ZANZIBAR, Tanzania – Here’s how I spent my fourth of July.
At 2:21 p.m., after a 1000-mile detour I never expected to make, I landed at Ethiopia’s international airport in Addis Ababa.
I had 39 minutes to catch an absolutely must-make connecting flight to Kigali, Rwanda.
“No problem,” a flight attendant assured me.
At 2:48, after an agonizingly slow bus ride from the plane to the terminal, I passed through the last of four chaotic checkpoints.
Before I could properly gather all my belongings from the scanner bins, or put on my belt, I heard an airport employee at the top of the stairs ahead shout: “Kigali passengers, hurry. Your gate is closing in 12 minutes.”
It took three minutes for me to reach her. Already, I was breathing hard.
“Gate?” I asked.
“Seventeen, at the end,” she said. “You have nine minutes.”
“Cart?” I pleaded, sharing my advanced age of 76 and pointing to an artificial left knee.
“Sorry,” she responded.
Addis Abba Bole International Airport is Africa’s third largest. Foot traffic was surprisingly light in the departure area of Terminal 2, a vast, modern structure that at the moment felt like an empty sports arena.
So big, I could only see as far as Gate 5. I set off on a slow but desperate jog to my far away destination.
I had managed to strap on my small daypack holding my passport and other valuables. In my left hand I carried my belt and crumpled boarding pass. With my right, I wheeled my carry-on suitcase. My left sandal kept slipping off my foot, slowing my gait. My beltless pants began to droop. Somehow, I kept them up with the same hand I used to pull the suitcase.
At Gate 9, I spotted a clock. 2:55 p.m. Five minutes left.
Sweat soaked my tee shirt. Thirst and anger clogged my throat. Airport officials I passed paid little attention to what must have been a pathetic sight.
The anger I felt, however, was directed at myself. Over a reporting career spanning 52 years and more than 100 countries, most of them developing nations, I always prided myself in having a Plan B.
This day, it did not exist.
The clock ticked on.
Road to Zanzibar
Anyone reading this can recall being burned by a bad travel day, likely more than once.
Africa, home to some of the most entrenched and corrupt bureaucracies in the world, requires even the savviest of travelers to be on their A game at all times.
Otherwise, a trip going off the rails can quickly lead to the nearest cliff.
My predicament in Addas Ababa was but one of a series of unexpected obstacles that began the previous evening in Zanzibar leading to a 30-hour mad dash to Istanbul.
I had arrived at midday on July 3 in this tropical island blessed with one of the world’s most exotic names.
I had just concluded a successful, stress-free, five-day reporting trip to Rwanda. An exceptional guide, Jonas; my trusty wing man, Tom Kattar of Jupiter, Fla., and Rwanda’s well-deserved reputation as Africa’s most efficiently-run country helped me land each of the stories I had hoped to write.
Zanzibar would be different. Formerly ruled by a puppet of Great Britain, it gained autonomy through a violent 1964 revolution. Soon after it joined with neighboring Tanganyika, an East African nation 80 minutes by ferry to the west, to form Tanzania.
Zanzibar has the flawless sands. But the Tanzanian mainland claims Mount Kilimanjaro and Serengeti National Park, one of the world’s great wildlife refuges.
Here on the island, I had my guide, Lily Kingo, in place. My plan, less structured than Rwanda, remained fluid. But Lily had plenty of ideas.
I was ready to get started.
I never got the chance.
Crisis x 2
Around 6 p.m., six hours after Tom and I arrived, we were contacted by a scheduling agent with Turkish Airlines, our carrier from the U.S. to Africa.
We had a problem, Eva Kabates, told us.
In fact, we had several problems.
The first involved our return ticket, which included a 90-minute stopover at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda to take on new passengers and flight crew. The issue: an Ebola outbreak two months earlier in neighboring Congo
In May, a piggybank full of U.S. government agencies, led by the Centers for Disease Control, issued a decree that all international travelers returning to the U.S. who spent time in Congo or neighboring Uganda, could only enter the country at Atlanta, Houston, New York or Washington. There, we would be subject to a health inspection by the CDC.
Tom’s original ticket home was to Miami. Mine, Detroit.
No good, Eva said. Pick one of the four. Now.
We chose JFK.
It took Eva 90 minutes to sort out the mess and issue new tickets. Her task was made more difficult by an inadvertent scheduling mistake by Tom and me which put us on two different flights leaving Rwanda, the starting point for our return to the U.S.
After we said goodbye to Eva, I said hello via WhatsApp to Lisa Smally, my Toledo-based AAA travel agent.
It was 8:46, more than three hours into crisis travel mode.
