Summit Sistas

We are sipping hot cappuccinos in the humid jomo kenyatta airport in nairobi, kenya after a very long travel itinerary with just 1 more short flight to go (to kilimanjaro).  The sun is just now coming up.  Our travel was not without incident, but overall ran fairly smoothly considering the number of flights and stops to deal with.  I (Jill) started my journey some 30+ hours ago in portland, oregon where my luggage was accepted readily but my flight to Denver was delayed causing me to miss my first connecting flight.  I was wandering around Denver airport trying to figure out a new plan when I was lucky enough to reach a real person by phone who informed me I had already been rerouted on a lufthansa flight – I made it to the gate just barely.  In Frankfurt, I was so happy when Jaimi found me (since verizon failed me and I did not have phone service) and ushered me into the fancy lufthansa senator lounge where I was able to shower and eat good food.  We celebrated the beginning of our journey together in the comfy leather seats with our cute matching packs, before boarding our flight to Cairo.  Unfortunately, we failed to get seats together on our long flight from Cairo to Nairobi.  I tried to do a seat exchange, but despite all the talk about africans being laid-back and relaxed, they were very adamant about sitting in their assigned seats.  So, I had to sit in the back with the screaming children, and Jaimi got harrassed by her overly-friendly seat mate who was very interested in the women’s underwear ads in the magazine she was reading.  But… it could be worse, I realized, as I was sitting next to a girl from Moscow who’s trip was delayed 24 hours and is scheduled to start her Kili climb today!!  They really wanted to sell us a visa here, but we insisted we did not need one to walk through the airport and finally got directions on where to go to get our new boarding passes and ensure our luggage transfer.  So now we are set, excited to get to our final destination, glad to have a couple of days to unwind from our journey, and trying not to think too much about the climb just, yet.  We have been practicing swahili and have down about 3 words.  Habari za leo (yes, we did just have to look that up!)

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.