Overnight in Abu Dhabi Airport
Greetings from Abu Dhabi Airport! This short post is about the first part of our trip from Kathmandu to Cape Town.
Kathmandu airport is very disorganized. We arrived back at the airport three hours before our flight, and ended up needing almost all of that time to check in and get boarding passes, go through multiple low-tech security screens, have immigration officers inspect and stamp our our scraps of paper and passports, and then wait in long lines to board. We were delighted to actually board, find our seats, and take off. Etihad Airways, it turns out, is the new national airline of the United Arab Emirates. The plane was a brand-new Airbus, and the entertainment and service were great.
The flight to Abu Dhabi was absolutely packed, mostly with Nepali men going off to work in the Gulf. Many of the men wore baseball caps and large chest stickers from the “Office for International Migration,” or the less euphemistically named “Gulf Manpower Services.” Many of the men drank heavily on the five-hour flight, enjoying a last bit of fun before the hard work and alcohol prohibition started on the ground in the UAE.
Until we were in India and Nepal, I had not registered how much labor the sub-continent countries supply to the Gulf States. When we landed in Abu Dhabi -alongside flights from Delhi and Cochin, Dhaka, Peshawar, and Islamabad- the chaotic airport really felt like a great Arab job fair. There were also a lot of nurses (in particular) and other professionals streaming in to work from Europe. I tried to explain to Zola that many people in the Gulf are basically too rich to want low-level jobs, and not skilled enough for others. Their countries pay wages that are high enough to lure men and women away from their families for a while, and that the men send money back to their families in Nepal, India, etc. Zola said that it is sad that dads are separated from their families. He also mentioned that when I was working all the time in California and Minnesota that our family was sort of like the Nepalis and Indians.
We are enduring our six-hour layover in a strange “pay by the hour” airport lounge. The main airport areas are still incredibly busy and loud at this hour. Lu fell asleep immediately in a borrowed Etihad official stroller. Zola and I are about halfway through reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” aloud (with judicious editing on my part), but he stretched out on a sofa and fell asleep after only about five pages tonight. India (the person) and I were warned politely that we would be expelled from the lounge if we did the same as Zola, so we have been drinking Diet Cokes, talking, and downloading photos onto her computer.
We are both slightly regretful that we didn’t stretch our layover into two-day lookaround in Abu Dhabi, but we are really ready to be in Cape Town.
We will board the flight to South Africa at 2:30 am local time (which is 3:45 am in Kathmandu, about 21 hours after we left for the airport the first time). We will try to sleep for the eight hours to Johannesburg. Onward to South Africa.