My trip to Kenya to attend the Magical Kenya Tourism Expo could have made a perfect commercial for Kenya Airways, though I’m sure they prefer to keep their marketing in a positive vein.
The first fights I was presented with were out of JFK flying Kenya Airways. From Hoboken, New Jersey, where I live, JFK is a pretty long trek, across the Hudson River, through the traffic of Manhattan and Queens, out to Jamaica. When traffic is bad, I’ve had it take hours to get there. So, I tend to opt for Newark, if possible. That’s maybe a half-hour trip. Though it can also be affected by bad traffic, it’s generally much easier.
I asked if they could get anything from Newark. They got back to me quickly with some alternatives. They were Lufthansa going out and Brussels Airlines returning. Kenya Airways would have been a nonstop flight from New York to Nairobi. Any European airline would have to stop in Europe, and I would have to change planes.
I opted for the flight from Newark. So, I’ll go through Europe, I thought. That won’t be so bad. If I had known what I know now, I would have said, no, go back to the Kenya Airways flight from JFK. I would have saved myself lot of trouble. It was a decision I would later sorely regret. I learned my lesson.
My Lufthansa flight was scheduled to take off at 6 p.m. Monday. I got to the airport at 2:30 p.m. I wanted to be sure to be on time. I don’t like the feeling of anticipation sitting around waiting to go to the airport, knowing there could be some traffic problem or something else that could cause me to miss my flight. When I reached the check-in desk the woman told me my flight was delayed. Bummer, but okay, how long? Till 1 a.m.
One in the morning?! That was a bit of a shocker. I could have been home for several more hours instead of being stuck in the airport. Newark’s new Terminal B is very nice, but a seven-hour delay? I had not received any email or text notification. Oh well.
I settled in for the long wait. I think Lufthansa is a fine airline, but couldn’t they have sent out some kind of notice? She gave me an explanation for the delay. But typical of airline lingo, it was hard to follow. There was some sort of equipment failure, and then because of regulations, they couldn’t come in at a certain time or something … I don’t know.
Because of that delay, Lufthansa couldn’t get me on the originally booked flight to Nairobi, so they rerouted me through Cairo on Egyptair. Okay. It is what it is. S[tuff] happens. Now we’re up to three flights instead of one.
Sometime during the seven-hour wait, I learned that the 1 a.m. departure had been pushed forward again, this time to 2:15 a.m. Okay, what’s another hour and 15 minutes on top of a seven-hour delay? I would end up spending 12 hours in the airport waiting.
There was one advantage to these changes that I enjoyed. In the eight-hour delay, so many people had dropped out of the flight there were many open seats. I was able to have a four-seat middle section row to myself. So I could really stretch out, sort of a poor man’s business class.
Because of the additional delay from 1 a.m. to 2:15, by the time I got to Frankfurt it was almost departure time for my Cairo flight. I navigated the Frankfurt terminal as quickly as I could to find the gate. There have been times when I have run through airports, my feet sliding on glossy marble floors as I negotiated the turns. But I wasn’t up for that this time. I hoofed it as quickly as I could, marching past other people toward the gate.
When I reached the gate, the attendant at the desk told me it was too late. The flight was closed. I could see the plane through the giant windows right behind him. It was still sitting there at the gate. But it was closed. “Because of regulations,” again, it could not be reopened. I could only wave bye-bye from inside the terminal.
He looked on his computer terminal and wrote down the number of a flight that I could hopefully get, gave me directions for the Lufthansa service desk, and I was on my way. I found the Lufthansa service desk, and when I showed the lady at the desk the flight number the Egyptair man had given me, she said, “That’s a cargo flight.”
“So, just put me in with the cargo,” I said. I was getting desperate. No go.
This time, they rebooked me on Qatar Airways, via Doha, deep into Asia, and then back to Nairobi. That was two additional flights, making a total of three, two overnight. I would end up spending two days in transit instead of one. All just to save myself a trip from Hoboken to JFK airport.
I learned my lesson. Never again. I was a fool. I should have grabbed that Kenya Airways nonstop to Nairobi when I had the chance. How wonderful it sounds now.
After an extra day of travel, when I rolled into my hotel in Nairobi, the Expo had already begun. It was only a three-day event, so missing a day would be a third of it. I had to clean off the airline grunge quickly and get to Uhuru Gardens, the site of the event, as quickly as possible.
Stumbling in that way was not a great way to start, already half exhausted from a tour that involuntarily took me from North America, to Europe, Asia and finally Africa. I was off to a weird start and had a number of mishaps during the week, including leaving my video camera in the hotel room one morning, and later having the thing stop working while I was trying to do an interview with the CEO of Kenya Tourism. There was a huge thunderstorm at the end of the Expo that made it very difficult to travel from the event to the hotel. But it also made something else very clear to me. In Africa, you are never alone. People came to my aid so generously through every problem that it was astonishing. It was reassuring about human beings and of the kindness of strangers.
Every step of the way, I was assisted by kind people who went to great lengths to address my problems. They helped me recover my camera when I had mistakenly left it in my hotel room, far from the event. When the camera mysteriously stopped functioning, there were videographers on hand who helped me try to figure out what was wrong with it. The CEO waited patiently, showing no sign of irritation that I was making him wait while I tried to figure out my problem. One videographer offered to shoot the video himself for me, and did.
People sometimes wonder why I love Africa so much and keep returning. There are many reasons. It’s hard to put my finger on them all. But I think more than anything, it’s these great qualities of the African people: their generosity, their genuine spirituality. They are so kind and caring, it’s astonishing to me as a westerner. Their culture never bought into the “greed is good” idea. Instead, they believe in that ancient African word “Ubuntu” or “Utu”, which is defined as “the essence of being human. It speaks to our interconnectedness. I am because you are.”
It’s a great pleasure to be immersed in that culture at any opportunity. I’m smarter now. Next time, I’ll take the direct flight on Kenya Airways.
