January 30, 2006: Amsterdam to Kilimanjaro

[Photos. Top and Center: Killing time at Schiphol Airport, the Netherlands; Bottom: Flight to Tanzania]

3,852 miles and 7.5 hours after leaving Washington DC, our flight touched down at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It was now Sunday, 7 am in Holland, and the airport was slowly coming to life. We had just disembarked and were still squinting from the early morning sunrise and trying to figure out where to track down Ajay when he casually sauntered up to us while we were still wandering in the middle of the boarding terminal. He looked remarkably well considering he had been up most of the previous night at work.

We set up shop upstairs near the business center to kill time during our 3 hour layover. I was pleasantly surprised to find my Cingular cellphone service could roam on the Dutch "Orange" network and dropped a quick email to Lisa to let her know we were halfway there. She immediately replied despite it being 2 am in Washington DC, so we ended up being able to talk a bit before our group finally decided to look for some food.

After eyeing the 4.5 euro ($6) pizza slice I decided on a bottle of white beer instead despite this essentially being breakfast. It was after all cheaper and in europe afterall.

KLM flight 569/NW8383 left on time at 1030am. This flight was unfortunately pretty full and was not one of the snazzy Airbuses that we had just arrived on (it was an M11). We hunkered down in our center seats for the 8.5 hour/4288 mile journey to deliver us to the African continent.