I stayed overnight in Dar es Salaam at a great hotel that Lisa recommended via some friends. The only drawback was that it was quite far from the airport. But it was on a beach and it was beautiful and comfortable and had great character. And it was reasonable.
Early in the morning I headed back to the airport from where I took a flight to Johannisburg. Sitting beside me was cool mountain climbing dude. We talked the whole way. He had just climbed Kilimanjaro and told me all about the varying degrees of altitude sickness people came down with. He had hallucinations while another guy almost died and had to be carried down quickly by the porters. He’s from Philadelphia and living in Johannisburg at the moment. His next adventure is going to work on a game farm in South Africa apparently working on contraception for animals. It seems that there are too many elephants and since you can’t hunt them they have to find other ways of keeping the population down to something reasonable. We imagined a variety of different ways you might do this, causing us to laugh quite a bit.
I had a 4 hour layover in Johannisburg. The only person I met that wasn’t an airport check-in person or immigration officer was very rude. I went to the call centre to see if I could call the hotel in Adelaide to book a reservation. It hadn’t worked from Tanzania. Well the woman was most unhelpful and I wasn’t able to get through. Nothing ever happened, the line was just quiet, no ringing, no answer. When I asked her what could be the matter she said in a snippy tone, “Just pick up the phone and dial” so I tried again and again nothing happened. I gave up and she tried to charge me a 4.50 connection fee. So I got annoyed and told her that I wasn’t going to pay for a service that I didn’t get. She told me next time I should use the pay phone. I told her next time she could provide friendlier service. So I arrived in Adelaide with no reservations.
The flight from Johannisburg to Sydney was almost 12 hours long. And we had quite a bit of a delay because of high winds going the wrong way we couldn’t take off. “Why didn’t we take off using the runway the opposite way?” a passenger suggested sitting near me suggested. After sitting there for about an hour they actually ended up doing that since the winds weren’t going to change. And off we were. Next to me was a lovely couple from New Zealand. We talked for a while before movie time and sleeping time. And they gave me their address and invited me to come and stay with them in their small rural town somewhere south of Auckland. So I have more connections! The cool thing about movies on this plane was that everybody had their own screen with their own choice of movies. I watched “Out of Africa” first. :-) I remember seeing it when it first came out that long ago. I think it was one of the reasons why I’ve wanted to go to Africa for so long. It was the whole camping in the savannahs of Africa thing. The scenery was beautiful like how I saw, and cool was too that we had the same kind of wash basins at camp as Meryl Streep did plus tables with table cloths.
She didn’t travel in a big white truck though, and I didn’t have Robert Redford with me. The movie took place in Kenya and they had the locals speaking Swahili which was cool because I understood bits and pieces of it.
We got into Sydney later than we were supposed and so I missed my connecting flight to Adelaide. They put me on the next one but I really only had 45 minutes to get that. Trouble was I had to pick up my luggage and go through Australian customs. It felt like my bag was practically the last on the plane and because I was coming from African and had been on a farm my bag needed to be checked. They are very strict and particular about what they let in. My boots had to be sprayed, even though I had washed them, to make sure no unwanted things were coming in. Then it wasn’t very clear where to go to get my next flight so I went the wrong way first and in the end had to rush to get that flight. I sat beside a nice couple on that flight too but neither of us was very talkative. I kept falling asleep for one. They were sorry however that they couldn’t give me a ride into the city which I thought was very nice. So far Australians have been very friendly.
I got a taxi that took me to the hotel that’s the meeting point for my next camping adventure. I thought it would make most sense to spend the next two nights there. But they only had room for me the first night. It’s a three star not so special generic motel type place but it was a bed to sleep in which is all I wanted at that point.
The next day I had to move. It turns out there are a number of festivals going on in Adelaide including the fringe festival and a drink and art fest of sorts which means the hotels are all booked. So I ended up at a swanky hotel that only had one little ‘economy’ room left for $190!! The room was very small and the bathroom even smaller. But it was comfortable and the bed was nice with lovely linen and a feather bed which I needed because the air conditioner worked very well. The bed was almost up there with the one in Bucarest at the Marshall! Tonight I’m back at the dumpier and cheaper hotel, though I think it’s overpriced too.
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