After a long wait in the Atlanta airport, we all got to our plane with plenty of time to spare (starting new trends for me). Our group has the same flight itinerary as AIM’s Kenya team so we’ve been traveling with them and enjoying their delightful company. The plane had touchscreens in the back of each seat so for the duration of our 14-hour flight we had personalized choices from several hundred movies, music albums, and TV shows. (Highlights include Inception, nearly a whole season of Dexter, Dial M For Murder, and the entire Toy Story saga: I would end up only watching North by Northwest, a Hitchcock classic.) I did manage to sleep about 8 of the 14 hours (if not a little bit more), recorded several pages’ worth of last-minute phone conversations in my journal, and spent some quality time in the Word. However, the strangest part of the trip was the time factor. Our flight took off at 8:45 PM EST the evening of January 19th. Because we flew east, the sun rose after only about 3 hours of flight time, and was only up in the sky for another 4 or 5 hours. And thus we landed in Dubai at around…8 PM…
Internal clocks? Successfully confused.
However, it’s good I slept most of that first flight because our group got separated, turned around and thoroughly bewildered in the Dubai airport. Suffice it to say that we all got 30-day visas into Dubai (except the Canadian in our group, something to do with international politics), went looking for our baggage, found it had been taken care of and checked through the whole trip and had pass back through customs and around four security checkpoints. It was a long night (day?).
And yet, in the face of overwhelming odds, we made our flight into Nairobi and are now relaxing at a local backpackers’ hostel. A few of us piled into a tiny taxi and went out for water and grocery supplies. Turns out water is really heavy and when you put it all in the trunk of 20-year old car that didn’t have shocks/supports to begin with…well…I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about how noisy that car ride was. I think most of the people staring at our extremely-low-riding car just assumed the Americans in the back seat were REALLY heavy. Regardless, at around 5:30 tomorrow morning, my team will depart on an 8-hour bus ride to Busai, Kenya, which constitutes the final stage of our travel (for now).
