Easter Break: Flying up the coast to Lamu

Flying over the savannah of eastern Kenya between Nairobi and Mombasa

After waking up in Nairobi, I headed to the smaller of the two Nairobi airports, Wilson airport.  This airport serves domestic flights around Kenya and private planes, mostly.  It was a rather interesting experience as it doesn’t have one central terminal. Each airline has their own building with their offices and their own little check-in counter and waiting room.  So, once you find the building of the airline you’re flying with somewhere along a long road of one after the other, you check in your luggage, get your boarding pass, and THEN they bus you back down to the one boarding gate, somewhere back by the entrance.  I was really glad that I had paid a little extra for the lady who runs the guesthouse where I stayed (who was really nice) to drive me down there, as she asked directions from the workers and got me to the right building. 

The city of Mombasa from above.  Maybe someday I'll make it back for a closer look.

I took a flight from Nairobi to Lamu, with a stop in Mombasa (a major city on the coast) on the way.  In Mombasa we just stopped to pick up more people; I didn’t have to get off the plane.  It was rather like a flying bus.  It was a beautiful sunny day and I had a window seat, so I enjoyed watching the coastline as we flew. 

Juice boxes on the plane!

Lamu has its own little airport on a nearly deserted island just across the channel; it’s the kind of place that only has one plane at a time, so you just get off the plane on the runway and walk yourself into the building.  Coming out the other side of the airport building, I followed everyone else down the path to the pier, where longboats were waiting to ferry us across to the town. 

Flying up the Kenyan coast

The marshy land along the coast near Lamu.

Getting off the flying bus...

Making my way into the airport...

Made It On the Plane!

Well, we made it on the plane.  As much as I enjoy flying, it can be stressful.  We took the airport express train from Cadorna as I mentioned in my last post.  Once Michela and I got to the airport, she went down to help the rest of her family as they sorted out their luggage (two suitcases times five people plus carryons, adding in the things bought in Italy and putting back what they'd taken into Milan to wear while in Milan, etc., means an awful lot of luggage) while I went ahead to check in my suitcases (yay, I have two again!) to get them out of the way.  The guy at the check-in counter worried me by wondering aloud if they'd let me into Tanzania on a tourist visa as I have a one-way ticket (thanks for giving me THAT to worry about for the next sixteen hours.  Spoiler alert: they did let me in.), but he was also great because he wasn't too fussed about whether my luggage was exactly within the weight limits.  They were close at least.

Michela and I got to the airport a good three hours before our flight, and the Shorts even earlier; still by the time we got all of their luggage checked in we had an hour and forty-five minutes.  Security, customs...slow.  But, we had plenty of time by the time we were done still, so we stopped for food (gigantic pieces of pizza) and last cups of Italian coffee for those that means something to (not a coffee person myself).  Then we started for the gate...the sign said seven minutes' walking time to that gate, but it lied.  We heard the announcement that our flight was boarding, and so we started running ( I HATE RUNNING).  We were some of the last people to board, but it was fine.  Honestly, we weren't actually late, it was just that boarding went more quickly than usual because there were so few people on the flight.  We got settled and then still had a good twenty minutes before the time scheduled for take-off.

My seat was right over the wing while the Shorts were almost all the way in the back; after I was settled I went back to take some pictures.  We took a few as selfies that I was in as well, but I think they were on Tammy's phone and I haven't gotten them from her yet.

The reason why there were so few people on board is that the plane was stopping in Rome on the way to Addis Ababa to pick up more people.  So, for the first hour, I had three seats myself (and no one was in the center four, either).  It would have been nice to stay like that all night, but of course we did pick up quite a crowd in Rome.  Still, it was just two people to every three seats so it could have been much worse.  The only further annoyance was that a large number of the people boarding in Rome seemed to be a large tour group of elderly Italians.  Now, I love Italians, but that was a bit much in one place.  Nobody could just sit down and mind their own business; everyone had to stand up and inquire as to where so-and-so was and complain a bit and make sure everyone else was well settled first.

