Passports? What passports?

I've got to be honest with you, I almost cried today. And not in a good way. And it would have been ridiculous because I was in a bloody airport, of all places. But you know how travelling for work can just grind you down? I got ground down. Now I know what an organic, fairly-traded, darkly roasted coffee bean feels like after it's gone through the espresso maker. Spent.

I just want to say, before continuing, that it's OK. Everything worked out splendidly because of an amazingly patient and heroically helpful ticket agent who works for Precision Air in Tanzania. I also want to admit the whole saga happened because I'm a dumbass. But mistakes happen when you've been on the road for weeks and you've got a million TZ shillings in brown envelopes, separated into stacks of 100,000s and you're trying to keep too much information in your head. There: my pathetic excuse. Feel free to reserve sympathy.

So we were supposed to fly away from the big mountain tomorrow. That was the original flight plan. But in my head, I'm already planning my next and final trip, to Mtwara, and I know I have to get back to Dar to give receipts from this trip, hand over unspent money, get another stack of money and a pair of plane tickets and a roster of interviews planned and then top up our phone and internet credits, buy a jar of peanut butter, do laundry in the hotel sink, and get on the road again this weekend. Anxious to get this list of tasks under way, I neglected to consult the ticket from our current excursion.

So... we take a cab to the bus terminal in Arusha, take an hour-long bus ride to Kilimanjaro Airport which was delightful and I read a newspaper. It was such a relaxing calm-before-storm kind of thing. At the ticket counter, they tell us we're booked for tomorrow. Bloody hell! She's right! Oh no. The nice lady tells us to stand to the side and perhaps she can get us on once everyone's checked in. Time passes. The line grows. Eventually we manage to catch the lady's eye again. We hand over our original tickets and passports. She gets a colleague to process our boarding passes. But in the middle of doing so, he starts shouting in Kiswahili and sort of pushes our stuff aside and starts processing the next person in line. This is what I imagine he said, "Crazy mzungus! You don't know how to read! Go soak your head while I talk to competent customers."

It's now about 20 minutes to take-off. Our nice lady friend grabs our info once again and tries to get another person to help, and then another. More yelling in Kiswahili. Mzungus and other foreigners looking sheepish and bewildered. Us smiling furiously to appear supportive and also casual and friendly, the kind of strangers you really want to help. 15 minutes to take off. Our bags are sitting ominously on the weighing machine.

Miracle! Boarding passes! Bags tagged! We're on our way! We thank our lady friend who hustles off with a blaze yellow vest on - she's needed on the tarmac. But... where's our passports? No one knows. No one knows?? Na wewe kachaa? Are you crazy?

Lady friend is gone. Can't go through security. We hear the loudspeaker announce final boarding call. Noooo! We've come so close!!! I'm standing with Scott's heavy camera bag while Scott, in a cowboy hat, runs around frantically, talking quickly in English to everyone so that absolutely no one can understand. I see the vignette from afar, repeatedly: Scott, hands flailing, pointing to passport, other person, raising eyebrows, confused. He returns, sweaty and unpassported. Then, out of the corner of our eye, we see a man we met on the bus hand something to our lady friend near the boarding gate. Scott plows through security and there's a half-hearted, "hey," but no one stops him. He's a cowboy. On a steel horse he rides. Miracle! It's his passport! Why was it outside on the ground? Must have slipped out of lady friend's hand earlier. Yowsa, that was close.

Is mine there too??? No. Wha? Scott, wild-eyed, determined, runs back to Precision Air counter and apparently steps behind where the ticket agents are to snoop around. A woman holds up some other burgundy passports, from Europe and such (why are there passports back there??). Nope, not Canadian. Suddenly, he sees mine on the floor with discarded papers and other detritus.

Miracle again! He comes running back, victorious! We take our computers out of our knapsacks and take off our shoes and empty our pockets and take off watches, hustle through security and then we collect all our stuff and race out the door. I hug our Precision Air friend. I hug her again and again. She says, "You're mostly welcome," which is funny. I know what she meant but in her heart, she was probably thinking, "that was more work than I really wanted to do today." Personally, I think she had a crush on Scott. (Must have been the moustache.)

That's it. That's the whole damn thing. No wait, there's a footnote. As we sat on the plane, alternating between suppressed hysterical laughter and catatonic release, decompressing with a can of cold beer, listening to K'Naan sing, "And every man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn, damn thing at all," and looking dreamily out the window and egads! The clouds which had shrouded Kilimanjaro the entire time we were here, opened up a sliver to reveal Kili's frosted peak. If you look hard, you can see it here.

there it is, peeking up above the clouds...

And that's the end of the story. Well, this chapter anyway. The story goes on, as you know, with me falling down and getting up and so on. I really must put this computer away. Weird power surges are giving me forearm shocks. And so it goes...