We are going to leave you with a teaser tonight. Cathy and I are in Gombe National Park and have limited bandwidth and since we were up at 3 am this morning, we are too tired to write tonight. But needless to say we had an exceptional day which included flying to Kigoma, then traveling by boat to Gombe and within 30 minutes or so of our first walk through the forest, we came upon a family of chimpanzees. It was an awesome experience, which we’ll write more about tomorrow when we get to Kigoma.
I remember saying something about having a relaxing day today, with all of our business done on Monday. Put a strike through on that blog post. Today turned out to be a busy day. That is not a complaint mind you. It was filled with blessings that we had not anticipated at all. It started off very well with the 6:00 AM worship coming through the walls of our hotel from the Lutheran church accross the street. It’s an awesome sound to here and a very nice alarm clock too! We got up as the music ended and just started moving along slowly, thinking we had plenty of time to do whatever we wanted. Little did we know what was in store. As it turns out, Bishop Makaya had arrived in Dar the night before. He gave us a call and asked if we could meet after breakfast, which we did. In talking with him, we mentioned about going over to the Air Tanzania office to check the status of our flight and talk with them about the extra 135 Kilograms of weight we are bringing with us (AKA, all of our the computer equipment and such). Bishop Makaya said he would go with me to see if we could get a price break on the extra baggage fee’s. It turns out that he was right. The rep suggested that we send the extra weight items over as cargo instead of extra baggage at check-in. All in all, even with various fee’s paid to Air Tanzania Cargo handling along with other movers and handlers at the airport, it turned out to be about half the cost to send as cargo. The thing is however that we needed to get the stuff over to the cargo terminal by 5 PM to put it through the paces of shipping. What paces you ask? There is getting through the security gate, then there is negotiating with the cargo agents for Air Tanzania. Then there is getting it wrapped up on a pallet (and paying the person who wraps it), as well as negotiating the fee’s with Swissport, who are the ground agents who move cargo around for the various airlines. Then there is the witnessing of the pallet of stuff being security X-rayed and finally the tipping of the movers and shakers who made it all possible. I know I missed a step or two in this list, but you get the idea. It took a couple of hours to complete, but even with all of that, it was still worth the price break and the assurance that it would be going with us on our flight to Kigoma. It all worked out in the end, but it made for a very long day as going to the Airport in the middle of daily Dar traffic is an adventure all by itself.
Tomorrow we leave the hotel at 4 AM to make our way to the airport for the 6 AM flight to Kigoma. I’m looking forward now to leaving the hot, humid city and getting out to the higher elevation and dryer western side of the country. It is always a pleasure to step off the plane and walk down the tarmack to see our friends waiting and waving to us. I know Daudi and one of the drivers will be there, but I don’t know if we’ll see any others from the Diocese this time. We did give them fair warning that we have a lot of things coming with us. The plan it for us to stay in Kigoma and eventually go on by boat to the village of Kagunga, while the driver takes all of the equipment up to Kasulu for safe keeping.
I’ll post some more tomorrow during the day hopefully so you can see us going on in the boat, etc…
Have a great evening you all.
Bill