Saturday, January 25th - Winter's over (sorry folks!)

The work week was fine. I was in exams, therefore busy marking, doing report cards and exam supervision, plus trying to prepare for the second semester. Jacqui's week was OK as well. She went out to dinner with former colleagues and friends from my school, and started tutoring a grade 4 student on Wednesday. She went back today, and will start with another student tomorrow as well as being involved with the homework club at school. She enjoys it a lot, which I'm really happy about.

From what we see on the news and what we hear from family and friends, we picked a good winter to be out of Canada. Our winter is over; we haven't used the heater in the apartment for the last two nights. Temperature wise, our morning lows are now in the 10 - 13 degrees range and our daytime highs are in the high teens. So everytime I find myself outside, I can't help but to think about every one of you back home.

We pretty much decided that we will go to Sri Lanka for our week off at the end of February, but we haven't booked anything yet. It should be done this week Inshaa Allah!

Sunday, January 19th - Weekend in Bahrain - two needs fulfilled!!

We left Wednesday night to go to the Kingdom of Bahrain, a small country just south of us. The whole country is basically an island, with a population of less than 1.5 million. Its capital is Al Manamah. We got to our hotel by about 10ish.

On Thursday, we walked around the city a bit. We saw their World Trade Center and ended up at their souk. It would have been nice to spend more time there, but we had to get back to meet some friends. We went out for dinner and had a nice evening, all four of us.

On Friday, Jacqui and I went to a brunch at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. It was great. First we thought the price was a little steep but when we saw that everything was included (solids and liquids!); it made it quite worth it. As for the needs fulfilled, liquids were one of them, and the second one was pork. They had ham, and ribs. I almost cried when I had my first one; it had been that long. This great afternoon made for a very quiet evening, as sleep came early!

We went to the City Center on Saturday (a mall, what else), before flying back to Kuwait around dinner time. All in all, it was a very nice weekend.

Towards Manama - capital of Bahrain

Building in Manama

Street leading to the souk

Interesting architecture

The World Trade Center

Another  interesting building

Flying high in Bahrain ...

... at the Consulate of Canada

Tuesday, January 14th - long weekend coming up

Three down, one to go (work days). We are flyiing out tomorrow night, 7ish, to go to Bahrain. We'll check out this small country for the weekend. More details in my next blog, which should be on Sunday. In the meantime, more pictures.

Sunday, January 12th - more pictures, for the birds!

Our weekend was quiet. We went for a nice walk on Saturday and sat by the water for a while, watching the tide come in. It was pretty relaxing. Sunday was pretty much ordinary at work. We have a 4 day week; can't complain. Here are a few more pictures of birds of Tanzania

Friday, January 10th - Another trip booked!

Our first full week of work of 2014 is over! Mine was pretty good - two days without students due to flooding at school and water damage to portables. Jacqui's week was fine as well. She started in one school on Sunday, switched to another one on Monday and finished the week at the same place! Four days in a row at the same school ... I guess that's where she works now! She doing ESL and loving it. No prep, no marking, no report cards, no parents, no stress. It's perfect!

According to our calendar, we are schedule to have a holiday on Monday, the 13th; it's the prophet's birthday and a national holiday. Luckily for us, the government decided that the holiday would be on Thursday, the 16th, which now gives us a long weekend at the end of next week. So we booked a trip to Bahrain, a small country pretty close to Kuwait. We'll check it out and provide you with a few pictures. In the meantime, here are more pictures from our safari.

Sunrise on the Serengeti

Keeping a watchful eye on his kingdom

We have liftoff - they need to run before getting airborne, like a plane on a runway

Nap time pretty soon

Check out my hairdo!

A bunch of lionesses in a tree, in the Serengeti

Checking the menu for the next meal?

Hanging around

Grab a drink!

That feels good!

An eagle, perched up high

Sunrise on the rim of the Ngorongoro crater, Jan. 1st 2014. Nice way to start the new year.

I don't have any words to describe this one!

Thursday, January 2nd - The challenge of coming back to Kuwait

With the safari over, one would think that the adventures would have been over. Far from it. The return to Kuwait was very stressful. I've mentionned already some time ago that our flight there had been changed in December. We landed in Kilimanjaro from Dar Es Salaam instead of landing in Arusha, as originally planned. Our return flight had however stayed the same, that is leaving Arusha on Jnauary 2nd at 12h50 pm to go back to Dar Es Salaam. From there, we had 1hour and 45 minutes to make our connection to our flight from Dar to Addis Ababa. It's not a whole lot of time, but it's feasible (Dar's airport isn't very big). The tour operator had checked the flight the day before, we had checked Jacqui's email to see if there were any changes, and no, everything was fine and according to plan.

So we get up in the morning, go for breakfast and wait for Malisa (our guide/driver) to pick us up and take us to the airport. We get there shortly before noon, say goodbye and in we go. We show up at the Precision Air counter, give our passports and the lady goes into a small office to print the boarding passes (they cannot print at the counter).

