When we were dropped off at the Kilimanjaro airport, they weren't checking people into our flight yet, but we got the lady to look us up, just to make sure that we were in fact bumped to this Precision Air flight after our Air Tanzania flight was canceled. Not only were we not on the flight, but our names weren't even in the system for the waiting list! The woman at the counter patronizingly told us that our tickets were for Air Tanzania, so we were at the wrong counter and there was nothing she could do for us. Although it was not yet 6 am, we called our travel agent, Irene, to see if she could do anything for us by talking to this Precision Air rep in Swahili. All she got out of her was that we were now first on the waiting list for seats because we were the first people to arrive for that flight (thank goodness we got up so early!! (Although it appeared that only we were in this predicament)), but that we had to wait for Air Tanzania reps to get there to transfer the tickets for us. Oh the suspense!
After what felt like a very long wait, the Air Tanzania reps arrived, transferred our tickets, and advocated for us, and by some miracle, there were three seats on that plane, so we left at 7:30 for Dar!
Once there, it felt like noon but it was only 8:30 am. We left our luggage and got in touch with Hellen, who came shortly thereafter to pick us up, with Stephan in tow. It was such a happy reunion! We had missed her!
She took us back to Njia Health Center, where she proudly showed off the tiling that had been laid down in our absence, and we checked one last time for malaria (still clean!!) before heading into town for lunch. We are starting to like the finger prick...
We had a very pleasant lunch at the City Garden, before Hellen took us back to the airport. We got to talk to Apo and George from the village on the phone, which was really fun. They had taken such good care of us! Then we had to leave Hellen. It was a sad goodbye. We were also disappointed that we didn't get to say goodbye to Eric, who couldn't get out of work. Oh well. Karla doesn't like goodbyes anyway.
We boarded the plane to Qatar, and were seated next to Guy, which was fun. We had a pleasant flight, then landed in Qatar for 2 hours. We had a quick dinner at a fast food place and tried out perfumes at the duty-free shop before boarding the plane for Delhi and passing out. If only Alicia had put on more perfume, Karla wouldn't have had her first case of air sickness.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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