It's not Tanzania, but it sure is nice!

It was nice while it lasted...

For the second night on the ground in a row, I find myself in a hotel and not in Tanzania. At least I’ve moved up a notch. I’m in room 230 at the 5-star Intercontinental Nairobi. You know, the place where Bush stays when he comes to Kenya. I must have deep pockets…or just bad luck.

Everything was going to plan. I killed an interminable afternoon in London at the hotel and the shopping gallery at Heathrow before boarding my flight to Nairobi. Shortly after I sat down, a loud Englishman got on, circling the plane looking for his seat. He found it, eventually – right next to me, of course – and proceeded to talk my ear off for the next 45 minutes. He’d had 9 pints at the airport waiting for the flight, and his incessant babble was a mixture was somewhere between entertaining and annoying.

The flight was virtually empty. Clearly Virgin was taking a big loss on this flight but the passengers were happy as many got to stretch out across four seats for the overnight flight. I parted with Noel under the guise of being in a noisy section of the plane, which was not entirely untrue. The flight passed, quiet and uneventful.

I retook my seat next to Noel for the landing as the flight attendant said they needed two guys in the emergency exit row. We were sat facing the flight attendant during the descent, and the back and forth conversation between her and Noel kept us all unaware of what was going on outside.

We seemed just about to touch down and felt a good jolt as we bumped the runway, but Noel and I could see nothing but cloud outside of the window and then the pilot hit the gas and we took off again. A few white knuckles all around, but when we levelled off again, the co-pilot came on to say that we had had to abort the landing as they had lost visual contact with the runway. We circled for a half hour but the weather was so bad that we had to divert to Mombasa, almost an hour away. No one on the plane was happy. Noel would miss his cab and likely the barbeque in his honour waiting at his mother’s house, and I would miss my connecting bus to Tanzania – for the second day in a row.

We touched down in sunny Mombasa just after the sun rose. It was 7:00am on a Sunday morning, and this airport, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, was dead. Two planes sat on the tarmac, and there was no movement anywhere.

You’d have thought it would be simple: fuel up, wait for the word that the weather had improved in Nairobi and then high tail it back there. The only thing was that Virgin doesn’t fly to Mombasa and as such had no staff, no ground crew, and no contracts for any services there, not to mention that we were showing up virtually unannounced on a Sunday morning. So the pilot was forced to negotiate all of these things with the airport staff. Kind of like pulling your wheels up to a gas station in the middle of nowhere with no price listed. Only you need 20,000 litres.

In the time it took to negotiate the fuel, the pilots ran over their legal flying hours and so that was the end of that. We weren’t going anywhere. This posed a bigger problem, since we would then have to disembark and our luggage would have to be offloaded. As mentioned though, Virgin had no contract for ground crew here and there were no immigration services at the time since we were arriving unscheduled. After over an hour on the plane, it was decided that they would let us into the terminal, so we were guided (and guarded) as we were led to a sectioned off area. The Virgin office in London was negotiating for services and immigration. We spent a good two hours in the airport before they managed to work things out. We then found out that the plane had been slightly damaged in our aborted landing in Nairobi and that there were no aircraft technicians for A340s at Mombasa so one would have to come in from Nairobi. They announced that Virgin would put us up in a hotel for the night and that a Virgin manager was on his way in from Nairobi.

So we loaded into a convoy of buses and headed off to an unknown hotel. People were tired and unhappy but smiles started to emerge when we arrived at the hotel, a luxury resort on a white sand beach. Pools, cabanas, canopy beds and balconies with ocean views. This was going to go a long way to soothing our pain. I, for one, was going to make the best of this unexpected turn of events and quickly changed into a bathing suit and sandals and met up with a girl from the flight to have lunch at the buffet. We were enjoying our leisurely lunch as a nice breeze blew and the band played and had just finished up when a hotel staff member approached us and told us that Virgin had charted a plane and we would have to check out within the half hour. Talk about dangling a carrot. And a luxury carrot at that! Now I really was pissed! But we had no choice and so in a pool of sweat, I repacked my massive bags and we re-boarded the buses for the airport only 2 hours after arriving.

Things were handled quickly at the airport, and they needed to be. The runway lights had failed that day at Mombasa and so we were in a race against the sun to take off. I boarded the rankest, sweatiest plane I’ve ever flown and we took off with about 20 minutes to spare before sunset. Upon arrival in Nairobi, a Virgin agent approached me to tell me that they had a reservation at the Intercontinental waiting. The girl from the plane had offered to let me stay with her at the hotel she had originally had booked there, but in the end we cancelled that to save her the money and so we are both staying here at the Intercontinental on Virgin’s tab. It’s just too bad we haven’t been able to take advantage of the hotel more. After a nice dinner and a drink at the bar, we we’re exhausted and it’s bed time.

It’s not Tanzania, but at least it’ll be a 5-star bed tonight. And the bus company is honouring my reservation from two days ago, so maybe, just maybe, I’ll find myself in Tanzania tomorrow!