The pre-boarding waiting area at Arusha airport

Restaurant in the front, waiting area in the background, at Arusha airport

So we wait, and wait, and wait. Finally, a smily man comes out and tells us that there is a problem with our reservation. He told us something along "Your reservations on this flight have been cancelled; you were supposed to fly out of Kilimanjaro this morning at 7h30." SAY WHAT??? Obviously, a major discussion ensued. Who cancelled the tickets? Why? Why were we not told of that? How do we get home if we don't get on that flight? Our stress level goes up a bit (OK a lot). He then goes on to say that we can modify our reservation and get on the flight as long as we pay the penalty to change our reservation. At this point, we'll pay anything; just let us on. Just one problem. The penalty is $ 40 US per person, cash, as they do not accept Visa or any other credit card (the technology isn't there yet). I've got the equivalent of that amount in Tanzanian schillings (their currency) but they do not accept that. It has to be USD. So after arguing for a while (very calmly actually), they finally decided to put us on our scheduled flight, with no penalty. I've never been so happy to see boarding passes be printed! So now we're on our plane, but the flight is 50 minutes late (not because of us, just because that's the way they operate I guess). Remember when I said earlier that we had about 1h45 min to make our connection. Well, if you take away 50 - 55 minutes, there isn't much time left. All the way, all of us were wondering if we were going to make our connecting flight or not. If we don't, we have a hell of a problem as there aren't too many flights a day going to Addis Ababa, and if we miss every connection, the kids will eventually miss their flights back to frigid Canada.

So we land in Dar Es Salaam. We have 40 minutes before our next flight leaves. Just to add to our problems, we are sitting in rows 2 and 3 of the plane, which loads and unloads passenger through the back. So we are the last ones to get on the tarmac. We all run to the terminal. Vince goes right away to talk to a lady at the baggage counter and explains the situation. Jacqui and Julie takeoff for the Ethipian Airlines counter to get the boarding passes, while Nicolas, Vincent and I wait impatiently for our three checked bags. They arrive and we grab them and start running, following the baggage lady. She actually ran at a pretty good clip. We cut in front of people at the security scanners and get to the Ethiopian counter where Jacqui, Julie and the lady working there are waiting for us. She prints the boarding passes and here we go again, running to the next hurdle, immigration. Everyone has to fill a form when entering or leaving the country, so we fill that as fast as we can. We then have to wait a little bit for our turn to see an immigration agent. We go one by one (actually we were in two lines). Jacqui and the boys go first, then through the metal detector again and then run up the stairs to the boarding gate as soon as they are through. Julie and I are last. We both make it through but the dude calls Julie back. Shit, one more minute gone by. She's finally cleared to go. We go through security again then run up the stairs to try to get to our gate. We don't know which gate it is (there are only 8) but everyone was waving us to the right, so that's where we went. We almost stopped at the entrance desk but the lady just told us to keep running. So we did. We finally boarded our flight, a little sweaty from the heat and from running so much. Our seats are at the very back of the plane, all in the same row. When we sat down, one of the attendants came up to us and asked us if we wanted water, with ice, to cool down a bit.

Once on the flight, the whole thing was pretty funny. It must have been like what you see in the movies. But in real time, it was very stressful. All along, I couldn't help but think of the title of a movie (which I don't think I've ever seen): Out of Africa! Our stress level went way down after we got on the Ethiopian Airlines flight, as we knew that from there, there wouldn't be any more problems. Bigger airline, bigger airports, ... A delayed flight would still make it to destination at one point, unlike a cancelled flight from Tanzania.

We got home at about 2am, just glad to be back in Kuwait.

Wednesday, January 1st - The Ngorongoro Crater and back to Arusha

Happy New Year everyone!
Our day started early, as in 5am. We had to pack our stuff and have breakfast before leaving for our game drive down in the crater. Getting up this early allowed us to witness a very nice sunrise, by a cool morning (altitude of about 2000 m). There was also a lot of fog in the crater, so we couldn't see the bottom from the top.

First sunrise of 2014

Early morning on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater 

Good morning, sunshine!

An eagle flying by

I wonder how many pictures were taken that day???

We (our guide, with some help from us) packed up all our stuff, we had a quick breakfast and headed out to the crater. A 25 minute drive took us down to the caldera (. By the time we got there, fog had lifted a bit, even though we couldn't yet see the rim all the way around.

Fog inside the crater (behind the tents, with the rim on the opposite side)

Once in the crater, we saw many animals and birds. We saw hyenas and a few rhinos; two kinds of animals we hadn't really seen so far on this safari. We stayed in the crater until about noon, had lunch before leaving then took the five hour drive back to Arusha. That was the end of our safari trip. All agreed that it had been the trip of a lifetime. It was so great!

Time to pack it in!

Clouds hanging around the rim of the crater

Zebra having breakfast

Lunch, with our guide showing us on a map where we've been in the last few days

Baboons, slowing us down!