Zanzibar (I.) - The arrivals, the arrivals again!

(The third chapter of the traditionally difficult arrival stories).

It almost didn’t happen.

Those who know me know that I'm not a beach/island/sea person - but I confess that during the insane last months in Kaabong the thought of lying in a hammock on a white beach washed by the Indian Ocean seemed more attractive than ever. By the time I finished in Karamoja, a trip to Zanzibar seemed to me absolutely essential for my physical and psychological well-being, and though as usual we didn't plan it much (hardly at all in fact), the idea was firmly settled in my mind.

But as so often in Uganda, the simple plan turned out not to be simple at all. This time the problem was our passports, stuck at the immigration office for the purpose of visa renewal. No passport, no travel - the immigration office accounts for a good part of muzungu frustrations in this part of the world. Of course, it's precisely when you most need your passport that everything takes extra long. And so instead of travelling we spent my precious holiday days visiting the immigration office, only to be always told to come back a few days later. If immigration in Kampala had frequent flyer programme, we (especially Javi) would be flying around the globe for free.

I was already at the brink of despair when, on the very last day we mentally marked as a sensible deadline to start our Zanzibar trip, we managed to rescue the passports. The visa wasn’t exactly sorted out, but we were given a handwritten piece of paper saying it was ok and assured it would be enough to pass through the airport immigration control (not a negligible detail, as leaving Uganda with an expired visa stamp costs you some 20-30 USD for every day you overstay - by that time our visa stamps had been expired for about a month and half).

With passports in our hands, and after a whole-day struggle with the online booking system, which (as they say here) "refused to work" just for the flight we wanted, we managed to get tickets to Zanzibar for the following day and thought the fight was over.

It wasn’t. In our engrossment in the passport business we completely neglected any other preparation, and so it was only then that we found out that Tanzania is fairly strict on entry about yellow fever vaccine – which we both had… only that Javi's vaccination certificate had been stolen last year together with his passport, and he never got a duplicate. There is hardly a better time to try to sort this thing out than hours before taking your flight (while also planning to inspect and potentially purchase a gas cooker, but that’s a different story). And so, in the morning before heading to the airport we rushed to a health centre in Kampala to try to get Javi a duplicate yellow fever vaccination certificate.

A whole new struggle ensued. First they said, impossible. We insisted a little, and the nurse seemed to give in: if had a confirmation from the relevant vaccination centre (which was in Spain), they could prepare a duplicate certificate. After a couple of phone calls to Spain we managed to obtain a confirmation email from a Spanish doctor (in Spanish) – upon which the nurse said she could fill in the certificate but she couldn’t possibly stamp it (it's no use without a stamp). By the time we reached that stage, a few hours had passed and emotions (mine at least) were running pretty high - also because we should have been leaving for the airport by then, instead of arguing with a dismissive nurse. Eventually I was removed from the scene to get our backpacks from home, while Javi with all his diplomacy took the duplicate certificate and by some miracle managed to get it stamped in a different hospital just before taking our taxi to the airport.

It was only on the way to the airport that we had time to inspect the painfully acquired document. The name written on it was the Spanish doctor’s, not Javi’s…!!!

And so we were starting our holiday travel with passports both with expired visa stamps, two pieces of paper from the immigration saying it’s ok, and a vaccination certificate on someone else’s name. Why this is our typical travel style even if we intend (for the first time ever!) to go on an easy and comfy trip, I don’t know...

But, in spite of all this, we managed to pass through the immigration control, took all the (delayed) flights, even (kind of) saw Kilimanjaro...

... and what we deduced could be Livingstone Mountains (?)...

... and eventually made it to the mythical island, where not only nobody wanted to see our vaccination certificates, but we didn't even have to fill in the long visa application form (it was late and clearly the immigration officers wanted to go home). Struggle ended, holidays could begin!!!

The Zanzibar airport luggage belt :-)