The rest of the overnight flight was fairly uneventful; I got a bit of sleep and woke up in Africa.  

And I'm Off!

And I’m off!  

I wonder if my parents ever realized how much trouble their children would still be even in their thirties...my flight this morning was at six am, meaning I needed to be at the airport around four, which meant leaving the house around three, which meant waking up around two...and yet they still volunteered to take me to the airport.

I flew to Newark, where I had an eight-hour layover (I don’t mind layovers, really; I like airports), which was just annoying because of how early I had to fly out to get there.  Surely there’s another flight to Newark later in the day?? From Newark, I took an overnight flight to Lisbon, Portugal. Well, I say ‘overnight’ as it was nearly six am when we landed, but with the time difference, it was more like arriving around midnight.  I did manage to get some sleep on the flight though. From Lisbon, I will take a flight to Venice and then the train to Milan, where I’ll stop for a few days to visit the church where I worked previously for a few days before continuing on to Tanzania.

Thai Coast...from Above!

You, dear readers (Hi mom!), will probably soon be tired of pictures-out-of-the-window-of-the-plane.  But I love them...coastlines, city lights, islands, mountains, snow, desert, sunsets, and the clouds of every color and size and height.  I had an aisle seat on my flight from Wuhan to Bangkok, so I was removed from temptation.  As the plane lifted off on the second leg of the trip on to Kuala Lumpur, I told myself it was really too much trouble to keep a large camera at the ready, but as we flew up over the city I kept seeing shots I wished I'd taken.  I didn't last ten minutes.  Just as well, because it was a good flight for photography.  We flew right down the Thai coast north of Vietnam, and passed seaside towns, islands with turquoise water lining their sandy beaches, and odd little puffy clouds.  However, we were still flying low enough to be under a layer of gray above, so the light was muted.  Towards sunset the sun found a few small openings, and turned the little fluffy clouds shining white and a thunderhead pink.  I got a break when it finally clouded over, but I did get a few shots of the lights of Kuala Lumpur, or suburbs thereof, as we came in to land.

  

The Chaos in Between

Sometimes in life there are moments in which you know that you are seeing something special, something you will never see again.  The star-crossed elements align and a magic moment happens.

I had one of those moments tonight, on a red-eye flight from LA to Nashville.  As I blearily stared out the window between attempts to sleep, the layers of the sky  separated. 

Below were the lights of a city, maybe somewhere in Texas.  Ribbons of orangey pinpricks outlined the streets, knotted together to create a downtown.  In the second level, a summer storm raged as we flew parallel, just to the north.  The clouds flickered and glowed with constant lightning.  Above the fighting clouds, a third level opened to the heavens. The Big Dipper, bright and bold among hundreds of more distant kin, looked serenely over the fleeting scene below. 

Three layers--the sleeping city, the ancient universe, and the chaos in between. 

Oops.

Well,I suppose it wouldn't be a true adventure if there were no surprises.  You'd think that as much as I've traveled I would know better...

I made a rookie mistake. I didn't realize that there are two airports in Bangkok. And I booked a flight into one and my second flight from the other three and a half hours later. And I had immigration to go through and had to get the boarding pass for the second flight...it could have been really bad.

Fortunately, a very helpful information desk girl caught my mistake. The shuttle bus didn't start running until five, but I could take a taxi. At three-something in the morning the traffic was practically nonexistent and so the taxi made it in only thirty minutes instead of the forty she predicted.

Also fortunately, I made a second rookie mistake that actually helped. I didn't realize that Bangkok is an hour different from Wuhan. So, even with the surprise taxi drive, I still arrived here at the gate with an hour to kill.

It also helps that I haven't slept at all, so I was too mellowed to feel any more than a token amount of stress over it.

By the way, I actually did take a less blurry picture of the gate, but I liked how this one caught that girl's pony tail in motion. Again, I have had no sleep.

Here I go again...

...on my own...Going down the only road I've ever known... I love that song by Whitesnake. 

I'm sitting on a plane at the Wuhan airport. I know I'll have to turn my phone off soon, but I figured I'd get started. A couple of funny things already...

