Marathon Travel from Africa to Asia - Our 32-hour travel day

---

Marathon Travel from Africa to Asia - Our 32-hour travel day…

From the start of our journey, we knew that leaving Africa was going to be both emotionally and physically challenging. We wrote in our last blog of the emotional attachments we made in Tanzania to the Kili Kids orphanage and to the warm, generous people we met throughout our safari adventures. Our physical challenge was one of endurance, to traverse the distance from Arusha, Tanzania, to Chiang Mai, Thailand, over a 32-hour time period and through 4 time zones. Thankfully, Sam and Lauren are fabulous travellers. With only minimal whining about lack of sleep, they seem to love the adventure of it all and are usually the cheeriest ones in sight at our middle-of-the-night airport stops.

Our travel day began at 3:15 am, when we awoke to shower, finish packing our bags, and meet our driver, Boniface, at 4:00 am, who would take us to the Kilimanjaro airport through the dark of night for our 6:00 am flight to Nairobi, Kenya. Precision Air only has this one flight each day to Kenya, so we needed to be on board.

This was a smaller dual-prop plane, which meant that we needed to check and then retrieve three of our bags when we got to Nairobi in order to re-check the bags onto our next flight on a different airline. Unfortunately, this meant sending Ken through Kenya customs and immigration (and purchasing the $20 “transfer” visa) to locate and then haul the three bags back to where Kate and kids where camped out in the main terminal. What we didn’t anticipate when Ken went off on this expedition was: the visa and immigration line took about an hour; the entry line and security check-in was in a far-distant building with another long line; because we were so early for our next flight there were no agents from that airline that could check him in for our next flight. Guess what? Without a boarding pass, security would not allow Ken back into the terminal building to rejoin Kate and the kids and no way to easily communicate to them Ken’s status. Fortunately, Ken’s persuasive whining and sleep-deprived demeanour (think junkyard dog) was able to convince the third level of security to which he appealed that he was not a terrorist threat and that he be allowed entry back into the terminal...all this took almost two hours, and, after a certain point, there were no luggage carts and Ken had to CARRY the three suitcases (visualize circus performer). Meanwhile, a nervous and worried Kate was getting ready to send out the search and rescue party (read: army commandos).

Anyway, imagine a sleep-deprived homeless family on the floor behind some chairs along a hallway with all manner of bags and items spread out waiting for our next flight, which did not leave for seven hours. Luckily, there were a number of interesting shops and an Internet Café which was more than happy to have our business for multiple hours. At 2:00 pm, we joined Qatar airlines for two flights. The first five-hour segment took us to Doha, the capital of the country of Qatar. We had a very tight connection here (45 mins), but arrived 20 minutes late and the bus that drove us from the plane to the terminal consumed most of the remaining time. It seemed to us that our plane had parked in another time zone from the airport because of the great distance that this shuttle bus traversed.

When we go off the bus, we had fewer than 10 minutes to get to our next flight. Pushing our way to the front of the crowds (we were now experts at this following our many weeks among Europeans), we dashed to our next gate to make our connection. We did not want to miss this flight because there would not be another until the following night! Ouch! Of course, what no one communicated to us what that there were about 40 additional people on the same flight on which we had just arrived that were also flying on to Bangkok and that we didn’t need to rush because they were holding the flight for everyone…(now you tell us). Ultimately, we were just glad to be safely onboard our next flight, but we definitely expended some physical and emotional energy which we wish we could have saved.

Our next flight (7 hours—overnight) to Bangkok was on a very large and comfortable jet with plush seats, two hot meals, and touch screen tv monitors in each seat with a good selection of entertainment. This was warmly welcomed by the kids, but did not necessarily encourage them to want to get any kind of sleep on the plane. After another short night, the sun (and breakfast) awoke us over the skies of Bangkok. After deplaning and clearing immigration around 8:00 am, we settled down for another airport wait for our flight to Chiang Mai which left at 3:00 pm. Our efforts at boarding an earlier flight were not successful so we enjoyed the inexpensive prices of just about everything in Thailand, bought some food for sandwiches and snacks, ordered large fruit smoothies, and read the newest version of Newsweek which we found on the newsstand, giving us some much-appreciated US news.

Air Asia, our final carrier on this trek, is a budget airline (like Southwest) which does not have assigned seating so you must be assertive in getting to a seat, especially if you have a lot of carry-on luggage (as we did). In the end, seating was not the issue. Going through security, the screeners pulled out our jar of peanut butter (an item which had passed through dozens of other x-ray screenings with no problems) and were informing us that this was a liquid that needed to be thrown away. We were not alarmed by the prospect of throwing away a $2 jar of peanut butter, but this is what we had been using to mask the taste of Lauren’s anti-malarial medication which she could not swallow and we would grind up into a spoonful of peanut butter. Basically, the issue was that these screeners did not know what peanut butter was! We were trying to communicate to them that this was a food (paste), not a liquid or gel. Kate, ever the attorney, made some passionate appeals which either convinced (or wore down) the security agent in charge who seemed appeased by the fact that this jar was necessary for a related “medical” purpose. We thus racked up another “save” from airport security.

We were greeted in Chiang Mai at 4:30pm by our friendly driver from the Riverside House B&B who drove us the 20 minutes to our location along the banks of the Ping River. Our transfer fee was just 200 baht (about $6) and we were so relieved to be able to put down our bags and settle in. We enjoyed a well-deserved dinner at The Dukes (American-style) restaurant next door and immediately crashed for the night following 32 hours of travel, door-to-door.

Check out the attached photo of a sign we saw in an airport along the way. Please let us know if you happen to know what the difference might be between the English and American Lounges and, for that matter, why the French have one of their own??? We had quite the chuckle over this...

K4

---

Photos

Airport Camping...Kenya
Early morning arrival and long aiport layover..

Precision Air
Shuttle service between Tanzania and Kenya

American Lounge??
Puzzle: What's the difference between the English and American Lounge--how are they different from the French?

Comments

[Carolyn Taylor]

Apply for the Amazing Race!
Whew! Aren't you glad you are doing this when you are young? Loved the visual of the family pushing to the front of the line; Ken as a junkyard dog; and Kate as an lawyer defending a jar of peanut butter :-) Ride those elephants! Carolyn