We flew from Kenya, just having had a magical 3-day safari experience where the lodge we stayed at catered to our every need and continuously wanted to do things for us, to Ethiopia where we would be on an exciting 13 day tour with a local tour company. In order to see many of the country’s top sites and stay out of the danger zones, it is best to be on a tour and guided everywhere. My son’s Rick’s recent message to me right before flying to Addis Ababa, was he had read an article about a violent flare-up in Ethiopia and to stay safe!
We landed and first had to do some sort of health checkpoint. We had to scan a URL and then fill out the form. Mike’s phone had service already in the new country and he tried filling the form out twice just to get to the point of submitting and getting an error message. My phone was not getting service at all (turns out I had to select a different service provider choice than the one it auto-selected), and I had to go to a person on a computer who was filling in the information for us poor souls who didn’t have connectivity. We were at the end of the line and it took forever for this chaotic process to finally get everyone through. None of the information we filled out had anything to do with health – just the usual – where did we come from, what airline, passport information.
Also during this Health Check process, Mike ended up being asked some health questions which he answered and I was with some other official and was asked to show proof of being vaccinated against yellow fever. Weird and random! Mike wasn’t asked for the yellow fever vaccine proof and I wasn’t asked health questions. I just wanted to re-engineer this whole experience so that it worked and made sense. Sigh…
Then we get to where we can finally see the airport exit door but we have to put our bags through an x-ray machine. I was asked if my suitcase had binoculars in it. And this is when the shit hit the fan. I had to remove them from the suitcase and go with an official person who was grasping my passport, to a place where I was told I couldn’t bring them into Ethiopia. News to us! Didn’t think to look up banned objects for every country we go to since I don’t have lighters, lithium batteries, knives, guns, exploding shoes or drugs. Our tour company didn’t think to explain this to us when we booked with them. So here I was after an already draining experience in the airport facing another draining experience that turned out to be 10 times worse.
They further explained that I was to leave the binoculars at the airport warehouse and then pick them up before my flight out of Ethiopia, 13 days later. Well, I immediately went into a frame of mind that I couldn’t relinquish my binoculars – they had become kind of an appendage for us as we are traveling here in Africa, and we had to hold on to them. So, how to get the permission to keep them? They had said that if we had received pre-authorization for them that we could keep them.
Then I was whisked away to the warehouse and Mike was told to stay where he was with our luggage. I followed the man who was gripping my passport, as I gripped tightly my binoculars. The entrance to the warehouse was uber-chaotic. People everywhere, boxes everywhere, things taped up haphazardly and a huge warehouse room on the other side of the door that looked like people just threw everything on a garbage heap. I couldn’t let my binoculars suffer that fate. I asked how to get the permission and said I needed to see that decision maker. But they took the binoculars, wrapped them in tape, told me to get a photo of them, gave me a receipt for them and took them into the warehouse as tears welled up in my eyes. I followed the guy into the abyss of the warehouse and only saw him write some number on a desk that supposedly was the number that my binoculars had somewhere on them. Did they? What is their fail-proof system for this garbage heap of stuff?
Finally, after 3 hours of being given the run-around of who I could talk to only to have that special person either somewhere getting a key to the office, or having breakfast or just not at work that day, I was told by the 5th official I talked to that it just wasn’t possible to get permission to take the binoculars, then and there. He explained it was a multi-day process because it had to be decided on by the head office which wasn’t anywhere at the airport. I relinquished, realizing it was futile.
That night as I was sleeping I had a nightmare about that warehouse, my binoculars not being able to be found and running around in the warehouse screaming at everyone.
I will find out in 2 days if my nightmare was a premonition or not… Fingers crossed 🤞