On the other hand, I might never again hold 1.1 million of a currency in my hand again

What a horrible end to our time in the north of Tanzania. We’ve just spent the past two hours running around the Kilamanjaro airport between ATMs, booking offices, and service counters. We’re $500 poorer, and not in a good mood.

We spent a relaxing afternoon at a restaurant near the Fastjet shuttle center in the middle of Arusha, paid our $5 each for the shuttle to the airport, and arrived with plenty of time. Our flight was delayed an hour.

Then two hours.

Then three.

Then suddenly…it was canceled outright. No explanation as to why. No rebooking forthcoming.

There was a mad dash by 75 people to the check-in counter. It was 7:30. Our flight to Abu Dhabi, the first of our two hops on the way to O’Hare, was at 1:50 the next day. If we couldn’t get on that flight, it would become very messy and complicated to make it home in a timely fashion.

But there was no other flights that night. The next one that they could offer us, they practically had to shout to me to be heard over the noise of people yelling and waving boarding passes around us as we crowded the counter, wouldn’t arrive at the DAR airport until 1:30 tomorrow…no way did we want to to cut things that close. There were no buses back to DAR either – none that run at night at least. It was an airplane or nothing.

We had paid $134 each for our round-trip fastjet tickets between DAR and Kilamanjaro airport, so I told them to just cancel our seats entirely; we’d go to their competitor, Precison Air, and get their 8:55 flight back. According to their website, they had one way tickets to DAR for only $50. No problem. We’d be getting about $70 or so back for cancelling our fastjet tickets.

Hah.

Christine went to go arrange Precision tickets at their ticket office, and I went next door to the fastjet office, literally separated from each other by a single piece of drywall and some studs. I was told that…interestingly enough…the $125 ticket was not split equally. Oh no. The flight up to Kilamanjaro from DAR was $111. The return flight was…$23. The agent told me, straight-faced, that I’d be receiving an automatic credit card refund of $46 for our two tickets. Strike one.

Meanwhile, Christine was finding out that, interestingly enough, supply and demand were in effect next door. The online price for one way tickets back to DAR was no longer $50. They were now $250. Each. Would you like to buy two? That’d be One Million, One Hundred and Five Thousand Tanzanian shillings. 1,105,000. Cash only. We don’t take credit cards.

Cue me, sprinting across the darkening parking lot to the only ATM in the airport, which was sitting in a flickering booth under florescent lights. Luckily, it wasn’t packed with other desperate travelers. I checked my watch – 8:10pm. I began the withdrawal process. “This ATM has a 300,000 shilling withdrawal limit. A 7,000 shilling fee will be charged per transaction.” Is it illegal to verbally and physically abuse an ATM? Probably, so I didn’t.

Four panicked transactions and one extremely stuffed wallet later, I was running back to the sales office. In case I haven’t mentioned this in previous entries, the largest denomination of Tanzanian currency is the 10,000 shilling bill. I had 100 of those jammed into my pocket, trying very hard to not have them come bursting out and spreading out into the wind like confetti.

The travel agent, face expressionless, carefully counted them as we stood, heart pounding and hoping that our prices would hold and we wouldn’t be forced to extract even more cash from a machine. They did, and we made our flight, in a very bad mood.

Tin Foil hats on. How much money did Precision Air make that night, from desperate homeward-bound, safari-weary tourists that couldn’t afford to wait a day for their flight? We were never told what had afflicted our original, $23 flight. My teeth ground together when I thought of the fact that I’d just paid ten times the price for the same flight, a slave to the next flight on the horizon. How often does this happen? How convenient is it that a flight that is originally $50 suddenly balloons five times that amount when their only competitor conveniently and unexplainedly cancels. How often does it happen? Wouldn’t it be a great money making idea to randomly and carefully take turns canceling flights, Precision one week and Fastjet the next, in cooperation with each other, then jacking up the prices of the only flight back to DAR? They wouldn’t do that, would they? Would they?

I don’t know. But the moral of this bitter, angry blog post is – avoid Precision and Fastjet whenever you can. Avoid that mousetrap of needing to make that one hour flight if you can. International tourists taking safaris in the northern parks should skip DAR entirely if you can, fly into Arusha/Kilamanjaro directly and back out. You certainly can; it’s an international airport. It’s a dangerously low-option pain point to need to get back to DAR, at night, when there are usually just a couple options, just two locally-owned small airline companies that may or may not be price-fixing and colluding with each other.