From Lake Buynonyi, we had an 8-hour bus ride to Kampala. When we got in, we grabbed a taxi straight to the (other) bus office to book our tickets to Nairobi the next day. The next morning, we ran errands, sending postcards and exchanging money, before getting on the 1pm bus to Nairobi.

The 14-hour bus ride to Nairobi got us into the city around 2am, but we were prepared — we had reserved a room at the Downtown hotel earlier that day. We managed to get a taxi to the hotel and got 5 hours of sleep before getting up to run more errands (internet and gift-shopping) before heading to the airport.

We still had a lot of traveling before us: a 5-hour flight to Doha, Qatar, then a 14-hour layover there before our 3-hour flight to Cairo. But that long layover was all part of the plan. (more…)

When Beth and I were looking for flights out of India to Africa, we found that the most affordable way was through the Middle East, and that most of these flights had a layover of 12 hours or more. Having just told Beth a few stories about Matt, an Australian ex-pat living in Qatar who Abby and I had met in Cambodia (See “Bada Bing!”), I instantly thought of emailing him to see if he’d be up for some tour guiding. A prompt reply included an enthusiastic “yes”, so we booked our tickets with a 12-hour stop over in Qatar.

We arrived at noon to find Matt waiting for us with his white Jeep Cherokee ready to go. We jumped in, and took off for the city… a long 5-minute drive from the airport. Matt showed us around the coast by driving us past the new museum set out on the water and bringing us to a lookout point where we could see the tall skyscrapers a few miles away rising out of the crystal blue sea. (more…)