Me and the Rwandan flag. One more country to add to the count.

Not much blogging (actually none) on this trip although there was plenty to blog about. Among other things, the scenic bus tour through Rwanda and eastern Congo turned out to be an intense and grueling journey, definitely a test of one's stamina. Not totally unexpected, but there were a couple or three moments when arrival at the destination was not at all certain. I also witnessed a new record for number of people on a minivan, 31. No, I'm not kidding and for comparison, the previous record (as witnessed by me) was 29. That leg of the journey featured a bench seat where all of the padding had worn off, so I was basically sitting on the pipe frame that would normally hold up the padding, and the board that had replaced the padding on the back had a nail sticking out of it and occasionally into my back. 

Things I am looking forward to on this trip:

• adding a new country to my checklist
• a scenic bus tour through Rwanda and Eastern Congo
• the possibility of being witness to the launching of a new program for our organization--please note this is not a slam dunk, so many things could push back, postpone, undermine, derail, or otherwise frustrate this process. All the usual philosophical cliche's apply: Murphy's law, 'nothing is ever  as easy as it seems', 'that that don't kill me, can only make me stronger', Ok, that last one is a bit of a stretch, fueled by the double espresso I just ordered and my inability to sleep on airplanes. In fact at this point I'm barely ahead of the proverbial army of monkeys randomly typing at keyboards. I mean this is a bullet point that has apparently turned into a rambling paragraph, hardly making a point at all, bullet or otherwise. Can't wait to get to a bed somewhere and sleep. That is still 14-16 hours away I expect.

Schipol, from gate arrival through security check to reaching my departure gate, 15 minutes. Sorry, wasn't alert enough to set my stop watch. I realize that almost no one cares about the time it takes to process me through airports, but I figure that someone out there is mining data on traveler perception of airports, and this is my contribution. Plus it amuses me in an environment otherwise largely devoid of amusement--unless you consider duty-free shopping to be a form of amusement. Also I have a theory that some airports are better at this than others and eventually I hope to collect enough data to prove it, at least to myself.

This trip will have the added feature of taking a bus basically all the way around Burundi to avoid possible political things. Actually it will be one bus for about 5 hours followed by a public, shared taxi for another 3 hours. So including transfer times, border crossings, etc it should be a 9 or 10 hour trip. Should be very scenic.

30 minutes from entrance to gate, Toronto Pearson airport.