Doha

The manager was again waiting for us in the morning to check that everything was OK. Bless him. Our taxi was there at 8am, and took us straight to the airport. For once we had our bags wrapped, as we were traveling through Nairobi, and they are currently trumpeting that they have just introduced a zero tolerance policy with staff for bag tampering. All that tells me is that there is an endemic problem, and that they've finally had the gumption to try to fix it. However, as usual, the power went off as we were about to check-in. After fruitlessly waiting for their computers to come up, they eventually strung a power cord into a room that had generator power, and booted a single PC from there. Now they could issue a boarding card, but not print baggage tags!

Unfortunately Precision Air wouldn't check our baggage through to Nairobi, even though it was the same airline, so that meant another baggage carousel, and another departure queue. However, the worst bit was that no security machines were working because of the power outage, so the local security lady wanted us to unwrap the packs we had just paid $20 to have wrapped. After a bit of haggling, and a lot of her pretending that she had no English, another guy came over and assured us that it would be ok, as long as I told him what was in the suitcases. Needless to say, I omitted reference to the flamethrowers and bazookas, and duly satisfied he walked our bags past the lady, and towards our flight.

We waited and watched a number of aircraft come and go, including one grounded for maintenance, which consisted of a guy coming into the terminal, ferreting around to find a hammer, then wandering back out to the aircraft, presumably to give it a technical tap. Luckily our aircraft, goodness knows what it was, arrived close to the appointed hour and didn't need surgery, so all 15 of us hopped in. It held about 60 passengers, and they shuffled us about until we were evenly distributed around the plane - presumably to even the load.

It was only a 20 minute flight at 4000 metres, so we never actually got permission to take our seatbelts off. As soon as the flight attendant was able to stand up, she walked to the intercom and asked us to prepare for landing.

All 6 bags eventually arrived off the plane, but with four hours to kill we weren't allowed into the departures area. After a bit of a wander around, I found a cafeteria on the second floor with two main features - airconditioning, and Australian test cricket on the TV. So we whiled away a couple of hours watching Clark and Ponting wallop the Indians, and set them a 500 run chase.

Finally in the departures lounge, there was not one flight board or gate list anywhere, and of course no details were printed on our boarding pass, so like every other traveler in the terminal, we resorted to asking the security guards who, amazingly, knew them all. Just as well that they were good at something. They missed liquids in both our bags!

Then, once we had boarded the plane we had to wait for almost half an hour without airconditioning for a connecting Precision Air flight to arrive, and the passengers to transfer. Finally, four uneventful hours later, we landed back in Nairobi. A great sense of deja vu. We've been around this circle a couple of times. This time we had to go through customs and immigration, finger printing and searching, so that we could enter the country to pick up our bags. Five minutes later it was through customs and immigration, finger printing and searching, so that we could leave. Yes, they wanted to know all of our relatives, address we stayed in Nairobi, and the reason for the visit both on the arrivals and departure cards. At least we knew on this visit that they didn't care which line we stood in to get the passport stamped.

Finally we were on our Qatar Airways flight to Doha. Talk about chalk and cheese. A new aircraft with the air conditioning on, clean facilities, friendly staff, and a huge selection on inflight entertainment. Even a three course meal before we landed in Doha at midnight for a quick plane change.