant, a story did the rounds that one hunter had his H&H double rifle worth in excess of a hundred thousand dollars go 'missing' at Johannesburh airport ... expensive to insure and more expensive to loose permanently. Don't know if it was recovered by its owner.

If doing multiple flights I try to leave an adeqaute time period between flights. So if flying into Jo'burg usually I stay overnight. It usually works out this way anyway for me so far, for the timing of connecting flights. A quick turnaround of a couple hours really makes me nervous as to whether checked luggage will accompany me or not on the next flight. So far so good, fingers crossed.

As for ammo, if one has a rifle but no ammo, one reason many choose common calibres where ammo might be able to be sourced. A .375 H&H Mag, and many others will probably have some ammo available somewhere. But many of us also use cartridges which are much rarer.