From Zen to NY in 6 Seconds Flat

For all my talk about enjoying the pace of life here in Tanzania and the de-emphasis on the material side of things, my baser instincts came out a few days ago. Melissa and I decided that we wanted to change our travel plans a bit. We were scheduled to leave from Kilimanjaro to Nairobi on Feb 23. However, we decided, instead, that we would go to Zanzibar for a few days and wanted to change our flights so that we would fly to Kilimanjaro then to Zanzibar thenn to Nairobi. We assumed that since we had fully refundable tickets and were proposing to use the same airline, Precision Air, this would not be a problem. We were sorely mistaken. After trying to work this out in our nearest “city,” Moshi, we were advised that we had to go to the ticket office in Arusha, a bigger city about an hour and a half away. We planned to go to Arusha to observe the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, so it was not terribly inconvenient. As we were walking into the ticket office, Melissa gently reminded me that I should be nice, to which I hostilely responded: “If you don’t like the way I deal with this, you do it.” A nice beginning to the morning. First, we tried to convince Precision Air that they could apply what we paid for the prior ticket to the new routing. Initially, the agent simply said no. We pressed the issue a bit which prompted the agent to engage in several drawn out conversations in Swahili with other employees. I was getting more and more frustrated. At one point, as frequently happens in Tanzania, they lost electicity, bring the whole matter to a complete halt. After the electricity was restored and after going back and forth for over an hour, we gave up and decided to simply buy the tickets and deal with the refund at a later time. They calculated the amount owed on the new tickets, which was about $1,400. We then offered to pay in credit card and then traveler’s checks—both of which they rejected. Cash only. Understand, this is an airline—not some fly by night operation (pardon, the pun). It appears as though the entire Tanzanian economy is run in cash. The fact that the highest denomination available is 10,000 shillings (about $9) is a reasonably good indication of the dire economic situation this country is in . Needless to say, we were not walking around with $1,400 in cash. At this point, I wanted to fly across the desk and slowly strangle the ticket agent, but I realized it really was not her fault. Nonetheless, I took off, in 5,000 degree sun, looking desperately for a place to cash our traveler’s checks. I found a place that must have been for idiot travelers, because it offered the worst exchange rate that I have seen in my entire time in Tanzania. Substantially worse. Having no options, I cashed our traveler’s checks. I ran back to the ticket office, with a dangerous amount of cash-dodging a multitude of souvenir hawkers along the way. I made it back to the ticket office, drenched with sweat. At this point, Melissa and I were dangerously close to being late to meet our group, at which point our ride home would have left without us—with our children. The ticket agent proceeded to count the money (a mixture of US$ and Tanzanian schillings) at a snail’s pace while applying some incomprehensible exchange calculation. Of course, the first time that she counted the money, she made an error and the whole excruciating process had to start over. At this point, my calm and collected wife was ready to burn down the ticketing office.

I guess the moral of the story is that you can take the kid out of the West, but you can’t take the West out of the kid.