Travel to Zanzibar

I really do believe that travel is more about the journey than the destination, but this was one time when I absolutely could not wait for the journey to be over so I could just be at my destination. I arrived at the Lusaka airport for my direct flight to Dar es Salaam, only to find out that I was actually flying to Dar es Salaam via Ndola, which, while it is the second largest city in Zambia, isn't exactly somewhere I expected to stop. I might have understood Nairobi or Johannesburg, cities with airports that are hubs for travel around Africa, but certainly not Ndola. Yet I boarded the plane, and this is what I wrote as I waited for take-off:

The planes just keep getting smaller and smaller. There are literally eighteen seats on this plane - nine rows with one seat on either side of an aisle where you can't even stand because the ceiling is so low. There is no space for overhead storage, and, from my seat in the back row, I have just watched the crew load luggage behind me into a space the pre-recorded safety briefing referred to as the "coat closet". There's not even a separate area for the pilots. I can see both of them, and, between their heads, I can see straight out the windshield of the plane. As the plane begins to move I realize that take-off is more similar to that of the microlight flight I took over Victoria Falls than the last commercial airline I flew.
The ride was rough, to say the least, so much so, in fact, that I promised myself if the same plane appeared for my return flight to Lusaka, I would exit the airport in Ndola and take a six-hour bus trip back to the capital city. But I made it to Ndola, where we walked off the plane and into a small warehouse (otherwise known as "baggage claim") before walking into the parking lot of the airport, only to re-enter another small, brick building (otherwise known as "check in"). After checking in, I was handed my boarding pass for the flight - not a printed, perforated, individualized boarding passes that I'm used to, but a completely blank, wrinkled, laminated card that had clearly been used many, many times.
I took my card and headed into the waiting area to board my flight, which was supposed to leave in about half an hour. Yet, looking out the windows onto the runway, the only plane I saw was the small one from which I had just disembarked. So I sat. And I waited. And I waited. And I waited. Two hours later, another plane landed, the passengers disembarked and, finally, we were allowed to board. I couldn't even bring myself to check my watch. It was less than an hour until my flight from Dar es Salaam to Stone Town departed and I was still a two-hour flight away from Tanzania. I took my seat, opened my book, turned on my iPod, closed my eyes and was almost immediately greeted by a talkative, self-assured, 40-year old Zambian man who sat down next to me. For the next two hours, I listened to him explain to me how the clouds protected the earth from the sun and HIV is spread by prostitutes. Needless to say, landing in Dar es Salaam was a relief.

Except that I had missed my flight to Stone Town. I exited the plane as quickly as possible and got in line at passport control. Just when I thought my line had less than a dozen people in it, a group of about fifty Indians who had just landed were ushered to the front of my line. So I waited, again, counting how much time passed since my flight was scheduled to depart.

I finally made it through passport control and was trying to decide what to do when I overheard a couple talking to a representative from Zambian Airways. It was clear they were in the same situation I was, so I introduced myself and joined them. The woman from Zambian Airways wasn't sure she could do anything to help us, but asked for our passports and said she would check. And so we waited. After fifteen or twenty minutes, the woman returned and quickly ushered us out of the baggage claim area of the airport and toward the check-in counter of a different airline than any of the three of us had used to book our original tickets. ZanAir had a flight leaving in five minutes and they had room for us. In a whirlwind, we were issued tickets (I was shocked when payment wasn't an issue), rushed through security, ran across the tarmac to the airplane and boarded just in time for the door to close behind us.

In about twenty minutes we were in Stone Town. I'm not sure I've ever been so thankful for the destination.