The worst possible way to the airport

How did we even end up booking a flight as part of our roadtrip? Well, our next principal destination was always Rwanda. To get to Rwanda we would have to cross through multiple countries, and for the 2200km it would've taken us around 3-4 days by bus. For this once we decided to fly the distance from Lusaka in Zambia to Kigali in Rwanda.

We had been monitoring the flight price for this trip, which was services three times a week by RwandAir, since early January and the price had been incredibly stable at the very elevated price point of 250€, at least in our European minds for the 2h short flight this seemed quite pricey. Since we weren't sure when we would end up flying we pushed the flight booking until we arrived in Zambia a few days earlier. Once we had more clarity and decided to fly out on Monday, I went to book the flights and, shock!, saw that the price had increased to 400 EUR per person! Now, that was definitely overpriced for a short 2h flight.

I was poking around the website of RwandAir for a while until I came upon a promotion site explaining a coupon code that would expire in 24h, valued at 25% of the flight price. That still meant 300 EUR for the Monday flight, but after some consideration we changed our plans to accommodate a flight on Sunday evening already, where together with the coupon code we managed to reduce the price down to 260 EUR per person. Therefore Sunday was our last day in Lusaka.

After the taxi had picked us up from Likumbi's place, we had around 40min for the 45min drive to make it to the airport for the advertised 2h before departure. Sounded doable! Now, unfortunately we did not count on the taxi's GPS sending us through the worst possible way. We ended up having to traverse a gigantic township / slums of Lusaka.

That meant people everywhere on the street and a top speed of 10km/h, and GPS completely failing us and sending us down dead end roads, as well as the roads being in such a bad condition that our poor taxi driver wasn't sure we were gonna make it. Additionally, we had already started the trip well into the reserve fuel, and the fuel indicator needle had already reached the very bottom, so we were at risk of getting stuck in a deep puddle without fuel, and a good chance of missing our flight.

Despite the pressure of having to catch a flight in two hours, we decided to take the situation with humorous disbelief. The while situation was just too absurd. The driver stopped multiple times to ask for directions, and yet we never seemed to be able to make it out of the maze. Until we finally did. Super relieved our driver pulled into a gas station and put a whole three Euros worth of fuel into the tank, to ensure we could make it to the airport. The needle was still in reserve when we left the gas station.

We made it to the airport about 1h45min before departure, which was acceptable.Leer más