First, there are evergreen boughs with festive red and gold ornaments strung up over all the check in booths. I mean, it's only August.  The Chinese are adopting Christmas because it looks like fun, but they have a poor understanding of some parts-particularly the part about when to stop celebrating it. Mom and I heard Christmas music playing in the McDonald's in Beijing in July.

Another thing that amused me is,I know, common at airports and a liability matter...but we took a bus about thirty feet to the plane. It took us far longer to load and unload the bus than it would have taken to just walk a few extra feet.  We got on, the bus made a u-turn, and we got off. Everybody was giggling a bit as we got off. The picture shows both a bus in the original position as well as where we got off. 

Sunrise to Sunset and Then Some

I couldn't post while on the plane, obviously, so I'll revisit that experience just a moment here, before I dive into India.  

I've always enjoyed flying, but instead of getting more and more comfortable with it, it seems like I get more and more nervous these days...oh, not about flying itself, or crashes or that sort of thing, but about lost luggage and delays and bureaucratic issues.  Maybe it's just having more luggage, a tighter schedule, and more expensive tickets the older I get...I mean, it's hard to get worked up about a Ryanair flight that just cost three euro, carry on luggage only, and if it all goes wrong, you can always just take the train...

Anyways, I guess it was left over nerves from waiting until the last minute for my visa, but I kept expecting something to go wrong; some missed connection, something...but everything went like clockwork.  The only minor annoyance was that they charge 8 yuan for a bottle of tea in the Chengdu airport, which is highway robbery.  Oh, well.  I'd sure pay 8 yuan for one now; why isn't bottled iced tea available everywhere?  It always makes me appreciate China to travel elsewhere, and that's the thing I often miss the most--the bottled drinks are better in China than anywhere else (yes, including the U.S.).  Mango juice, peach juice, various teas, other fruit juices, plus all the normal stuff like Coke and Sprite. I've had a heart burn all day from drinking Pepsi.  I finally found a bottle of apple juice just now...I hope I can find more.  

Anyways, whining digression aside, the flight:  I flew out of Beijing at 8 AM, changed planes in Shanghai with an almost seven hour layover (but I much prefer long layovers to short ones; I hate being rushed)...another digression--I'd rather have spent the layover in the Beijing airport than the Shanghai one; the Shanghai one mostly has overpriced, overly fancy food, when I really just wanted something normal...okay, where was I?  Oh, yes.  Flight out of Shanghai at 4:55 PM, to Chengdu.  Now, it was the same plane from Shanghai to Mumbai, but even if we were going on, we still had to get off at Chengdu and walk through the customs thing and then get back on.  Anyhow, left Chengdu at some time or other (I'd lost track by then, and it's not on the  ticket since, officially, we were just "continuing" the flight) and arrived in Mumbai at 1 AM.  Despite the late hour, the airport was hopping; this is one of those cities that never sleeps.  

I found an ATM, and the taxi stand, and made my way to the Windsor Hotel (hostel).  The pillow is ridiculously small, and the showers are cold, but I'm overjoyed to have a mattress that doesn't feel like a piece of wood with a sheet on it (which is how the Chinese like it).  I might have mentioned all that in my last post, but I'm too lazy to go look right now.  Anyways, Mumbai.  I like it.  

As for the photos:  the first is the sunrise over a neighboring airplane as we boarded in Beijing; the second is the sunset as we took off from Chengdu.  

Beijing Airport...Still.

And here I am at my new home! Oh…wait…this is the Beijing airport…still. 

So, we had a tight layover in Beijing.  And our plane from L.A. was late getting in.  And we had to collect all our luggage and walk with it through customs.  And it’s a major capital city of a huge country airport, meaning correspondingly huge.  If any little thing goes, wrong we could miss this flight…

Well, of course it did.  Oddly enough, it was the first group of us who got our luggage who missed the flight.  Somehow, we missed the place where we were supposed to return out luggage for the flight to Wuhan, and ended up out in the main part of the terminal.  We went to the check-in desk, but were sent to another, then to the ticket counter.  Oh, and in the middle of this, we had a Chinese man trying to be helpful and leading us in circles.  The long and short of it is, nine of us missed the flight.  Those who had taken longer to get their luggage and were behind us did not go the wrong way and made it, go figure.  

