Description

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” –Mark Jenkins

Saturday 29 July 2017

24 hours of travel

After a long and busy day, Tracey and I, and our 6 bags of luggage, were finally loaded into the car and ready for the off. Being a Friday night at the end of school term, the M25 was of course a car park for most of the journey, but after an agonisingly slow 90 minutes, we pulled up the departures ramp at Heathrow’s terminal 5 – grinning like Cheshire cats.
Once our rucksacks were through the oversize counter and the donation cases were safely checked in, we headed straight to the lounges like a couple of clumsy kids.
The flight was amazing and the only complaint I would have is that we had seats on the wrong side of the plane… sunrise comes through the left hand side windows on arrival, not the right. However the second flight window seats did net us some cracking views of Victoria falls and the mighty Zambezi river as we came in to land.
The timing of our VISA approval was perfect and no longer had the stamp gone in, when the airport power went out…. we were through…. without a working baggage belt though our luggage took a little longer and was quite literally thrown by hand through the wall and into the baggage hall. Gotta love the Africans… thankfully anything of any value was safely in our cabin baggage.
Tired and hanging we made it to the Sunbird in Livingstone for about 2pm and were told the current occupants of our room were yet to move out, so we dumped our luggage in the dorm room of some other volunteers and headed into town for beer and supplies to kill some time.
Sadly we narrowly missed the phone shop opening times and so were forced to use the kubu café wifi to let everyone know we had arrived safe and well, albeit drained and a bit smelly.
After a dinner of Nshima and beef, beans, potatoes and coleslaw with salad – we crashed at 8pm.

No comments:

Post a Comment