Our Travel Story

We are alive in the DRC!!!

Josh here, with another novel. This is a summary of our travel adventures, all 42 hours of it...

Today we arrived in the Domocratic Rubuplic of the Congo at around noon local time, which was about 18 hours after our original scheduled arrival time. The following will recap our airport stories and the adventure we have already had just getting here.

We left camp crossroads at around 1pm and arrived at Toronto airport at sometime around 3:30. We had a couple issues at the airport. First, as Emily mentioned, her Visa form was missing the expiry date. None of us had noticed until we were boarding onto out first flight, and were worried that they would not let her through. However, after taking a long time in their line (causing delays) and showing how we were a group of seven, they eventually let her through.

Right after this we went through security as fast as we could, since our boarding time was very fast approaching. We made it through security and arrived at our gate after the schedule borading time had begun. However that volcano apperently hasn’t stopped messing with flight paths and the plane was delayed on its flight to toronto so we boarded late. This was nice for not having to rush, but ended up causing far worse problems, since we also needed to take a longer route back to europe, causing us to miss our flight to paris. On a more positive note, we did a group watching of Avatar to start the flight. The personal movie screens are a great idea.

As Emily mentioned, our new path was from Amsterdam to London to Nairobi to Kinshasa. However, this wasn’t the path we were automatically assigned to, so there was a bit of a scramble to get out luggage off of one plane, get tickets for the other, etc. Once everything was sorted out we had about a 7 hour wait for our flight. This wait mainly consited of everybody trying to sleep (some were succesful).

Our flight to London was quick and comfortable, hour long with lots of empty seats to sprawl accross. Then we had a 4 hour wait in London where we checked out the Terminal 4 market place. Btw, Heathrow airport is huge!! It took us like 15 minutes just to get from our plane to the transfer area to check into our new flight. Thank goodness for those sliding floor things, otherwise it would have taken much longer.

The flight from London to Nairobi was close to 8 hours long. I was fortunate in that I was only awake for maybe 3 hours of it. My body was very clearly needing sleep. Upon landing in Nairobi we got our first sight of Africa! I felt sort of weird realizing that we were actually in Africa, not watching a discovery channel show of the scenery, but actually seeing it. To get off the plane we had to walk onto the tarmak and get shuttled to the airport. Once in the airport we found our gate and proceded to check in. During this process the issue of Emily’s passport surfaced again, with the security person saying she would not be allowed on the plane. However, after making some calls and listening to our pleas (and watching us hold up the line) he eventually let her through. No doubt God was with us on the journey!

Our stoppover was supposed to be only 2 hours, but TIA (this is africa). It ended up being over 4 hours long due to some resource difficulties (it appeared that they didnt have a plane to fly, but none of us really knows. After a free pop or water and 4 hours we got onto the plane and flew to Kinshasa! Ironically enough, the customs at Kinshasa was one our main worries heading into our travels, but we had no issues at all, which was a very welcome change. Also, all of our luggage arrived!! Jean-baptiste picked us up and we headed to our place! I will close this blog as it being our travel story, but I will say that it is a pretty incredible city, and for me it brought back a flood of memories from Nicaragua. Its looking to be a pretty incredible trip.