Getting There

One of the things that drives me crazy about people - and here I'm mainly thinking about my fellow Americans - is the misguided belief that foreign travel is especially difficult. Usually it's not really that much more challenging than domestic travel, except that the flights are longer and you have less chance of being mugged. All you have to do is type in Zanzibar instead of Orlando in the destination window of your Travelocity website and, huzzah, you have your tickets. Or you just call the amazing Rochelle of Child Travel and, huzzah, you have your tickets. For that matter, you can also just type in Zanzibar in your destination window at Hotels.com and, huzzah, you also have your hotel room. Now, of course, sometimes you might have to take flights that are slightly outside of your comfort zone, but that's actually a very good thing. And this brings me to the flight from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar.

Like a lot of places overseas the international and domestic terminals in Dar es Salaam are not in the same place, so when you fly into Dar es Salaam you have to catch a taxi to the domestic terminal (which costs either $5 or $10, depending upon your taxi driver - always ask up front). There are several local airlines that fly to Zanzibar, and I flew on ZanAir, which a perfectly nice little operation. Fortunately I had taken care of the visa in advance by stopping at the Tanzanian Embassy here in Abu Dhabi (more on that later), which made thing a lot easier.

Getting into the airport was a bit of a challenge because I had to get the approval of a guy who viewed the gateway - and his wooden desk - as his own personal fiefdom. I've always believed that no tyrants is ever as tyrannical as the petty functionary whose tiny domain you've had the misfortune to stroll into. This guy wouldn't let me through the metal detector (which I think worked) because I didn't have my ZanAir ticket, and, of course, I needed to go into the domestic terminal to get my ticket (somewhere Joseph Heller is smiling). When I checked in Qatar Air gave me my tickets for the first two legs of the journey, but not for the switch over to ZanAir. Plus, I had the temerity to put my bag on his wooden desk and he was not at all happy. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I have a terrible temper so this was definitely heading in a bad direction. It also got me thinking of how many airports, both domestic US and international, at which I should have been arrested for bad behavior and I could come up with five without even thinking. Luckily, a remarkably nice young man from ZanAir heard the commotion and came out and sorted things out, while smiling at me and rolling his eyes at the bad behavior of the Lord of the Wooden Desk. He took my itinerary and worked everything out.

The flight itself was utterly painless and only took twenty minutes. Now, who knew that you could actually get ten people, including the Kiwi pilot Ian, on that little plane. It was actually quite the experience. And, oddly, I found the crack in the passenger side control calming - they must have made that flight safely many times to have a steering control that banged up. I actually met Ian out on the tarmac before take off and he, seemingly like everyone from New Zealand, was really friendly. We talked about their victory in the recent rugby world cup. On the way back I just missed out on the opportunity to sit up front next to the pilot, and I'm really regretting it. Next time.