There was another flight an hour later, but it only had one free seat. Kevin happened to be first in line, so he decided to try and run for it.  Apparently he made it, because he never came back; we waited in the same area for a good while just in case.  Unfortunately, there were no more flights after that until the next day.  We managed to change our tickets to one person at 12:30, three at 1:30, and the last four at 5:40.  By the time we finished all that, it was 7:00 pm.  So…eighteen and a half hours to go for me (1:30) and even longer for the last group.  Definitely qualified as longest layover I’ve ever had… To make it even more fun, we were stuck for the night, with all of our luggage. 

We piled all the luggage together around a group of three seats near the ticket counter; a few people stayed to guard it all while a few of us did some recon work.  Laura found that we could get passwords for the free airport wifi from the information booth.  Kelly and I went exploring downstairs for a better home base; we found a quieter bank of chairs with plenty for everyone, and also the hourly lounge, which had beds and showers.  In the end, we all cheaped out and stayed out of the lounge.  We set up home base on the last row of seats.  It turned out to be nice that there were so many of us; we could take turns guarding the luggage, sleeping, and wandering off to find food, shop, etc.  Samuel found a row of outlets around the corner, where we could recharge our laptops.  

Although no one was particularly excited at another night in an airport, we made the best of it.  I got to know teachers who would be at different schools, who I probably would never have made much connection with otherwise.  We played balderdash.  We ate some particularly unappetizing Burger King food (my last meal in the U.S. and my first meal in China were both Burger King…sigh; I’d hoped for at least a Taco Bell in L.A.), we sponge-bathed, we took exploratory walks, and skyped relatives.  We watched a group of window-washer rappel from the roof, cleaning the glass wall of the terminal as they swung back and forth. Finally, I got through to Ed, so he could inform those who were supposed to be picking us up our new arrival times; however, most of the schools were ahead of us and had already called the airport and got the information themselves.  Sigh, the things you can do if you speak Chinese… 

And finally, we did make it to Wuhan.  And all of our luggage made it with us.  And you know the funny part?  The group who made the original flight didn’t get their luggage until the next day—it waited to fly with us!  So, an adventure either way around. 

32000 feet from Alaska

According to the mapping program showing on the screen on the back of the seat in front of me, I’m 32000 feet over Alaska right now.  It’s interesting the routes that airplanes take due to the curve of the earth and wind currents and all; to get from L.A. to Beijing we flew up the coast, over Alaska, and then we’ll cross the Bering Strait and part of eastern Russia, then follow the Russian coast down into China to Beijing.  Several people have referred to this flight as ‘crossing the pacific’, but really we’re only over open water a minor part of the trip.  

Flight-themed songs keep popping into my head; I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again…right now you’re thirty thousand feet above me, I’m just out here watching the planes take off and fly…when the plane goes down, I’ll remember where the love was found…okay, maybe I shouldn’t sing that last one too much.  

I love these maps they do on long distance flights now; this is the best one I’ve ever seen.  It offers a variety of views: entire route, what’s outside the left side of the plane, what’s outside the right side of the plane, the cockpit view, the external view, overhead, 360°, and you can even set it to cycle between them.  I like knowing what we’re flying over, and how far we’ve come, and how many hours are left to go (exactly seven right now).

It’s a good thing I’ve got the map view, because I can’t see outside for sure.  This plane is set up with nine seats across, three three and three.  I’m in the aisle seat of the middle set, which is quite comfortable since there’s no one in the middle, giving us some space to stretch out.  I’d have to look over three people and an aisle to see the window, and then even if I do that, I’m over the wing, so all I can see is white metal.  And then, it’s apparently really bright out there because everyone has kept the windows firmly shut nearly the whole flight.  

