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.