As an aside, I had wanted to do a photoblog type of thing for this trip, but one day into it, I’ve already run into some difficulties, including a tumblog that refuses to post to twitter, the scarcity of good wifi in the places I’ve been to so far, and an unreasoning fear of bill-shock when I get back home. SO instead of documenting my trip on the fly, as it were, I’m just going to have to do it this way.
Manila to Kenya
I arrived reasonably early to check in for the first leg of the flight to Mombasa. Ok, let’s face it. I was earlier than may have been absolutely necessary. What can I say? I was excited. SO excited, in fact, that I pulled off this FAIL, long before my journey even started.
You see it, right?
The shackle of the red padlock totally missed the second zipper and is lying on top of it, rather than running through it. It’s a good thing the zippers were also locked with the built-in [but not TSA ready] combination lock. I discovered this mistake only a good deal later. You can probably imagine how worried I was, especially since I knew that I didn’t change the combination on the built-in lock so it was still set at zero-zero-zero.
It was a good thing I didn’t know any of this while we were in transit.
Going from Manila to Kenya meant that we had to fly to Doha first. From there, we would take a transfer to Nairobi and a connecting flight to Mombasa after that. The Manila-Doha leg took all of 8 hours and 22 minutes. With an hour’s wait at Doha for the transfer, and a 5 hour DOha-Nairobi flight, I would’ve sweated bullets for 14 hours and not been able to do anything about it. As it turned out, by the time I discovered my fail as I was checking in – four hours early – for the one-hour Nairobi to Mombasa flight, I was too bushed to really care. When we landed in Mombasa after eighteen hours of travelling, I was all but ready to kiss the dry and dusty ground of Africa. At that point, whether someone pawed through my skivvies seemed incredibly trivial.
An extinct bird, midget sodas, and an attempted robbery.
The flight from Manila to Doha was piloted by a man named Dodo. In fairness, I could’ve just been accent disabled, but that’s sure what it sounded like to me. It was not the most reassuring thing to learn that the man who was flying the shiny brick with pretensions shared a name with a flightless bird not known for its intelligence. An extinct flightless bird.
I had a quite chuckle to myself about that, but I soon forgot about Captain Dodo as I became mesmerized by the pre-flight rituals of the woman who sat next to me.
You know what it means when someone says “a purposeful stride,” right? Well, that’s what this woman had. A purposeful stride that for awhile there, I was afraid would bring her right on top of the seat and over the top onto the next row before she could step on the brakes. Instead, however, she came to a dead stop, her brightly colored toes almost exactly six inches from the front edge of the seat cushion and started pulling things out of her carry-on luggage: a travel pillow, a pink blanket, a pair of fluffy bedroom slippers.
She then spun around, sat down and whipped her gladiator-ish shoes off. In two fell swoops, she had pulled on socks on both feet and slipped on the fluffies. She stands up again – and I swear it hadn’t been more than fifteen seconds since she plopped her behind down to change her footwear – shrugs off this stylish jacket with elbow-patches, and bundles that as well as her carry-on luggage into the overhead compartment. All with the crisp efficiency of a Chinese gymnast.
After going through her routing, my seat mate promptly fell asleep, waking only when her highly trained, hyper-efficient senses detected the far-off creak of the approaching food trolley.
As the trolley drew level with my seat, I looked up at the by-now familiar face of the Korean flight attendant who didn’t smile and who only marginally more frequently attended passengers with a bored look on her face. She asks me what I want to drink and I say “a soda.” SHe looks at me like she doesn’t understand what I’m saying, so I say “a soda” again, only slower and with more lip action. She looks at me with a hint of irritation. I was trapped between two cyborgs! So I did what I always did. When in doubt, ask for a Coke.
When she heard me say that, she nods and pulls out a midget can of, you guessed it, Pepsi. If only I weren’t too intimidated by her cold efficiency, I would have thrown a hissy fit about how pepsi is not the same as coke. But as it turned out, I meekly submitted to her even as I vaguely heard the crack of a whip.
It was only on the Nairobi-Mombasa leg that I finally got the Coke I asked for.
Getting to Mombasa from DOha counts as a domestic flight. Like flying from Manila to Cebu. I was pretty thankful for that simply because I dreaded a repeat of what happened to me upon arrival in Nairobi.
We left Manila with no visas for Kenya. Kenya, as it turns out, issues visas upon arrival under certain conditions which, thankfully, I qualified for. So, I approached the visa counter with no worries at all. It helped that I was still euphoric just from being in Africa. I should’ve known better.
I wasnt even at the counter yet when the guy barks at me “Fitty dolla.” I pull out a hundred and, as I sidle up to his counter, he grabs the money with the lightning speed of a praying mantis taking performance enhancing drugs. I blinked and suddenly, all that remained in my hands were the documents he needed to issue me a visa. Including. My. Passport.
I watched his whole procedure with open, if jaundiced, eyes. I knew he was going to try something and I was betting that it would be some sort of sleight of hand. I doubted he would mulct me of fifty dollars openly. Then, he barks at me again and with a big sweep of his hand, indicated that I should move to one side. I comply but quickly look back on his desk where I saw the money just mere seconds earlier. It wasn’t there.
Still, benefit of the doubt and all that, I waited for him to finish issuing my visa. In my mind, i kept remembering the smart-ism that you don’t bitch about people who handle your food. Well, I didn’t want this guy throwing up a wall of procedure in my face because I was rude enough to remind him about my change.
When I finally had my visa tho, that was exactly what I did.
In as cold a voice as I could muster, I go “My change, Mister.” Incidentally, among the Kenyans I’ve met, being called “Mister” isn’t as confrontational as it would be if it were Westerners – and pretend westerners – talking. So I figured if I ever had to explain myself, I could always say I wasn’t being rude. Or something. Whatever.
The point is, when I said that, he went from being curt to sheepish. With something resembling embarrassment writ large all over his Michael Jordan-esque face, he hands me back two twenties and a ten. Incidentally, I was so distrustful of him that I immediately went to Barclays to get his bills converted to local currency. IN my mind, I though that if the bills turned out to be bogus, I could immediately point out where I got them. Oh well. Revenge fantasies can get out of hand, can’t they?
In country
Anyway, once we’d gotten past the unpleasantness of the visa guy, it was all good for me. After all, this was Africa and coming here has been on my must-do-before-the-world-ends list for as long as I can remember. On the way to the hotel, I took a few pictures from out of the window of the van we were in. My first glimpses of life in Africa.
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