I did have some good window experiences in my first two flights, though.  We took off from Nashville at 5:30 am flying south east; as we flew, the sky turned pink and then orange and then we watched a brilliant sunrise.  I slept the first part of the flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, but when I woke up we were over the deserts of Arizona.  I saw canyons (not sure if I saw the Grand Canyon, but possibly), mountains, and what looked like salt flats displayed beneath me; I took quite a few pictures then as I had a window seat for once.  

It still doesn’t seem quite real that I’m passing the Bendeleben Mountains on the Alaskan coast (especially since I’d never heard of them before), and that in just a few hours I’ll finally be back in China. 

Volare! Flying Out!

And I'm off!  I'm leaving in about an hour for my brothers' house in Nashville, and I'll go to the airport (in the middle of the night) from there.  I can't believe the day I've waited on for so many months is here!  And everything I even thought of taking fit into my suitcases with no problem--but, I am the Packing Queen. :) 

Darn, I wish I'd loaded Volare (classic Italian song; Volare means 'to fly') onto my mp3 player!  Maybe I'll remember to do that while I'm at my brothers' tonight. 

A Day in the Air

The most common question I get about moving to China is "How many hours is the flight?" Well, in fact, it takes four flights, but the total in-air time is looking like it'll be about twenty-one hours this time. 

I leave Nashville at 5:30 am Thursday morning--so of course I have the be at the airport a couple of hours before that.  Right now we're planning to go to my brothers' place in Nashville Wednesday evening, and then go from there, instead of going from here at two in the morning. 

My first flight is to Atlanta--yes, going the wrong direction.  I find it quite entertaining to search for flights sometimes; sometimes the routes seem so nonsensical.  The flight to Atlanta takes just over an hour, and then from Atlanta I fly to L.A. (about five hours), then from L.A. to Beijing (thirteen hours), then from Beijing to Wuhan (two and ten minutes, if I remember correctly).  None of my layovers are too long, so really we're making pretty good time.  I'll be meeting up with some of the other American teachers who I met in June in Nashville and L.A. 

When I arrive in Wuhan, it will be 9:00 pm Friday night.  This schedule may seem a bit crazy, but really it's pretty well designed--I won't get much if any sleep Wednesday night, so I should be able to sleep on the flight to L.A.  Therefore, I'll be awake flying into China, but tired and ready to sleep when I finally get to my apartment sometime Friday night.  I have to flip-flop my day and night due to the time zones anyhow, and it's easiest to do it in route like this. 

When I do tell people the flight plan, I get a lot of grimaces.  Twenty-one hours in the air?  You poor thing!  Why do people hate flying so much?  I love traveling and every part of it--I don't think I've eer been bored in an airport.  There's shops, restaurants, and of course endless people watching.  Besides, you have books, magazines, other travelers to talk to, and the view out the window of planes taking off and landing. On the long flight, there's usually so many movies I haven't seen yet that I can't fit them all in.  Even after all the flying I've done, air travel has not lost its magic.  I just love being on the move.   Now, if only airlines had a better record of getting luggage to the same place at the same time, flying would be perfect.  Please pray for my luggage. 

Flying over the lakes of Wuhan, February 2010

Europe from Above

We spent Monday getting back to Verviers.  We met at the McDonald's on Syntagma as usual, at 8:30.  We made it through the airport without incident, except that was hoping to buy a banana and never found any.


The flight back was fun because we flew right up the coast of Albania and Croatia.  I've never been on a flight that long that flew so low.  I was in the middle between Katy and Stacy.  I had my headphones on a good part of the flight, but after a while we got out our eurail maps and followed our progress right up the coast, trying to figure out which country's coast we were over at the moment.  We could see both water and land for much of the flight.  It tried to take a couple of pictures, but I don't know how well they will come out.


As interesting as that was, I was a lot more excited when we left the ocean behind and flew over Switzerland. We flew right over all the snow-covered mountains--so beautiful! Of course, I took a couple more pictures.  I could see lakes scattered here and there among the peaks.  I love mountains, but I'd never seen them from the top.