Lisa spent more than an hour handling the other problem: Getting me back to Rwanda ASAP and booking a flight from JFK to Detroit.
The return to Detroit was easy. But booked flights nixed a normally straight-forward return to Rwanda. Instead, Lisa had to route me through Addis Ababa on two separate flights that took me 1,000 miles north and 1,000 miles south.
After saying goodbye to Lisa, Tom and I reconvened to check our new tickets.
Instinctively, we knew an unpredictable adventure awaited.
Flight to Addis Abba
Nineteen hours and a sleepless night after arriving in Zanzibar, Tom and I returned to the airport to embark on our separate journeys back to Rwanda for our flight to Istanbul at 2 a.m. We both were aware that we might never re-connect.
Today. Tomorrow. Or at all.
My plane left on time, a good sign. The journey north quickly passed, moving from the lush, green rain forests of east central Africa to the brown, arid northeast.
As we approached Ethiopia’s capital I was struck by its massive growth – and accompanying smog – since my last visit in 1985.
This day I was just passing through.
I hoped.
The thought of getting stuck here indefinitely brought an unwelcome anxiety to my normally calm demeanor.
And that was before I began scurrying through Terminal 2.
Airport Dash: Part 2
Toward the end of my race against the airport clock I assumed I had missed my flight. Then, suddenly, a ray of hope emerged. I spotted my gate – 17 – a reachable distance away. I think I saw passengers lingering around the departure area although in my state they could have been a mirage.
It was 3:01, one minute past gate closing.
The last 100 yards or so felt like a mile. I had slowed to a pace a tortoise would relish if we were both chasing the hare.
Finally, I arrived. The Ethiopian Airways desk agent and a number of the passengers looked at me curiously, as if I had transferred from a space ship. I handed her my crumpled ticket.
I noticed the time: 3:07
Never had I been so happy about a late departure.
Flight to Kigali
After finally boarding the plane, a sympathetic flight attendant gifted me a spacious exit row to myself and brought me water.
Tom sent me a text: Arrived Kigali airport. I would join him in two hours. At the moment I felt relief as it appeared the worst was over. We still had a grueling 22 hours to go to reach Istanbul, which included that stopover in Uganda. But I felt confident we would succeed.
Recharged, I had time to reflect.
I’ve visited 23 of Africa’s 54 countries, mostly on various reporting assignments. Candidly, this episode would merit only an honorable mention on my most memorable list of African mishaps:
They include:
- 1974 – A dysentery attack from bad food or water crippling me in Cairo and lasting two agonizing months
- 1979 – Driving a VW Bug across Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia during which the car broke down in the Algerian desert
- 1979 – Blowing off a court appearance in Tunis, Tunisia for a traffic incident with a taxi that was my fault. I fled by ferry to Sicily, leaving my driver’s license behind.
- 1984 – Hitching a ride with a truck driver named Ali in Djibouti and embarking on an all-night ride through the desert to the Somalian border. There, Ali was busted for having contraband cigarettes stashed beneath his rear bed. Amid the ensuing bedlam, I escaped undetected.
These, of course, are the tales of a much younger correspondent, more reckless for certain. And one missing all the modern technological advantages.
Which brings me back to the lack of a Plan B.
I returned to the road in 2020. Since then, I’ve reported from 12 developing countries I had never visited. Each journey involved meticulous pre-trip planning. Each turned out to be a seamless success.
Embarrassingly – for me – I had been lulled into complacency.
The lesson: Even self-driving cars can run off the road if you’re asleep at the wheel.
Postscript
After our separate journeys, Tom and I re-connected at Kigali airport at 10 p.m., four hours before our flight to Istanbul.
Although exhausted from our 14-hour day, we had enough left to recap our separate adventures. Tom, like me, had to dash through an airport – for him, Nairobi – to barely make his connecting flight to Kigali. And he had to sweat out a problem with his only suitcase, a small carry-on he was forced to check and which ended up on a different plane. A last-minute maneuver by Tom with an airline gate agent – my friend is an adept finagler – insured his bag would join him.
After recounting my day, Tom said he felt bad that our scheduling snafus kept me from chasing stories in Zanzibar.
I reminded him that the previous night, as we scrambled to rebook our tickets, he had told me: “Something good will come out of this.”
It had. What we had just gone through tops any story I would have found in Zanzibar, I told him.
Tom brightened.
“So, you’re going to write about this? he asked.
“I’d be a fool not to.”
Editor’s note: First in a series from a reporting trip to Rwanda and Zanzibar June 28-July 4.
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Written and reported by: George J. Tanber
Editor: Michael Gordon
Photo editor: David Kozy
