The friendly lady at Check-in in Ankara put my bag right through to Auckland and hopefully it’ll be there when I get to NZ… Just as well I’ve got a change of clothes in my carry-on bag.

The flight from Ankara to Istanbul was uneventful, outside of the plane being parked outside the International Terminal, necessitating a bus ride back to the far end of the Domestic Arrivals and then a mad dash on foot back to International to get through Passport Control, followed by a quick march to the gate, which was different from the one shown on my boarding pass! Just we well that I make it a habit of checking on the airport schedule rather than relying on the accuracy of the Check-in staff.

‘Oh, Lord, stuck in Cairo again…’
The trip to Cairo was short, pleasant, if a bit bumpy. When I arrived, I found that the airport’s not set up for international transit passengers, especially those with a seven-hour layover, like me.

One has two choices:
• Get a Tourist Visa and tour Cairo and/or get booked in a hotel that one doesn’t want (I still got ripped off for a USD $15 visa I didn’t use);
• Hang around as a semi-prisoner in the Transit Lounge; in other words, hand over your passport and ticket until two hours before you fly and you’ve got the run of the Departure Lounge for victuals, etc, but make sure you keep close at hand. This was the option I took. I had no problems going to pick up a bottle of water and a soft drink to keep me hydrated, and the Security staff proved themselves to be most friendly, even offering me tea at one stage.

I’ve got a couple of books and this computer to keep me occupied, and I think the guys in Security appreciated me using my rusty, limited Gulf Arabic. They’ve actually been quite friendly, and joked that I’d better be good or I’ll find myself in irons. I promised I’d behave, as I’d prefer to go to Dubai and my hotel room than a Cairo jail. I thanked them for letting me go upstairs for my drinks when I returned to the dungeon that’s Cairo Airport’s Transit Lounge.

There was a v. frustrated Italian businessman who was shocked by the lack of a system for us International Transit types, and between his basic English and my equally basic Italian, we shared our mutual disdain of having to sit in a grubby room while someone we don’t know holds our passports and tickets. In the end, a nice young man (I must be getting old, when I start using that line!) in a suit accompanied him to get his boarding pass, etc. Sr. Italiano smiled and wished me a good trip back to NZ (he was surprised at how extensive a trip I’d had) as he headed off for his plane.

So there I sat, waiting the hours before I headed off. There’s an Arab and an African snoozing nearby, so it’s pretty quiet down here.

A couple of hours later, the hall was filled with people on their way to do the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims try to do at least once in their lifetimes. This included a family from that wonderfully traditional Islamic city of Brooklyn, New York. Like the rest of us, the Hajj group had to wait for ages for their transfers to be completed, which entailed a lot of filling out of forms by the Security staff, followed by copious rubber stamping of said pages. Eventually they received their boarding passes and passports and were allowed to continue their travels to the holiest site in Islam.

It was then the turn of the snoozing African, now very much awake, and Yours Truly. The Ghanaian gentleman worked on cargo ships and was off to meet a boat in Thailand, taking the same flight to Dubai as I. Unfortunately… the Security folk couldn’t understand why this poor fellow had only a one-way ticket and no visa for Thailand. He repeatedly tried to explain that in his industry one flies to meet the ship and then may be dropped off somewhere else at the end of his contract. He showed them his letter of employment that confirmed that he really did have a job and instructions as to whom to contact upon his arrival in Thailand. In fact, he was going to be met by someone from the ship at the airport.

This situation being so unusual for the Security men, necessitated kicking the whole thing upstairs – well, actually the supervisor came downstairs to talk to the chap. In the end, they could not work out what to do, and, like all good bureaucrats in need of protecting their own backsides, decided not to let the guy go, and instead send him back to Ghana! At least the could have passed him onto their counterparts in Dubai where he might have had a better hearing.

As the people he was contracted to were at that stage, fast asleep – it was the middle of the night in Singapore, I quietly suggested to the poor fellow that he stall his return until he could contact someone from the company that hired him to corroborate his story. I felt bad about not jumping to his defence, but as the matter already confounded the Security guys, I didn’t want to find myself delayed, as well. I reluctantly left the Transit Dungeon and headed for my Dubai-bound aircraft.

The flight to Dubai was uneventful, but once there it took well over an hour to get from the plane to my hotel, especially as the former was inconveniently parked at the opposite end of the airfield, well away from the Arrivals Hall, so we had to travel to the terminal by bus which took some thirty minutes. I therefore had only around three hours between the times I arrived at my hotel and my departure back to the airport. Needless to say, I had two hours of much-needed sleep before waking up and going again.

My flight back to Auckland on a packed aircraft was not too bad, considering (1) there were stops in Singapore and Brisbane on the way and (2) it was going to take almost 21 hours to get to NZ from Dubai. Fortunately, I had a very nice Iraqi couple to chat with on the way, as well as meeting a very friendly Greek Cypriot woman, another Greek chap, a young Kiwi DJ on his way home for Christmas and an Auckland-based Indian who were all extremely interesting to talk to.

I was hoping to catch some sleep between Singapore and Brisbane, but a rather inexperienced member of the cabin crew (in fact, it seems that Emirates is growing so fast that everyone, excepting those in the cockpit were lacked experience – well, I hope that was the case!) was insistent on waking me up to have a meal, in spite of the fact that I’d put a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sticker on my seat back! (Ah, there are none so blind as those who don’t bother to look…) After the disturbance I dozed for a few hours until it was breakfast time. The only other excitement was the epileptic fit that a passenger had who was sitting in the row behind me. Fortunately it happened as we arrived in Brisbane

The stop in Brisbane was short and punctuated by a drugs search of my bag and clothing. Actually, it was rather funny to be stopped, put behind a partition and having my short and cabin bag swabbed with bits of paper that were fed into a machine to see if I was carrying contraband – do aspirins count? I must have looked like some damned old hippie returning from a Cairo hash den, if there really are such things in Cairo – I wouldn’t know; I didn’t look for any when I was there.

The last leg was fortunately short and I helped a Chinese lady order her lunch from the non-Mandarin-speaking cabin staff (unusual, as there’s usually at least one Chinese-speaker in the crew these days), as well as a Slovenian woman, who conveniently spoke Italian, get through NZ Immigration and find the conveyor belt that had our bags from the flight… Well, everyone else’s bag. Mine didn’t arrive!

Actually, I wasn’t the only one on that flight with missing luggage, which wasn’t any consolation whatsoever. Heck, at least I’m back in my safe haven of NZ where I do have a change of clothes and a toothbrush. Now I just have to wait (and hope!) for my bag to eventually arrive.

So ends this adventure. I’ve got a month or so to rest up before I head off again.

Pax