Flying Home

Elaine and I's flight home was scheduled to take off at 3:10 with boarding starting at 2:30pm. Elaine and I left Moramanga with Jess, Laetitia, and Loïc at 8:45am. It's supposed to be a two hour drive in the morning but we had scheduled four hours to leave time to drop by their house in the capital. We got to the Tana outskirts at 10:40....and hit traffic. Traffic was SO bad, it was 15km to the airport, which theoretically is 45 mins in normal traffic....we moved 50 feet in 30 minutes. We were starting to think we wouldn't make it to the airport in time. I didn't know what to do, I didn't want to miss my flight and get stuck in Madagascar. I just started praying "Dear God please ease traffic, please let us get to the airport in time." I was getting ready to abandon ship and flag down a moped and hire it to weave us between the cars until we got to the airport. If Jessica and our luggage got to the airport in time, awesome, if not I'd figure out how to get it stateside when it got to that.  Finally, we got to a traffic circle, which took us 20 minutes to get through, but afterwards traffic eased up a bit (12mph) all the way to the airport with only a few short stop and go areas. We finally made it to the airport at 1:30pm. The lady at the counter took some convincing but begrudgingly let us check our bags. (we arrived 2 minutes before check-in closed) and then got to border control...Elaine's visa had expired when she missed her flight 3 days prior. We had talked to a Ethiopian Airlines pilot who thought it wouldnt be a big deal. However, they wanted her to go back to the ATM to withdraw money and pay a $37 fine/visa extension. At this point we were panicking, it was 2:00 and she was going to have to redo all the lines and get through security before our flight.

Well, I continued going through customs while Elaine with a little confusion and a helpful customs officer navigated to the ATM and paid the fine and skipped all the lines and even beat me through security! We arrived at our gate at 2:30 exactly and boarding hadn't started yet. Phew, what a relief.

I will never again let anyone convince me to spend the night two hours away from the airport the night before an international flight much less an international flight home.