The Long Way Home: Part Two

Kinshasa to Manila: July 2-July 3

Following two good days of rest and visiting and a little bit of sightseeing in Kinshasa, the day of our departure from Congo finally arrived.  Following prayer at our hotel with President Bosokpale, his wife Janette, Vice-President Badi, Pastor Selenga, Jim Snyder, Kevin Kompelein and others, we got into a truck and headed for the Kinshasa airport.  Passing through immigration we ran into a single difficulty: Soleil did not have a visa.  We had been told by immigration in Zongo (across from Bangui) that she was covered under her mother's visa but this was, apparently, misinformation; definitely not how they operated in Kinshasa.  Assessing the penalty for not having a visa and the cost of the visa itself we were asked to pay $2500 for her.  Luckily, we were prepared for this encounter and we soon had Selenga on the line, who called the chief immigration official in Kinshasa who told the immigration officials we were dealing with to let us go through.  It's all who you know, I guess, and we were blessed to have some amazing assistance in getting through the airport financially unscathed. 

We boarded an Ethiopian airlines flight to Addis Ababa and said our final goodbyes to Congo as we took off on the first stretch of our 26-hour leg to Manila.  Soleil did extremely well on the trip and we enjoyed pretty good seating all the way through to the Phlippines, getting either bulkhead seats or three seats each flight.  Soleil slept through our entire 4-hour layover in Addis Ababa and before long we were on our way to Hong Kong via Bangkok, Thailand.  This was the big one: 13 hours, but again, Soleil slept for about 3 hours and we made it to Hong Kong incident-free.

Soleil out cold in Ethiopia

Our two-hour layover turned hectic when we were informed that to enter the Philippines we were required to present a printout of our tickets leaving the country as proof we would not be outstaying our free 21-day tourist visa.  We didn't have this and weren't able to obtain it until the last minute, finally managing to arrive at our gate halfway through boarding.  All's well that end's well, though, and we made it to Manila with all of our baggage.  We got into Michelle's parents' place around midnight, happy to be done with traveling for at least a few days.