October 12, 2014

Today was a travel day and started out a bit rough. We did have the best breakfast yet which was waffles with some kind of chocolate/nutella that looked like peanut butter on the waffles and mixed fruit on top. Thank heavens we had a big breakfast because we didn’t eat again until 10 p.m. We got up early to go to church and then there was some bike/running race and so the roads were closed and then we got around it and they didn’t have the right address for the church.  Sam then realized he didn’t have his cellphone so we went back to the hotel and then it was found in a car that we had driven around in before, must have fallen out of his pocket. We decided we should just get to the airport early- thankfully we did, the line was enormous! We waited in line for over an hour and then another 40 mins to go through security and immigration. We got to the gate a couple minutes before boarding. The airline was Air Seychelles and the flight was delayed an hour once everyone was on due to some issue loading the luggage. We knew the flight would go though, since it is the only flight to the Seychelles for another four days. We finally took off and it was a comfortable flight. 

5 hours later we touched down into Mahe, Seychelles and we ran for our next flight and got there 10 mins before takeoff. The flight was a small plane with about 16 seats. We landed in Praslin 15 ins later and took our bags and went to the curb to find a taxi. Well, no taxis but a couple men in total beater cars. We had no other option but we hopped in with some guy in an old rusty, banged up rusty car and we prayed he was really taking us to our hotel. (In the US you don’t get into a car unless it says taxi on the side.) At our hotel, it wasn’t exactly what it looked like in the brochure. They took us through and on the surface it looked ok but then once he left we looked at the TV and the screen was melted. Then the bed was a cot essentially with nothing but a sheet on it.- We ended up using towels as blankets. The girls in the room next door came in around midnight with apparently a few drinks in them and were so loud, since we apparently shared a thin wall, it woke me up and then had a hard time getting back to sleep since I could feel the bars of the metal bed.. We decided we needed to maybe take a look around the next day and find other options. Since my phone doesn’t work on this island except to call home and we had no internet at the place we were staying at we called Nate and he did some recon for us to find maybe something better online so we had a place to start tomorrow.It isn’t terrible but definitely not what we were expecting.