April 19
Madagascar – Day 20
Madagascar Air has been unimpressive so far this trip. I won’t knock them too bad because they run typical to several other remote region airlines we’ve flown throughout the world. That is, the planes are usually a little rough like our first flight where the air blowers were broken. Then our second flight ran two hours late. And today, our 8 AM International flight (We were checked in at 6 AM) to Johannesburg didn’t leave until 11 AM. The five hour delay wasn’t too bad but after an hour of flying we stopped in Nosy Be, Madagascar and completely disembarked the 767, collected our luggage and then emigrated from Madagascar. This took another two hours because they took our bags off the plane one by one and the logistics of emigration were as primitive as I’ve experienced in a long time. It was perhaps the all time worst, ridiculous and stupid system I’ve ever seen! That’s more than 40 countries worth of emigrating!
When you consider the poor nights sleep, up at 4 AM and the Madagascar heat it was a slightly more challenging day then we even expected. But that’s travel. We finally arrived in Johannesburg tonight nearly 7 hours late and we had to immigrate into South Africa to collect and recheck our bags only to emigrate out ten minutes later. Sounds stupid but Madagascar Air could not sort how to check our luggage all the way to the States. By luck, Granny and I had an eight hour layover before catching our Delta flight from Johannesburg to Atlanta. After all of today’s nonsense our 8 hour layover saved our butts and we had just enough time to do all this customs stuff, properly say goodbye to our South African family and make our flight. Not easy, but done.
As I type right now, we are two hours out of Johannesburg about to exit Namibia airspace and start up the Atlantic Ocean. This is a long flight folks - nearly 17 hours! When you throw in our five hours of flying from Madagascar earlier and our airport time etc, this is a long day. And the flying will continue tomorrow.
Okay man, time for one more movie and a glass of red wine hopefully followed by some sleep.
Oh, once home I will post about a dozen of the pics you have not seen yet from the trip. Expect a lot more cool chameleons!
Looking forward to the pictures and travel safe.
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