Namibians can't read Hebrew

and neither can I, but by some minor miracle, we are en route to Tel Aviv via Addis Abbiba, a 12 hour journey that almost didn't happen.

Lesson for Ian: check, check, and check again entry requirements!

In the case of Israel, it turns out that whilst we don't need a visa, we do need to make a pre-flight online health declaration. In fact it's not a health declaration at all, we could have the pest, syphilis and 20 other diseases but they do not check for those, just Covid documentation, which we have if course, HOWEVER

I hastily tried to enter my details into the Israeli Health Ministry online form. They want dates of all vaccinations and a pdf certificate. For all 6 of us! And of course, loads of other data, though thankfully not as much as the world champions (India 6 × 8 pages , including my (dead) fathers occupation).

I get to the final pages. Upload failed! Try again later? Continue without PDF? OK, but then there is an endless spiral on the page. I hit refresh, and the whole thing goes back to the start page.

So I try again ×3, and Flo does, too. Always the same uploads fail, scans of QR codes fail,...and then the endless loop, before crashing.

Ok, give up on phones. Let's try pc. Page doesn't load ....page loads only partially. This goes on for 15 minutes, before finally I get it to load, and voila it works 1st time, but we have a maximum of 10 minutes to board, and we have 5 more to do 😩 . BUT, we now know all the data that governments want by heart, and we get the other 5 done in record time.

We have our green certificates for Israel 😀 , let's show it at the gate.

The boarding lady says it doesn't have your name on it. I explained that it's in Hebrew, and that is my passport number. You can check! She thinks about it a bit, and without more checks, she lets us go 😀😃🙂.

I realized later when I was so ignorant that I had forgotten Hebrew was written right to left, but whatever the case, the document bamboozled the boarding ladyWeiterlesen