Day 23/24 – Home

The weather on Zanzibar was still quite warm and very humid so I had decided to dedicate the last few hours of my vacation to some more relaxation and pampering. On my way to the swimming pool, I started to notice a pattern in the greetings from the personnel of the resort. I think that many of them did not speak English all that well, but that they were taught one essential question at the start of their contract to be used when talking to guests: “Did you sleep well?”. The first time, two days ago, I thought it was a bit of an unusual but not completely odd question for the little chat I had with the towel guy, but by now I had heard this short line too often of from too many different people for it to be a coincidence. I see it as a nice alternative to the “How are you doing?” that you get bombarded with nowadays, especially since in both cases the answer “fine, thank you” is not only sufficient but also most desirable.

After some more swimming, reading, eating and drinking I went for another spa treatment. This time I opted for a pedicure. When I arrived at the cottage that made up the so-called ‘spa’, the beautician was still a bit over-heated from giving treatments all day yesterday to the ladies in our group that wanted some pampering before leaving. The pedicure took place outside on the porch of the spa-cottage, giving easy access to all the natural ingredients for my treatment, but (more importantly) allowing the beautician to oversee everything that was going on on the premises. She noticed everybody that passed by and since we were in the personnel quarters, she talked to every single one of them. Meanwhile, there was something wrong with the electricity, which was being fixed by the handyman on duty. This meant however that the fan had to be turned off, giving the mosquitos easy access to my incredibly tanned, yet for most people still quite white looking flesh. Luckily at two in the afternoon, the odds of them being malaria-carrying mosquitos are not that big.

One of our group members that was staying for a few more days, had offered me access to his room, so that I could get one more shower and change from my pool outfit to my traveling outfit before leaving. After a quick and early diner and after saying goodbye to the remaining group members on the island, I was taken to the airport by taxi and had a nice chat with the taxi driver. I met our tour guide at the airport. She had had to do some work on another part of the island the day before and she was on the same flights home as I was. When our plane for Dar-Es-Salaam left perfectly on English time I was quite glad, as I figured that we would not have to spend the night at an airport for missing the connecting flight. Also, I was very happy, that this airplane was a bit bigger than the one we arrived on Zanzibar with. When we arrived at Dar-Es-Salaam we calmly collected our luggage and proceeded to the KLM check-in desks thinking we had some time anyway. I was even rested well enough to calmly let some very nervous and skittish looking ladies skip the line in front of me. However, when I reached the check-in desk I discovered what these ladies were so agitated about. The flight was overbooked and there were about already 16(!) people still waiting to get on the flight. I was asked to take a seat in the waiting area and I would know in about 1.5 hours whether I would be on the flight or not. Well, let’s say there were limits to how well-rested I was. First of all, not making it on this flight would mean that I would not make my flight to Stockholm the next day, which would cost me time and probably also quite a bit of money. But more importantly, why the hell are you selling stuff you don’t have? I don’t care that “it’s all legal ma’am”, it’s still not very decent and by the way who decided it is legal and why? Also, I don’t want to “calm down” because I “will make it to Amsterdam”. If I wanted to go to Amsterdam tomorrow, I would have booked a flight for tomorrow. I mean, if I sold you 3 apples and when you come to pick them up I tell you I don’t have 3 apples, but I do have 3 pears and tell you to shut up about it, because 3 pears also have vitamins and can kill your hunger just as well as 3 apples would, people would tell me I’m crazy. Yet this stuff I not only have to accept without complaining, it’s all legal apparently. Who do I talk to about this?

After 1.5 hours, it turned out that I could make it on the flight and as far as I could see, so did the 16 others that were waiting with me. It’s still unclear to me how they decide who makes it and who doesn’t, because some of the other people waiting (including the skittish ladies) were already waiting when we arrived at the check-in desk, yet our tour guide had no problems at all to get on the flight. As there were only seats available with an upgrade to economy plus, that’s where my seat was at, all free of charge, while our tour guide had had to pay 140 Euro’s for that upgrade. I have to say that a little bit of extra space was not unpleasant, but in my opinion it was not worth paying that much extra for. Since it was midnight already when the plane left, I did not wait for food anymore and went straight to sleep after lift-off. When we arrived in Amsterdam it felt like I had not had too much sleep, but since I not consciously experienced any of the dinner process in the plane and since I felt less wrangled than other times, I guess my pharmaceutical help had done at least part of its job.

We arrived in Amsterdam nicely on time, although landing seemed to take forever. Our pilot was female and she was slowing down, descending, increasing speed, slowing down again etc. I was not near a window, so I could not see what was going on, but I had made up my mind about female pilots. Then the purser announced that the pilot had aborted the landing at the last minute because of the weather. In the Dutch announcement he mentioned that we would try again on another landing strip, but the part about the other strip was omitted from the English announcement, so the guy next to me got a bit restless as he figured the weather had not changed in the past 10 minutes, so retrying would not make sense. Since I’m not a big fan of flying and as landing is my least favorite part, I have to admit to not be perfectly at ease either – with a female pilot and all :) – but in the end the second time was a charm already.

I had planned a few hours in-between my scheduled arrival in Amsterdam and my flight to Stockholm, to make sure that I would be able to catch the flight to Stockholm even with some delay in the flight from Africa. However, since the plane landed perfectly on time, I had some hours that I killed by making my way to Leiden and catching up with a friend. Since Leiden is not that far from the airport, I planned on taking the train back with some, but not much, time to spare. Then I discovered that somebody had jumped in front of a train, disturbing the train schedule to the airport, quickly absorbing all the time I had to spare. I was getting a bit upset thinking about getting stranded so close to home, but in the end, I made it to Schiphol just in time. After being a little bit unfriendly to every single stewardesses that needs to see your boarding pass before letting you move on to the next round of the check-in procedure, I managed to check-in my luggage just on time. And since by the time I checked-in only the seats with extra leg-room were available, I was also able to stretch during this flight as well, free of charge again.