Day 1, Saturday 17 September: after a very hectic week of preparations, many work deadlines, and celebrating Barney’s birthday, we’re finally off to Kenya and Tanzania with Dr, Joel Parrott and a group from the Oakland Zoo. Saturday late afternoon we leave on a smooth and uneventful Virgin Atlantic overnight flight from SFO to London with a six hour layover at Heathrow.
Day 2, Sunday, 18 September, at Heathrow, we drag our jet-lagged selves around the airport, and go up to a viewing floor to watch planes arrive and depart. It is very busy, planes landing every 30-60 seconds, and we get to see one of the remaining Concorde planes parked there.
Finally, we board Kenya Airways to Nairobi, and were exhausted enough that we actually sleep. Until an announcement comes, seeking someone with medical expertise for a passenger in distress. A few minutes later comes the announcement that we’d be diverting to Cairo airport so the passenger could deplane.
Day 3, 20 September: We’ve been here about an hour now, and since it was almost midnight when we land, we did not even get to see the pyramids when landing. We’re hoping that we can still make our Nairobi connection to Arusha and Kilimanjaro on Monday morning. Three calendar days on travel is a long time.
Three hours after the stop in Cairo, the person who is ill has to stay, they have to off-load her baggage, and then we finally took off. We land in Nairobi four hours late, and miss our flight to Arusha - one of only two flights per day. so after rebooking all 11 of us, we get them to let us into the Kenya Airways Simba Lounge so we could have some comfortable chairs, a sleeping area, showers, and food, very nice after 12 hours on an airplane. The flight will get us to Kilimanjaro/Arusha around 7pm, then to the lodge about 8pm, when we'll all probably collapse before our flight to the Serengeti in the morning for our first day of wildlife viewing.
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