Waiting, waiting, waiting

There are many people who say to me that I am so lucky to get to travel all the time and please can they carry my bags or get in them or whatever but really these trips are not all the people think they are. Having said that, despite all the trials and tribulations of travel in southern and East Africa, I miss it when I don’t do it! The last four and a half months I have been cooling my heals in my office and the walls have gotten terribly boring. So now I have the opportunity to once again use my passport and spend 6 days in Tanzania. This is thanks to having to defend my project expenditure over the last 12 months and of course do a bit of begging for money for the next 2 years.

Yesterday I got up at 04:45 to finalize my packing, sort out myself and be ready to leave home at 05:45 to get to the airport. Gone are the days of the 10 minute hop down to the airport and it its place is a 40 minute drive to the north of Durban to the new King Shaka International Airport. It is much further to travel to get to the airport these days but I would not swap it for the noise of all those airplanes landing and taking off all the time that we used to have. Anyway, back to yesterday! This was my first time flying out of the new airport and my parents just kicked me out the car as we drove passed since the new airport does not have a viewing deck and they saw no reason in stopping for very long. The airport is okay but really seems to have no character of its own.

The flight to Johannesburg was really short. Fog was moving in over OR Tambo so the pilot was given clearance for a much shorter routing than normal in order to beat the fog. Our 50 minute flight ended up being only 35 minutes! Nothing wrong with that in my books! The Royal Stag cricket team were on the plane and I spent the whole time cursing my misfortune that it wasn’t the Chennai SuperKings and MS Dhoni – now THAT would have been exciting. LOL!

It was a good thing to get those 15 extra minutes because the queues going through the security checks were long and slow. This was followed by yet another long, slow queue to get through immigration. That left me with about 20 minutes for one last trip to the loo and to find the boarding gate. The actual flight to Tanzania wasn’t too bad until the last 45 minutes when we had to endure some “dry air turbulence”. It was really interesting flying into Dar es Salaam as I have either arrived by road (a LONG time ago) or at night so have never really seen just how big Dar is. Dar is a sprawling mass of humanity, there are buildings from the sea to as far as you can see.

If I thought that my waiting was over when I got off the plane, I had another thing coming. I got to immigration quickly and filled in a blue form before proceeding past an official checking yellow fever certificates. At the visa section there was one official collecting passports, forms and $50 and passing this on to the staff behind the counters. He kept on ignoring me and taking from everyone around me. Eventually he told me that I had to go back and fill in a white form. So I went back, got the white form and filled in exactly the same information as on the blue form, showed my yellow fever certificate again and went back to being ignored at the visa section. Eventually my forms, etc were taken and passed to the people behind the glass. Then I had to stand in this little cordoned off area and wait for my name to be called. In the end I got my visa and it is very fancy – it even has my photo on it.

I proceeded through customs without any hassles and found the person with my name on a board. There was a hold up with the driver arriving to take me and two others to the hotel so we had to stand around and wait some more. After what felt like forever the driver arrived and I thought my waiting was finally over but that was not to be. We got caught in a hectic traffic jam and crawled along. Initially I tried to have a nap but gave that up and read a book. Over two hours after landing we eventually got to the hotel.

The good news is that I have a really fantastic room with a gorgeous view over a lawn, swimming pool, beach and ocean. It is clean and looks fairly new. I was somewhat exhausted after all the hanging about so made an early night of it after smearing mosquito repellent all over as the mosquitoes are huge and hungry.

The view from my room.

My room - the edge of the bathroom is on the left.

Monday is here and it is work time. The day started with registration at 8:00am but my day started at 04:30 when I got up to work on my presentation that has to be made on Wednesday. The presentation is now complete and I just have to review it a couple of times before Wednesday and I will be good to go. At 8:00am I registered at a participant and found my allocated place in the hall. The main event was to start at 09:00am but this didn’t happen and by tea time the programme was running an hour late. One thing that has been very encouraging is that my project got mentioned in the main review of the project as well as in the component review in which it is housed.

Part of my view during the day.

That is all from me for today. I think I will be having an early night after my early start today. Take care everyone!