03
AUGUST 2005 ‚ 0913 HOURS ‚ HEATHROW AIRPORT LONDON UNITED KINGDOM 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. 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. |