August 9th/10th - Lilongwe to Nairobi to Amsterdam to Hamilton?!

Remember what I said about our connections being good at the various airports? Well, all the connections were great but thanks to a severe thunderstorm in Toronto we couldn’t land there and had to go on to Hamilton. At first the plan was for us to go thru Customs here then be bussed to the TO airport. However, a series of events has caused us to spend, at latest count 5.5 hours, sitting on the tarmac. I am writing this from the plane. The series of events include…the storm moving to Hamilton so we couldn’t deplane until it passed, then Customs would not allow us to deplane without our stowed luggage, then the baggage handlers went off shift, then we were going to fly back to Toronto but the law does not allow crew to exceed x-number of hours so now we are waiting for another crew to fly us back.

It’s about 2am Toronto time now but for us it’s about 9am (Malawi time) and we have literally had only a couple of hours of sleep on planes during the whole travel time. Wishing now we’d had that nap in Lilongwe. We are so exhausted.

Oh good, they just announced that the new crew has arrived so hopefully we are on our way shortly.

Later in the day August 10th…
We are home now. The wait and travel time back from Hamilton to TO airport ended up being 7 hours total. Arrived at our place just before 5am, unpacked and didn’t feel sleepy (even though we have only had a few hours total since leaving Lilongwe on Saturday night) so went out for some breakfast around 7am. We will try and nap at some point today and then go to bed early tonight.

But I shouldn’t dwell on the delays, because as I said, the rest of the trip home went perfectly and we saw some interesting stuff. For example, on the flight from Nairobi to Amsterdam, we were in the row behind 2 Masai women and 4 men dressed in traditional robes with tons of beads (earrings, bracelets, necklaces belts) and chains of shiny silver metal coins. The women had those large round beaded collars…they looked so beautiful. I was sneaking peaks at one sitting across the aisle in the row in front. And she was sneaking peaks at me…I’m sure thinking “Look at that poor plain girl; taupe shirt, black pants, grey sweater. She needs some colour.” If there is an African version of ‘What Not To Wear’, she may be submitting me as a candidate right now As we were getting off the plane we smiled at each other.
I have to organize my pictures over the next day or two and will post some of my faves.