Les shenanigans de l'aeroport

Uf, I'm at the Peace Corps house in Tana... finally. Luckily the house had internet installed last month so I get to fill all you guys in on the ridiculousness of our journey.

Perhaps when the bus dropped the 20 of us off at the wrong terminal at JFK, we should have known we'd be in for a bumpy ride. It took us about an hour and a couple of incorrect airtrains to the right terminal, before we finally joined up with the Peace Corps Mozambique group who was flying on the same plane to Johannesburg before taking their connecting flight. Either way we chilled at the check in counter for a couple of hours, as we were really really early and there was no one to check us in. After I checked in and was leading my checked luggage to the carousel, I thought it odd that instead of sticking the baggage tags to my passport as most airlines do, these folks had stapled them to my boarding pass. But I figured oh well I'm a pro at flying and I shouldn't have any problems keeping the receipt of my air ticket and boarding pass stub all together.

Now, while all 20 of us experienced a bumpy ride to Tana, I'm pretty sure I'm the only one to have other stupid things happen to her on top of everything. Sadly, I have no one to blame but myself for the extra bits of trouble. My first individual scare was at security. I show my brand new peace corps passport to the dude and almost immediately he tells me my passport isn't valid. I'm totally freaking out and the guy takes his sweet time messin' with me before telling me that I hadn't signed my passport yet and that it's not valid until I do. Apparently a whole bunch of people who'd gone ahead of me had had this problem as well since we didn't realize we needed to do this, but as I was the last in line for a bit the guy must have gotten tired of it and decided to have some fun. Sure it's kinda funny now, but I wasn't laughing then.

So we get on the plane, awesome. Land in Johannesburg, awesome. Waited for 4 hours to get on the hotel shuttle to the hotel which was literally two minutes away. The thing was though that the Mozambique group was also staying at the same hotel and there are 57 of them and only two shuttles that between the two can take only 16 people at a time. Plus, the Mozambique crew hadn't checked their luggage all the way through and it probably took even longer for them to load and unload. Still the wait was well worth it, cuz the hotel was absolutely fantastic. Amazing. I swear to god it must be a 4 or 5 star. I slept like a baby for 11 hours.

In Philly we had been told at staging that our contecting flight to Tana was at 3:30 pm the following day after landing in Jo'berg. But when we got to the aeroport we find out that actually there had been a last minute change or some miscommunication somewhere and that we had actually been booked on the 9:30 am flight and that it had obviously left without us. Lots of scrambling, lots of phone calls, lots of uncertainty of whether or not we'd be leaving today or tomorrow. At one point we even thought that half of us would be able to leave tommorrow while the other half wouldn't be able to leave till even the day after. Through all of this though I really have to remark on the group's chill factor. A few of us took charge and the rest of us let them. No one panicked, everyone was really calm and pretty jovial even (of course the prospect of possibly spending another night in a really nice hotel probably helped). I, however, had something to worry about.

Remember those baggage tickets and it's odd placement? Well almost right after I got of the flight and was standing in line for customs, I realized that I no longer had that envelope of receipts and baggage tickets. Now, I was bit concerned at first, but decided that there wouldn't be any problem cuz there's no way anything could go wrong with the flight right? And even if they did they'd probably be able to track my luggage with just my passport right? So, I'm sitting with the group next to the pay phones and this sense of 'uh oh' starts to creep up on me. Cuz eventhough I'm sitting on the tile floor of a relatively fancy-pants aeroport, I'm still in a developing country, and with my experience of developing countries nothing is ever easy. And the longer I think about the lost envolope of receipts and such the greater this sense of foreboding mounts.

Our tickets get figured out and hotel accomodations get squared away, and this amazingly helpful airline employee comes over to us to give us directions on what's gonna happen. And sure enough she needs our baggage tickets cuz while we've been booked on the new flight our bagagge tracking numbers have not been entered and the only way they can garuntee our luggage will be on that flight is with those numbers. I beg plead and do my brown thing, but it still doesn't look so good. The only thing she can advise me to do is that when I come in the morning to explain at the check in counter what has happened and ask her to add a note for the luggage folk to look for my bags manually.

We get there in the morning and check in. One other guy is in the same boat with me and together we try to navigate through the ridiculousness of Jo'berg aeroport to try and get a print out of our boarding info from the flight to JFK that would have our baggage #'s on it and we'd be able enter that into the computer. No dice. But honestly at this point, I'm so exhausted and so heartsick and angry with myself for losing the tickets in the first place, I'm just letting go. I had all my valuables and essentials I'd need to live in Madagascar on me, so if I lose my luggage I'm ok with it, I convince myself.

So we board the flight and just as we take off, the captain comes on the intercom. There's an electrical problem. We have to disembark and our flight is indefinetly delayed. We sit again in the aeroport for another 8 hours for the third day in a row. However, as we board again finally at 4 pm, the super helpful and wonderful person from the day before finds us and lets us know that since the flight was delayed she was able to go down herself and make sure all of our luggage was boarded on the flight. Omigod such a huge relief, and now I feel a little silly for getting so worked up over it in the first place :P

Johannesburg

Really quick post. I'm in Jo'berg tonight after a 17.5 hour flight. off to Antananarivo (Tana for short) tomorrow. I won't have internet for at least a month. Please send me letters! My address and some directions for sending are in the side bar.