The Sahara looks pretty cool from a plane, almost as cool as the last fifteen times I flew over it :)

Well, it’s taken me a long time but I have finally got my travel plans all sorted out. Having a super-slow internet connection and minimal access to a phone that doesn’t work very well definitely makes setting up travel challenging but here’s what I managed to cobble together:

• Today I will return to Maasai Mara (probably with a stopover in Narok tonight)
• I will be in the Mara working with the students and other project members until August 7 when we will all return to Nairobi.
• On August 9th all the students will fly home to the U.S., I will stay in Nairobi for a further few days to work on computer related tasks for MCPP
• Then on August 14th I will board a plane in Nairobi headed for Mombasa where I will relax in a nice tourist resort, explore the city, and recover from 2 months of camping
• August 18 will find me flying back to Nairobi where I will spend a day preparing for the next stage of my journey
• On the 20th I will hop on a Egypt Airlines plane bound for Cairo where I will meet up with my friend Johnny who I met at USC. He has family in Cairo and has kindly offered to give me a place to stay and to show me all the sights.
• I will fly back to Nairobi late on August 26th for the sole purpose of catching my August 28th flight to Heathrow out of the Nairobi airport. What is that you say? … Yes, Yes … I agree with you, it is completely ridiculous to fly all the way south to Nairobi from Cairo in order to get to London. All that I can offer in my defense is two long trips to the Nairobi airport where I spent over 6 hours waiting around to talk to a British Airways agent. Why didn’t I just call British Airways? Well I did, and they informed me that they don’t accept credit card payments over the phone for flights originating in Nairobi so if you want to change your flight you have to go to the airport … where it turns out … British Airways ticketing agents only work when they feel like it and they don’t publish their schedules so you just hop in a taxi bound for the airport and pray you can find a BA employee on duty. And then …. you finally find one and they spend 30 seconds informing you (in very anti-climatic fashion) that your travel agent booked you a ticket that is non-refundable, non-tranferable, and non-upgradable, you can change the date of your flight but nothing else.
• Ya that pretty much sucked … and after exploring my other options, it became clear that the most cost-effective way to get from Cairo to London was by shifting the date of my Nairobi-London flight and flying from Cairo back to Nairobi … oh well it’s not that bad and I get to go see Cairo!!
• So after needlessly criss-crossing the African Continent a few times I will arrive in London on the morning of Friday the 29th. I will hang out there for a few days and then board a flight on September 2nd for Phoenix.
• What comes after that I don’t really know … I imagine I’ll sleep for a few days to start things off tho

~ by cstoehr on July 28, 2008.