Houston, We Have a Problem...

Nine flights in ten days. 

That’s what my first Tanzanian visitor, my former boss and now dear friend, Shahara, kept telling anyone who would listen about her visit to Tanzania.

And for her, it was true.  It was only four flights for me, but who's counting?  She came to visit me for ten days last month, during which time we saw several different parts of Tanzania, requiring multiple flights.

Officially, our trip began in Dar, that’s what we locals call Dar Es Salaam. I say officially because that is where we met.  Shahara entered Tanzania by flying into Dar, and I planned to travel to meet her there by bus.  Two fairly nice, comfortable charter bus companies run between Dar and Moshi every day twice a day, and the ride is about eight to thirteen hours depending on weather, road conditions and traffic. I had decided to take the bus, instead of the 45 minute plane ride to Dar to save a few dollars since Shahara would be the first of my three visitors, well groups of visitors, as my final ‘visitor’ included my Annie, David and Nick. Such a lucky girl, I am, that some of my family was able to come visit!  At the time, I thought the bus was a logical, and economically smart idea, especially since I didn’t have a problem with the half-day bus ride because it gave me a chance to see the Tanzanian countryside, plus, taking a bus in a country is always a learning experience. 

This bus trip was a ‘learning experience’ for a much different reason.  On the morning of the Monday I was traveling to Dar to meet Shahara, I went to the bus station bright and early for my 7:00 am bus.  My ticket instructed me to arrive by 6:30am, and I was informed by many of the Stella Maris staff that unlike almost everything else in Tanzania that is rarely on time, the buses run like clockwork.  So, Inno and I arrived at 6:45am, my compromise between what I was told about how timely buses run and the reality experience of ‘timeliness’ here in Tanzania. At 7:05am, with no bus in sight, Inno went to check with the bus manager about my bus because he was surprised that they were running late. I was not surprised, and chalked the bus’s tardiness up to same reason I chalk the rest of Tanzanian tardiness up to.  Inno came back to tell me that no buses were running to Dar today. Now, if you know Inno, you know that he is the constant jokester, so of course I did not believe him.  It took him about five times, the fifth time accompanied with an explanation, for me to actually take him seriously.  The explanation: as March, April and May are the months that make up the rainy season (the cooler of the two Tanzanian seasons: rainy and dry), it had been raining quite regularly like normal. Unfortunately, there had been so much rain in Dar Es Salaam that the only bridge entering the city had been destroyed by flooding the previous night. 

On the one day that I needed to take a bus to Dar, to meet Shahara– who would be landing at 4:45pm and expecting to meet up with me to catch our 6:30pm flight to the other side of the country–there were no buses.   This left me with just under nine hours to figure out how I was going to get to Dar, come hell or high water, no pun intended.  Inno and I began working like mad people to come up with a plan.  As Inno tried to find out if any automobiles could actually enter the city, I began calling airlines.  The originally expensive price of a one-way ticket to Dar now looked amazingly reasonable compared to the same day cost of a one-way ticket.  I thought that I had come up with a genius plan, considering the circumstances, to cancel our three day trip to Mwanza, the second most populated city in Tanzania on the western border of the country, also bordering Lake Victoria, and use the ‘credit’ of our tickets to Mwanza to fly Shahara to Moshi, where I was currently stuck.  Instead of visiting Mwanza for a few days before heading off to Zanzibar, we could cross over the Kenyan border to Nairobi and visit there.  However, the airline with which we reserved our Mwanzan flight would not reimburse or alter our original travel plans in any way, shape or form.  Their argument was that it was not their fault/problem that I could not get to Dar to make my flight because of the bus/road issue.  Of course they were technically correct in that detail, yet they failed to overlook that it was not my fault that this occurred either.   During my unsuccessful attempt to make these changes, I also learned that there were not any seats still available on any of the flights on any of the airlines from Moshi to Dar.

As the morning got later, I began to really worry.  Shahara didn’t have a Tanzanian phone, so I could not even reach her to explain what had happened.  How did society live for so long without cell phones? Didn’t things like this happen before the 1990s? What did people do?  She would arrive to the airport expecting to see me and I would never appear.  Additionally, we, or at least I, would miss our flight to Mwanza.   We were there for such a short time already that if we, or I, missed this flight, it did not make sense to reschedule a later flight to Mwanza at all.  I was stressed.  I think poor Inno thought I was going to pull out my hair.  At 11:30am, four and a half hours after we began to try to solve this dilemma and one hour before the last flight to Dar for the day was scheduled to leave, a seat opened up on the one remaining flight. 

Problem solved, you say?  Think again.  Now the problem was that this flight was leaving in an hour and Stella Maris is 30 minutes away from the airport.  Oh, and not to mention that I had to buy the ticket at the airport; online purchases were no longer allowed, and no one could guarantee me that when we got to the airport, that the ticket would still be available. 

I don’t think Inno has ever driven so fast.  He got us to the airport 22 minutes, which truly deserves an award, and he ran with me to the ticket counter.  Although I was (kinda) thankful for a resolution, I was irate at the money I was dropping on this ticket.  There was not time to dwell on that.  I was thinking, though, about how up to that point of my time here, the economical differences between the people to whom I have grown the closest and me have been almost non-existence, as there no situations where this reality has been blatantly noticeable had arisen in four months.  However, as I was pulling out the money to pay for this ticket, more than double of an average working person’s monthly salary, I could feel the tug on my heart, for I knew that if the people to whom I had become the closest were in the same situation as me, they would not be able to buy the plane ticket I was purchasing, despite my frustration with the cost.

I swallowed my emotions, for the time being, bought the ticket, hugged Inno and ran towards security.  To add insult to injury, security confiscated my contact solution, as it was larger than the approved carry on size for liquids. Of course it was, since I packed my bag for a bus trip, not an airplane, and oh, I had been a little preoccupied since I learned the bus option was no longer a viable option to think of the liquids in my bag.  Of course losing your contact solution is not the end of the world, but after my morning, even such a little encounter as that had the ability to put me over the edge.  It turns out that I sat at the gate of the-most-expensive-one-way-ticket-I-have-ever-bought for about twenty minutes before boarding, during which time I brooded and brooded over the stark reality between the people I love dearly and myself that I had just been forced to face/remember, the cost of this ticket and the insignificant loss of my contact solution.  I told myself I would leave my sulking and my sob story in the airport, which I tried to do, Shahara might tell you otherwise, but I really tried, and did my level best to not let the rocky start to our trip taint the ten days we had ahead.

I arrived in the Dar airport hours before Shahara arrived and before I was supposed to arrive by bus.  Since it was my first time to this airport, when I arrived to Tanzania I flew directly from Amsterdam to the Kilimanjaro airport, I followed the crowd to baggage claim.  Since I did not check any bags, RIP contact solution, I continued to follow the crowd until I found myself about to walk out of the doors of the airport.  I stopped to ask airport personnel where I should go if Dar was not my final destination and I was catching another flight.  I was told to exit through the doors the rest of the people were walking through and to speak to a woman sitting at a desk outside.  What I learned when I spoke to that woman, after I exited the building, following the directions I was told, mind you, was that no passenger is allowed to be in the building three hours before his or her flight.  NO ONE.  After my glorious morning, I now had THREE HOURS until I was allowed to reenter the building, since my next flight was not for six hours, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.  Just not my day, I tell you. 

Frustrations, reflections and the like aside, I made it to Dar and was able to meet Shahara when she landed.  That, of course, is the blessing of the day and the part of the day that I should have forced and still should force my brain to focus on.  However, I don’t think I am totally past the rest just yet.  I’m working on it.  It was just not my day, I tell ya.