27 hours in the sky

Mozambique is really far from California. It’s almost literally on the exact opposite side of the earth, so traveling home to Los Angeles for Christmas vacation generated a lot of frequent flier miles. All flights out of the Southern Africa region go through Johannesburg. Unfortunately that’s nearly a 40 hour bus ride for us. There is a regional flight to Jo’berg on South Africa Air that leaves from our nearby Tete airport, but we were already spending $1400 each on our Emirates tickets home and couldn’t really afford the additional $600 each for the extra two hour flight. Somewhat miraculously, one of the local Tete coal companies decided to sponsor us and pay for the extra leg of our trip. Janet ran into one of the South African coal executives while traveling to Maputo to lead Peace Corps training, and he was appalled when he found out we were contemplating busing it all the way to the Oliver Tambo International airport. He gave us his e-mail, and a couple weeks later he had gotten us tickets using the mines charity fund. We felt a little guilty since the tickets were for our vacation, but he assured us that since our work had benefited the community all year long, we shouldn’t worry about it. The quick two hour jump on a little 15 passenger Leer jet saved us 2 days bus travel, but we still had two days of air travel and layovers to look forward to. Tete to Jo’berg was two hours, then a three and a half layover, then Jo’berg to Dubai was another 8 and a half, another three hour layover where we could see the tallest building in the world from the Emirates terminal window, and finally Dubai – Los Angeles was 17 hours, the fourth longest commercial non-stop route in the world. Even though Emirates delighted us with their service and in-flight entertainment options, we were really glad, and jet lagged, when we disembarked in LAX. We were both hoping our bags made it with all the Christmas presents we had brought for our families. Since our little Tete airport had no computers, our baggage tags were all hand written, which made us a little skeptical, but they made it! We were so happy to see our dads, who had come together to pick us up, waiting for us in the International Terminal lobby. What a journey!