03 AUGUST 2005 ‚ 0913 HOURS ‚ HEATHROW AIRPORT LONDON UNITED KINGDOM
The flight from Zanzibar to Nairobi went off not much beyond the last delay ‚ and with no further taxes or bribes required. Getting into Kenyatta Airport at 8:45 p.m. leaving us no time to partake of the scheduled trip to the famed Carnivore restaurant and instead left us moving over to the British Airways check-in.
The fun part of the evening was once again at the visa desk where we got to shortly after disembarking our Kenya Airways 737. It seems a silly thing to have to pay another $20 for a visa when we're not even leaving the airport, but we weren't going to haggle and just bit the bullet.

But check it: contingent upon needing these visas, Susan had kept a stash of Kenyan shillings just for the occasion ‚ except for one thing. The Kenya Immigration authority doesn't accept its own country's currency to pay for visas. The lame excuse the no-nonsense representative gave was that the shilling fluctuates to drastically to permit them to accept it as payment. So Our only recourse was for me to wait while Susan made a trip to the currency exchange to turn her shillings into greenbacks. That didn't take much time and when she returned with the cash, the man behind the counter resumed the process. Only after leafing through my passport he found our original single entry visa and the second transit visa we needed to get after we returned from Rwanda, and ‚ get this: he then told us that we didn't need a visa at all. For whatever reason or his flawed logic he said our return from Tanzania didn't count against the documentation we hadÖ even though they had been utilized. But I wasn't about to advise him of that fact, especially when he flopped the two twenties back up on the counter and entry-stamped our passports making us good to go. So we went, somewhat happily dumbfounded at the luck going our way for once ‚ especially given the bribes and fees we had to suffer just to get the hell out of Zanzibar.

The next step was the game of wait and see we had to play at the baggage carousel to see if our duffels had been installed on the plane with us. With Susan switching off scouting duties while I went to the bathroom and then me resuming them while she paid a visit to the WC, I breathed a sigh of immense relief when I saw her monster bag and mine right behind it on the conveyor. Grabbing them we headed to the Pollman's Tours kiosk the representative of which walked us around the bend across a parking lot and to the departures terminal where we got in line for the British Airways check-in and after three security checks eventually boarded the 747-400 that got us here to London's Heathrow Airport about eight hours later.
With a six-hour layover here, we had toyed with taking the Underground's Picadilly line to Hyde Park or Covent Garden and just wandering around for a couple hours, but the gray drizzly weather and the weight of my backpack and a sudden onset of exhaustion that even a Starbuck's couldn't relieve, we otped just to ride out the long break before our flight to L.A. here in Terminal No. 3 where we strolled a newsstand and bought books (she got Nicholas Evans' "The Smoke Jumper", I went in for Nick Hornsby's "A Long Way Down") today's and today's London Times before adjourning to a pseudo-pub called O'Neill's (I've seen them in other ports of airÖ maybe even L.A.) for breakfast and a quarter-hearted attempt at a sudoku puzzleÖ which brings us to the present sitting in what was an empty terminal when we arrived, but is now chock full of people from everywhere going everywhere.

And there's still more than 90 minutes until our plane departs ‚ from which gate we don't know. The boards don't list it yet. Susan's guess is that it'll be Gate No. 15, a 20-minute walk from here, according to the information posted next to the departures. I'm feeling confident we'll embark from Gate No. 4, only a 10-minute stroll.

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