Note: The general content of this blog was originally written by Mikael (the Swede), then translated by Google, then reinterpreted by yours truly. Therefore, the content will be very similar to the next few blogs appearing on Mikael’s website, www.2cape.com.
I consider myself to be equipped with a lot of patience. Probably more patience than the average American, enough patience to deal with multiple-day-long train rides through China or with waiting for hours for the daladalas to leave the African bus stands. But this, well this pretty much killed it. Strap in and enjoy the next few blogs, as I explain exactly what we went through to get to Malawi.
Everything was fine (note the “was”). We were having a wonderful time in Istanbul, after having visited a university I’m interested in attending in Estonia (anyone want to study Semiotics with me?). We were staying with the same CS host that Em and I stayed with last time we were in Istanbul, and visiting places both new and familiar. We went to the Grand Bazaar, full of pushy salespeople and brightly colored things of every variety; walked over, under, and around bridges day after day; drank tea and ate donuts by the sea in the evening sun; visited the magnificent Basilica Cistern under the streets of Istanbul; and even went to Asia on a day (well, night) trip. Time passed quickly in Istanbul, 4 days too short a time to explore this city (even for both Mikael’s and my second time), and we were off to new places – our flight was leaving for Dar es Salaam (via Cairo and Addis) the afternoon of Saturday the 23rd. We bid our host farewell, made it to the airport, and checked in (as you do when you go to the airport). We were informed at the counter that our bags would be checked all the way to Dar, a relief, as everyone likes to avoid having to collect them and recheck-in at each layover destination. We were asked if we had gotten visas to our final destination , Tanzania, but replied that we could purchase them at the airport – once confirmed, the nice lady gave us our boarding passes, sent our bags off down the conveyor belt (why does it feel like you’ll never see them again, no matter how many times you’ve flown?), and we were off on the first leg of our flight – to Cairo.
Bad decision #1: We arrived in Cairo pretty much on schedule, at 1730 hours. It wasn’t a bad decision that we arrived (thank goodness, even Egypt Air’s pilots can land an airplane), but a bad decision that we arrived on time, because frankly it extended the rest of the scenario I’m about to begin describing. We had our hand luggage (consisting in total of a sweater, iPad, phone charger, USD, visa cards, laptop, laptop charger, and some pens), the clothing we were wearing, and our passports. Upon arrival, we were referred to the “transfer desk”, to be sure we’d get to the appropriate gate for our next flight to Addis. We also needed our boarding passes for this next leg – but, seeing as that we had an 11 hour layover in this airport (oh, cheap flight tickets), we were not concerned about the timeliness of any of this happening. At the transfer desk, our passports were taken, and we were told to wait in some chairs for further instruction. Well we waited, and waited, and got hungry, and waited some more, and finally found the guy who had originally taken our passports and enquired about our ability to get them back, and to move to another terminal that perhaps had some dinner in it (this terminal was, apparently, not the terminal with food). The guy seemed rather confused by this question, as if people wanting dinner and their passports back was something he had never, ever encountered before in his life. He seemed, as Mikael put it, to be facing some unprecedented challenge that his office had never before encountered – and so we agreed to wait just a little while longer while he worked it out. By now, it was probably around 1900 or 1930.
Well, we waited. The folks on our plane left, and we waited. New planes arrived, and we waited. Finally, fortuitously, something happened. We were bundled with the other white people who had magically appeared (4 Germans, I think), loaded into a van, and transported to the magical other terminal. Satisfied with our new location, we ordered a beer, Mikael spilled most of it on my laptop, we ordered another beer, met some Americans, ate hamburgers, and prepared ourselves for our next stop: Africa. Point to note: our passports, during this entire encounter, had been kept by a nice airport employee who told us we could have them back, along with our boarding passes, at midnight (3 hours before we were supposed to leave).
When the clock approached midnight, we found the nice guy who had had our passports, and asked about their whereabouts and our boarding passes. Seeming unclear, he made plans to meet us at the McDonalds in half an hour to straighten things out. He met us, eventually, and told us our passports were actually at our gate, waiting for the departure of the plane. We could collect them there, though to be honest, we were still unsure as to why they had been taken in the first place. I assume it was to keep us from running off into Cairo, as if we had any intention of exploring that city ever again (sorry, once in that chaotic mess is enough for me for a decade or two).
So, we continued to do nothing, though we moved toward our gate to wait for departure. We figured bureaucracy would run its course, as it often needs to in Egypt, and though we hadn’t been in possession of our passports for nearly 12 hours, we were content to let things work themselves out. When a guy arrived with a big bunch of passports with papers and tickets sticking out of them, we thought we were free and clear. However, he tossed the passports into a big plastic box (no security, no locks, no lids); started shrieking at the other staff members in a way very typical to the country, until the shrieking turned into a quarrel, and the highest ranking staff member had to get involved. How did he solve the problem quarrel? By lighting a cigarette, on the spot, inside the airport (a non-smoking area), totally unperturbed that there were 50 people clustered around him waiting for their passports, while another 50 sat nearby waiting for something to happen. Including us…
0210, 24th of July… plane scheduled to take off at 0250…
To be continued ...
p.s. Friends, we are on our way to Malawi tomorrow! We will keep you abreast of any political developments in our once peaceful, now-less-peaceful-but-probably-still-okay country. And in the coming days, I will be posting various blogs that I wrote earlier in these travels that will be posted on Pink Pangea, that travel website for women that I've been writing for, in the coming weeks -- so don't get confused as I mess up the timeline a little bit!
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