Monday, October 30, 2017, Tulip
Hotel, Accra, Ghana
We departed by hotel shuttle for
the airport at 10 AM; we were puzzled that no one seemed to be in line for our
flight except for one local gentleman.
The sign at the Kenya Air counter said Sierra Leone, not Liberia. Nevertheless, we thought that they were just
joking when they told us that our flight had been cancelled a month ago, no
doubt right after we made the reservation.
It has been common in the past for them to limit their service between these
West African countries but had for a time given daily service. For some reason there was no phone number or
e-mail to contact us by, not ours or the Church’s, so they couldn’t tell us
this really excellent news…
We spent the next hour wondering
how to handle this situation, which was multiplied in difficulty because our visa
was only for one night. After trying to
figure out all possible solutions, we decided that we needed to stay, so Jim
called the hotel to ask for one more night.
We ended up cancelling that later because we found out that like most
decent airlines, Kenya Air would take care of us by putting us up in their
hotel at their expense, and that a shuttle would pick us up and deliver us
again in the morning.
Then we had to notify the couple
in Liberia not to take their long trip to the airport to pick us up. That was a bit of an ordeal because we
couldn’t call from the airport on the phone we had, but this one nice man
sitting there gave us his phone to use.
Don’t you just love good Samaritans?
We couldn’t get the couple’s phone number (stuck in the phone that
doesn’t work at the airport) so we called the Accra office and then they called
the couple for us—another problem solved!
This left our ‘elephant in the
room’ visa problem to deal with. We only
had a visa for the night, so if we needed to stay an extra night, we’d have to
extend the visa by a day—how much would it be (probably another $100), how long
would it take (at least an hour probably), and how would we deal with this
problem?
Luckily, Kenya Air
has obviously done this before, so they called the visa people and set it up
for the morning. They would bring us to
the airport at 9AM and escort us to the visa department. We hope that they will also pay the $100 for
the extra day! Our feelings of panic
were diverted!
The Entrance to the Tulip Inn
It even has a small swimming pool.
All this reorganizing took about
two hours, and then we waited for their hotel shuttle and wondered what kind of
place it might be. 30 minutes later we
were at the Tulip Inn. It is an older
hotel, not that large, but with a hotel restaurant and even a swimming
pool. When we got up to our room (hot in
the hallways, but air in the rooms) we realized that they had booked us into two
separate rooms! (Really?!! I think we looked like we were together!) So when we got to the slightly crowded room
with a large bed, we told them we would be staying together, after which they
changed our room to what I presume is their ‘suite’. It had a large sitting area with a lovely
curved couch. The bedroom was separate,
and each had a TV and their own air conditioner. The bathroom is adequate too, and the towels
were even larger than the ones at the fancy and expensive Accra City Hotel! It is not crowded here and wonder how many or
few might be staying. The Internet is
rather quick too! It won’t be such a bad
day after all, even though at first we were beside ourselves wondering what on earth we would
do!
I loved that the stairway walls were decorated, all differently, all so interesting and beautiful.
Our sitting room.
We went to the restaurant and ate
our lunch, after which Jim came back to the room and passed out…it was a hard
day in the beginning…
Bye till tomorrow.
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