Back in the Loo

So I'm back after my whirl wind tour of East Africa :) I had a long and arduous journey on my return home. I left Ndolage at 8 am on Saturday look the dala dala to Bukoba (always an adventure - I think they managed 25 people this time.) That was followed by the first two of my flights home. First to Mwanza (second biggest city in Tanzania) and then on to Dar and a Taxi ride to my downtown hotel. Luckily there were no mosquitos around, the net was in pretty bad shape and slept without it. On Monday I started the longest leg of my journey.

My plane left Dar around 3:30 in the afternoon and was just over three hours to Jo'burg, but by the time we had taxi'd to the airport I had only 20 minutes to get through security and borded onto my next plane. I was luckily able to get my bording pass in Dar. So I made the plane with a few minutes to spare, however I was pretty scared about my baggage (it was a relief when I saw it in New York!!!!) The plane was pretty empty, so I ended up having the two seats along one edge to myself and was able to get a decent amount of sleep - about three hours on each side of Dakkar - but they had to wake us up for an hour in Dakkar to do a security check - What a pain!).

17 hours after leaving Jo'burg we arrived safe and sound at JFK where I had around 4 hours to clear immigration, collect my baggage, change airports and check in. So since everyone loves hearing about incompetence, here is one you will all love. So there were two international flights coming into JFK around the same time. they had two separate lines - one for US citizens and residents and one for non residents. Since it was an INTERNATIONAL flight, there were about twice as many non residents as there were residents. How does US immigration handle this. Why of course they had 6 officers handling the US people and 1, yes 1, handling all the non-residents. Finally after moving like 8 people through in half an hour they brought a few more people into the non-resident line, so it moved marginally faster (note, the non-residents for the most part take like 2-3 times as long as the residents, being Canadian, it took me under a minute...). So finally after waiting in line for over an hour, I cleared custums with my bad and was ready to set off for Laguardia. Note: Most Airports (like all) have a "ground transportation information centre" where people can get help getting a cab or a shuttle to whereever they need to go. It was closed. So I wandered around for a bit until finally stumbling upon the sign for the shuttle, and after nearly taking a cab instead, the shuttle finally showed up.

Trip through new york was uneventful. Much safer bus driver this time!!! I was pretty confused with where I was with respect to the rest of the city. I figure we went west of manhattan??? (Just checked a map, we were east of manhattan!!! however, I was correct that we drove through queens and brooklyn :)) I could see it from the runway at laguardia.

One final flight home and I was back in Canada and quite happy to be so. People here are so much nicer and friendlier than elsewhere. I chatted with the custums official (note we had like 8 or 9 officials on and didn't give preferential treatment to canadian citizens), and she helped me with my declaration form and it was off to see my dad :)

Last night was weird getting settled back into wloo. Burger brought Jenny over and we cuddled for a bit. I think she remembers me, and she hasn't tried to escape yet. When I woke up at 3:30 this morning (I was luckily able to fall back asleep) we had another little cuddle :) I think I'll keep her :)