Introduction

The secret sauce for this trip was the plane. I appreciated that not having to deal with commercial transport would have advantages. I did not fully appreciate how much it would help.

We travelled about every other day. Our schedule for the travel day would be based on the time the plane had to leave. From that we would either go directly to the plane or do some morning sightseeing and then board. On two occasions we first travelled via a charter flight and then met our plane for the trip onward.

Outgoing immigration differed in each country. In some countries our passports had been preprocessed and we just went directly to security screening. Others required a more formal process. After security we would take a bus (sometimes we walked) to the foot of the plane and then up a boarding ramp. Everyone had an assigned seat. We were in row 13 from Washington to Nepal and row 4 from Nepal to Washington. Once on board we would generally be moving within about 15 minutes.

On arrival we would be processed by local immigration. What that involved differed based on the country. In every place there were extra resources assigned. All this made the travel days very efficient.

One concern I had was that we would be flipping several timezones on most days. This proved to not be a problem and even a bit of an advantage. This was definitely a "sleep when your dead" trip so our bags out or tour start was generally pretty early. Since we always moved west a 6 AM start might be 8 or 9 AM where we were the day before so we were "sleeping in".

Our plane was operated by a British company TUI.

I have divided this page into 3 sections. The first are some pictures of the plane (a Boeing 757-200 with all business class seats). The second are some photos from the plane. The third are some photos of the crew taken after they dressed up following our India visit.

These are some of the better pictures from the plane. Taking pictures from the window of a plane never gets you high quality, but these can serve as memories of what we saw.

For anyone that flys, even those of us that prefer the front of the plane, the people taking care of us are rather anonymous and we to them. In this case travelled more than 30,000 miles spread over 10 days so you get to know and depend on the staff. We are the same seat for the first half of the trip and moved to different seats for the second. Each flight day was 5-7 hours.

The gallery I show here was from the trip from India to Tanzania. The crew decided to buy Indian dress and we were surprised as we got on the plane.