We landed in Brussels around there, and Katy and Nicole and I went in search of food.  The particular Brussels train station we ended up at is in the business district of town, so there wasn't anything outside of the station.  We ate at a Quicky Burger inside the station.  It wasn't something to repeat; the food was greasy and just tasted cheap.  But anyhow, it solved the problem of being hungry.

We caught a train back to Verviers and ended up running into a large part of the group on the way.  We spent the rest of the night doing laundry, checking our email, and catching our breath.

Sleeping on the Move: Brussels to Athens

I slept pretty well considering I was curled up on airport chairs with armrests and without cushions.  It was probably about 1:30 when I decided to try to get some sleep.  I put my backpack on one seat.  Then I pulled out my bag of t-shirts and put it over the armrest between me and my backpack to cushion that, curled my legs around the other armrest, used my sweatshirt as a pillow, and leaned against  my backpack.  I had my blanket, of course.  I slept for about three hours, waking up now and then to turn over.

A little after four I got up and got my stuff ready.  We checked our baggage a little after five, and caught a 6:30 plane to Athens.  I took my blanket and used it as a neck pillow and slept most of the flight.  However, I'm beginning to lose my enjoyment of flying: my ears popped so bad I couldn't hear much of anything the rest of the day.

The view from the balcony of our hotel room

One of the tour guides met us at the airport, and we took a charter bus, which we had for the week, to our hotel.  We stayed at the Pan Hotel, which is two-star and not luxurious, but not bad at all.  And it's in a great location--right off Syntagma Square.

I am rooming with Mandy and Anna for the week.  We have one bedroom with two beds, the TV, and a balcony, and another room with a single bed.  I volunteered for the private room since I'm coughing so much.  I'm glad to have a little bit of privacy, though.  It's been a long time since I've been alone in a room for more than five minutes.

Katy came up for a while and we talked about what we are going to do on our free day on Saturday, and then I decided to lay down for a short nap.  Well, that turned into three hours.  I got up and got a shower and a bunch of us headed out to find the Hard Rock, which was really close to our hotel.  They had really fun shirts--they are red-orange with Hard Rock Cafe written in black in the shape of a guitar.  I didn't get it, but if I don't spend too much money on other things this week I may go back for it.

I got a pig sandwich and onion rings, but I couldn't eat too much.  The barbecue sauce tastes different here, anyhow.  Hard Rock is always a good time, but I kinda wish we had waited until later in the week.  I couldn't even hear the music my ears were popped so bad.

Oh, and I had McDonald's for lunch.  They have onion rings here,weird.  Not bad, a lot like Burger Kings'.  Next door, some of the other ate at a little pita place called Pita Pan. :) 

August 10: Flying

12:51 a.m. US central time,  7:51 a.m Belgium time

We're about an hour out of Brussels.  As I thought, our night wasn't long.   We left Chicago O'Hare at a little after six Monday night.   We flew over Battle Creek and Lansing (or was it Detroit--I'll have to check the map) and then over Canada.  It got dark while we flew over Canada, probably by 7:30 central time. We crossed New York state and then the Atlantic.  Somewhere below the clouds we are now flying over Dover and London.  We noticed the sun was rising at 11:40 Tennessee time (I'm not sure exactly what time zone we were in at the time).  So, a four-hour night.  Most of the windows are open now and they're serving breakfast.  It's been a very good flight--the staff has been nice and have been good to serve drinks.  The inflight movies were Hidalgo and Under the Tuscan Sun.  I have been wanting to see the second, but I ended up watching most of the first and only seeing the second without bothering to plug my headphones in.  It would probably be a good movie--I enjoyed what I saw of it, but I just wasn't in the mood to get involved in another story right then.   Meghan taught me to play back alley bridge, and we played half a game of that as the sun came up.  Now shes taking a nap; I could probably sleep if I really wanted to, but usually I'm better off in situations like this if I don't sleep.  I just finished of the last of my chocolate, so I should be good for a while.  I'm listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd (Thyrty) at the moment.