Day 43 (Sat 19 Aug) - Nairobi / Dubai

One thing we must remember is not to go to bed late the night before an early flight!

We surprisingly managed to leave for the the airport just after 8.30am. It didn't take us long as the roads were relatively quite. We had our last encounter of Kenyan drivers - we still haven't worked out how they manage to get away without crashing into each other all the time.

We said goodbye to Sagini and went to the check in desk. There was a really long queue. When we finally got to the deak and handed over our tickets. The Passenger Experience Facilitation Officer (woman at check in) calmly said that flight was full but she could get us on the evening flight. The long and short of it was that the flight had been over booked and there was no way we could have got on the flight as people who were on transit from other countries had booked in the night before. There was no way we were going to miss that flight, Jo had booked a four star hotel in Dubai and if we got the later flight we wouldn't arrive until 5am the next day. The supervisor was called and Jo told him in no uncertain terms how he could resolve the situation. We had an anxious wait, the flight was due to leave at 12.30pm and at 11.25am they told us we could board the plane.

We had to dash through security and to the boarding gate, which was another fiasco. Due to the security alerts in London they confiscated Jo's one and only luxury, her hand cream, but let Sarb go through with matches! Apparantly hand cream is lethal!

We boarded the plane and had a pleasant five hour flight to Dubai. Dubai has a state of the art airport - it is stunning. Despite this we had an anxious wait for our luggage which finally appeared. When we left the airport building in search of a taxi the heat hit us. It was 7.30pm and it felt like we'd just walked into a steam room.

We quickly jumped into an air conditioned taxi and headed off towards our hotel (Ariabian Courtyard hotel). When we arrived we were told that they didn't have any standard non smoking rooms so they had upgraded us to an executive room. Did we say it was four star!!

The hotel has an English pub called the Sherlock Holmes. We thought we ought to check it out so we popped down and Sarb had a pint of Heineken, Jo had a white wine and we shared a massive plate of ploughmans.

Before bed Jo had a bath and then lounged around in one of the white towelling dressing gowns, whilst Sarb caught up with the cricket scores.

You can't really say we are roughin' it around the world!