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  Doha, Qatar
Sunday, June 8, 2008

07 June

If I overlook yesterday's plunge in the stock market, this trip is off to a very auspicious start: Normally I walk up to the main road to catch a bus or taxi to the airport, but this time I took a motorcycle taxi. Just as I reached the end of the road, the airport express bus was rounding the bend! I had to hurridly run across the road to catch it but even that wasn't a problem as the traffic light was green for me. If I had walked as I usually do, I would have missed the bus. Statistically, it should be necessary to wait, on average, 22.5 minutes for a bus that comes every 45 minutes. And for me, that's exactly how it worked out: The last time I took that bus, I waited a full 45 minutes; this time I waited a full zero minutes. Given that I can expect a 45 minute wait next time, I think I'll skip the bus and just take a taxi on my next trip to the airport. I wonder, though, if that will count towards the average waiting time for the bus?

I arrived at the airport at 18:15 after a 1 1/4 hour bus ride on which I was the sole passenger. The ride costs only 100 baht going to the airport as opposed to 150 going the other way - very likely as a way to encourage people to take the bus going to the airport. This incentive didn't seem to work as the bus does not run frequently enough to make it a viable option for getting to the airport in a predictable amount of time. Due to my luck in getting a bus immediately, I was able to make it to the airport in plenty of time.

Or so I thought. Would you believe that my flight was moved FORWARD by a half an hour? I didn't even think that was possible! Besides departing early, I had a problem at the check-in counter which took a full thirty minutes to resolve. It seems that my reservation had been automatically canceled by the airline because I had multiple reservations. When I made the original booking, I had made some changes and apparently the first booking was never canceled. This resulted in me having multiple bookings, which the airline understandably frowns on. But when I actually plonked down the money to pay for the ticket, that should have converted my reservation into an issued ticket in the airline's system. So how could they cancel the reservation for a ticket for which I had already paid? Did they maybe think that I wanted to just buy a ticket and not fly? Anyway, after a half an hour of running around, the lady managed to get me onto the flight. I asked her if that meant that my return flight had also been canceled. She replied in the affirmative. And since my flight was about to leave, she told me to deal with the problem elsewhere. In other words, it was MY problem, not hers. Thanks a lot, Qatar Airways - The World's Five Star Airline! I'll try to fix the problem during my long layover in Doha tonight. After all, I'll have eight hours to kill.

Once on the plane, who do you think sat next to me? A beautiful girl with a mini skirt, no bra and a see-through blouse? Or a guy whose breath smelled like he just got through eating a plate of crap? A big plate. Every breath he exhaled in my direction reminded me of his unusual choice of dinner. Maybe on the return flight I'll get to sit next to that girl whom I just described. I won't hold my breath - but I sure wish the guy next to me would hold his.

08 June - Night(mare) in Doha

Okay, so I made it through the flight without too much unpleasantness, arriving in Doha, Qatar at just around midnight. The first thing I tried to do was to confirm my return flight because I didn't want to show up in Cape Town at the end of my trip and find that my reservation for my return flight had also been canceled. But believe it or not, here at the world headquarters of Qatar Airways, they were neither able to reconfirm my flight, nor were they able to put me in touch with somebody who could. So I gave up on that for now and instead explored my options for passing the night until my connecting flight at around 8 in the morning.

The first thing I did was to eat a couple of the sandwiches that I had prepared in Bangkok before my departure (both in order to have something to eat while traveling as well as to empty my refrigerator of perishable food). Having done extensive research on the internet from home already, I first went to the Oryx Lounge to see what it might have to offer. The good thing was that, at $25 for six hours use, it was $5 cheaper than my research had indicated. The bad thing is that it was totally useless for my purposes. There was no place to sleep. There were chairs; newspapers; tables; "free" internet (once you paid the 25 bucks!); and there was even the opportunity for smokers to do their thing. Can you imagine me paying $25 to expose myself to cigarette smoke!

As the Oryx Lounge proved itself to be useless for my purposes, I then proceeded to the so-called "Quiet Room". Ha! It was a semi-dark room with reclining chairs that might have been usable for sleeping - had the room been anywhere near quiet. Not wanting to be the cause of sleeping passengers missing their flights, this room was bombarded with a constant barrage of flight announcements - one after the other - non-stop - until about 2:30 a.m. Unable to sleep in the chairs provided, I pulled my sleeping bag out of my suitcase and unfurled it on the floor in the far corner of the room. I then lay my weary head to rest at about 3 a.m. By then, the boarding calls had died down somewhat and the only announcements were warnings (every five minutes) about leaving bags unattended. Somehow through all of this I must have managed to get some sleep and the time eventually passed - as it always seems to. At about 6:30 in the morning we were called to board my flight to Dar es Salaam. For some reason I was thinking this was going to be a two or three hour flight but it turned out to be nearly six hours, which actually suited me just fine as that was long enough to get in a good breakfast and a nap - without having to worry about oversleeping and missing anything.

