The Plan:
Wednesday: drive to Sumbawanga (about 5 hours on a bumpy road)
Thursday: get an internal flight with MAF from Sumbawanga to Dar (we had no desire to make the 28 hour trip all the way to Dar by car again if at all possible)
Friday: get the BA flight from Dar to London Heathrow: the only direct flight between Tanzania and England - we decided that layovers with children are best avoided if possible
The Reality:
Tuesday: Call MAF to check whether they had space for us*. Sadly, they did not. We had various back up plans, such as UN joiner flights from Mpanda and proper flights from Sumbawanga (a lot more expensive than MAF but still better than the car ride). Unfortunately, all of these were also full so Olly arrived back at home at around 10:30am to tell me we had to leave immediately in order to drive all the way to Dar to get our flight. We knew there was a chance this could happen so I'd actually already done most of the packing over the weekend. This meant, although we had a slight mad dash around the house getting all the last minute stuff, it wasn't nearly as stressful as it could have been. We left at 11:30 to drive to Sumbawanga. Silver Lining? We realised that not flying meant we didn't have to worry about internal flights' luggage allowances for on the way back so we could max out our BA 7 x 23kg bags - woop, woop!
Wednesday: Drove to Mbeya. 9 hours from Sumbawanga on a bumpy road. Silver Lining? We got to see our friends who live in Mbeya on the way through :) Plus, on the way back it meant we could stock up on a couple of things that you can't get in Mpanda but are available in Mbeya.
Thursday: Drove to Dar. 13 hours on a paved road. Paved = traffic police. Still, we only got stopped twice and fined once. I can't even remember what it was for now. Probably speeding in a 30 zone (easy to do when you know you have such a long trip. And when the 30 refers to km, not miles).
Friday: This is where the journey got more stressful. We went to the airport, checked in and boarded the plane with no problems. Taxied down the runway. The plane paused, then we were informed that they just needed to check something. Time passed. The plane returned to the gate so the engineer could come and take a look. More time passed. After four hours, we were told that they'd decided it was wiser not to fly without a new part and we needed to disembark, collect our luggage from baggage reclaim and go to speak to the BA ground staff about what would happen next. We duly obeyed and eventually got sent to a (very nice) hotel in Dar to await further information. Fortunately, they did also give us a number so, when the information was not forthcoming, Olly was able to call and find out what was going on. More time passed. We ate some nice food at the very nice hotel. I had a bath (such a luxury after 2 months of bucket showers). Eventually we discovered that they were flying in the necessary spare part the next day and we would hopefully get to leave on Saturday evening. It was nice to know for sure that we'd be there overnight so we could relax a bit without worrying that at any moment they would be calling to tell us to get to the airport ASAP.
Saturday: We waited for news of when we would depart. We ate more nice food. We tried to find out what was happening. 4:45pm we finally spoke to someone on the phone who told us that the plane wasn't fixed and he booked us on a KLM flight that evening, changing in Amsterdam and arriving at Heathrow Sunday morning. Joy! By that time we were just fairly happy to be able to go, although quite disappointed that we did have to have a layover. The flight was SO FULL. We didn't get a skycot for Theo that we would have had on the BA flight, but the staff were super nice to us, and he did actually sleep most of the way on Olly's lap, for which we were extremely thankful - it could have been beastly. Silver lining? We were upgraded on the Amsterdam-London leg, which meant we could spend the layover in the BA business class lounge. It was amazing! Free drinks and snacks and a lovely, clean room for Theo to crawl around in.
So, in the end it could have been a lot worse. And because we're paranoid and I wanted to spend some time with Bethany before the wedding, the delay didn't cause us to miss it. It was pretty stressful at times, and it did mean we had less time in England than originally planned but we survived and even arrived smiling to have a lovely (albeit short) time in England. And the journey back was a breeze :)
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*MAF do a wonderful thing called 'joiner lists' where they tell missionaries such as ourselves what flights have been scheduled/chartered and you can put your name on the list to join it if there's going to be space. They'll confirm whether or not they have room two days before the flight. It's an ace service and generally works quite well for cheap internal travel. So it's not their fault our journey panned out the way it did and we're still super grateful that they offer the joiner service.
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