Out of Africa

The Girl and I have always believed ourselves to be a lucky combination – a notion based largely on evidence drawn from direct experience. An example of this good fortune would be the sale of our Buckinghamshire apartment in the UK back in 2015, the year that we moved to Canada.

We had been trying to sell the property for nearly four years – without success – before finally doing so just a week before we emigrated. This might seem to stretch the definition of good luck were it not for the fact that the sale was completed just as the sterling/Canadian dollar exchange rate hit its most fortuitous level for the best part of a decade – a figure that has not been matched since.

It came as a considerable and most palpable shock, therefore, when our latest adventure – the African safari trip trailed in my last post – imploded spectacularly over the last week.

That is right… we did not get to Africa… we did not go on safari… we finally retreated to the west coast of Canada to lick our wounds in a state of considerable shock.

In short – we are not happy!

I am not going to catalog in detail the entire fiasco here, though I will undoubtedly be naming names in a subsequent missive. Those who live in the UK may well have seen the news items of a week ago which recounted the spectacular and catastrophic failure of British Airways’ IT systems that laid waste to much of the operation – ticketing – check-in – baggage handling – online services – etc, etc… On what was touted as being the busiest travel weekend since the COVID pandemic British Airways cancelled well in excess of two hundred flights and wrecked the travel plans of thousands of customers.

The ‘highlights’ of our particular experience include having one flight delayed overnight and a replacement finally cancelled at around midnight – after we had spent ten hours in the terminal. We were told that we must collect our checked baggage and leave the terminal building – to join an already extensive queue of folk trying to find a room in the airport hotels. This was the point that we discovered that BA had lost our safari luggage!

Over the following three days we spent many wearisome hours on the phone trying to reschedule flights (including connecting flights in Africa for which we will  get no refund!) and to search for our missing bags. When it became apparent that there was no chance of both us and our bags coinciding in Johannesburg we finally gave up and spent another day trying to persuade BA to let us go home – the which they would not do without considerable further outlay.

Now we have to attempt to recover at least some of the cost of this ‘trip of a lifetime’.

This whole has been a deeply traumatic experience for us both and has left our confidence considerably shaken. We both had moments in which we could not see how the situation could be resolved – and I think it may take a while before we again attempt anything similar.