During the flight, I smiled a few times at a curvacious Muslim woman who was pretty much covered from head to toe. To my surprise, when she passed by my seat to go to the toilet, she slipped a napkin into my hand. At first I thought she wanted me to throw it away for her. When she smiled at me afterwards, I opened it - and was even more surprised to see what was written on it: "This is my number in Muscat. Call me anytime if like to come to Muscat. My name is Salma." Well I can assure you that the next time I'm in Muscat, I know who I'm going to call! Sexy Salma - dressed in black from head to toe! I'm extremely curious to know what she intends to do with me, although I could just as easily imagine one or both of us getting in serious trouble if I did follow up on her invitation, what with me being a double infidel (i.e. - a non-Muslim atheist!)

As you might recall from my prologue, I did a fair amount of worrying about how I was going to manage to get myself to Zanzibar from the Dar airport. From the information I had gathered via the internet, I was under the impression that I would have to get myself over to the domestic airport and catch a flight from there. Well, this was one case of the reality being a lot easier than the theory. As soon as I got off the plane, there were some official looking people standing there pointing in one direction for people who were staying in Dar, and another direction for people who were transiting. I didn't know which way to go because, while I wanted to be transiting, I didn't actually have a ticket yet allowing me to do so. So I explained my situation to one of the officials standing there - and he simply said "Come with me." He seemed trustworthy, so I went with him. He brought me through immigration without having to wait like everybody else; then he brought me to a little office where it was possible to buy a ticket for a flight to Zanzibar leaving from the international terminal (where I was) rather than the domestic one (where I wasn't - and didn't really know how to get to). The ticket cost $80, which was $15 more than what it was supposed to cost, but I gladly accepted it in this case as the guy was doing me a service that was easily worth the fee that he was tacking on. (I think he thinks that he outsmarted me, but it doesn't really matter. As long as we were both happy, then it was a worthwhile transaction.) I paid with a hundred dollar bill and his co-conspirator asked me if she could give me my change in local currency. So I asked her at what rate and she quoted a rate that was 20% below the real rate - which I pointed out to her. Sometimes it pays to be prepared. So she ended up paying me my change in dollars. (I'm not as dumb as I look!)

So at about 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon I boarded my third and final flight of the journey, pleased that I was going to be able to make it to my destination a third of the way around the world - more or less just as planned. The flight to Zanzibar took only twenty minutes (which actually made it very expensive on a cost per distance basis), and I walked out of the airport expecting to be pounced on by taxi drivers. But I put on my "I know where I'm going" face and just marched out of the airport - right past the twenty dollar taxis into town and got on a local bus (called a "dalla dalla" here) and made the ride into town in a rickety old van stuffed full of friendly locals for only 30 cents. The bus dropped me off a short walk from the guesthouse I had selected (The Garden Lodge on Kaunda Road). When I checked in, I was reminded of the fact that Zanzibar has no electricity at the moment so I would only have power (by generator) from six in the evening until morning - and there would be no hot water for my showers either. Because of this, I negotiated my room rate down from $30 to $25 a night, which I think is still a bit too much for what I'm getting but which seems to be normal in Africa. As I plan to be in Zanzibar for more than a week, I have plenty of time to scout out other hotels to see if I can find something better.

And in the evening, on my walk around town, that's exactly what I did. While strolling around to familiarize myself with the town, I stopped in at every hotel that I passed to enquire about their rates. Most of them were in the $60-$90 range - much too expensive for what they were - and much more than I'm willing to pay.

Later, on a restaurant-searching mission, I ran into a Canadian woman (Sharon) who was also on her way to eat. She had been in town already for a few days attending meetings for a Canadian government aid organization, so she was able to help me find one of the more famous restaurants in town, "Mercury's", named after the late Freddy Mercury of the band Queen, who was born in Zanzibar. At the restaurant, we shared a tolerable, if small and overpriced pizza - and a very bland dish of pasta. I have the feeling that getting food is going to be an issue in Zanzibar.

Sharon and I also spoke about the concept of giving charity to Africans - a topic about which my opinion is already well known to those of you who have read my previous Africa trip blogs. Aside from the damage that free money does to the motivation of Africans to work for a living, the presence of western aid workers drives up the price of food and accommodation, thereby damaging tourism as well. But, as we know by now, aid giving is as much for the benefit of the givers (who stay in fancy hotels, eat in the best restaurants and drive the nicest cars - all paid for with money from taxpayers from their home countries) as it is for the recipients. Anyway, Sharon is at least sincere in her desire to help the world's poor - even though her efforts might in fact be exacerbating the problem.

After dinner, it was back to my hotel room through the dark streets of Stone Town with my flashlight guiding the way, as well as being a potential weapon should anyone decide to take advantage of the darkness to try to relieve me of my valuables. After a cold shower (which wasn't as bad as I had expected it to be), I did a bit of reading about Zanzibar to further prepare for my time here, and finished the evening by cracking out my expandable keyboard for the first time ever on a trip. It took me a good fifteen minutes to get it working (there are lots of stupid little steps necessary to get it fired up), but then after that it was smooth sailing; a real pleasure to use.

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