Off to a terrible start.

So, in theory, I'm flying right now on my way to Dakar, Senegal, then to South Africa, where I will spend the night in Johannesburg, and then fly to George, where someone from the SAMPLA lab will pick me up to start my internship on Friday. In theory. But clearly, I am not flying to Senegal right now. Which means I won't be in Johannesburg tomorrow night. And I definitely won't start playing with Great Whites on Friday.

We got to the Atlanta airport today with more than enough time to spare, and I went to check in while Mom parked. My bags were tagged, my tickets printed, and the guy was checking my passport when he realized there was a problem. Remember how I had to bribe the customs official in Cambodia last year? (Okay, I just looked, and I never wrote about that. Nevermind.) Basically, there are no empty pages in my passport anymore. Well, there is one, but it's not a specified "visa" page. And in Cambodia, for $20 (shockingly, didn't get a receipt for that one), they will just put your visa over existing stamps. Guess what? You can't do that in America. So as the Delta guy was checking me in, he realized that my passport is completely full, and it turns out I will be issued a full-page visa upon arrival in South Africa. Which means they won't let me on the plane without an empty page. The guy thought that the non-visa-specific page would be fine, but he figured we should go check with George. So we cruise upstairs, where George tells us that if I arrive in South Africa with no blank pages, Delta gets fined $2000. So obviously, they were not about to let that happen.

So I was sent to the Denied Boarding Desk, which totally sounds like I would be surrounded by terrorists and war criminals. Turns out, it's just a division of the visa service. They were nice but not that helpful, so Mom and I hopped on our respective phones and started calling everyone we could think of. (Okay, I'll be honest. Mom hopped on her phone. I sobbed for a while because OH MY GOD THE WORLD WAS ENDING. Then I tried to call my dad. Then I sobbed for a while. Then I texted Ryan, sobbed some more... you see where this is going.) So after talking to four different visa services, Mom realized that there was no way I was getting on my flight, which was in like an hour and a half at this point. In order to get extra pages in your passport, the US Passport Agency has to physically sew them in for you. And there is not a passport agency in Atlanta. Awesome.

So now my passport is on it's way overnight to Texas, where someone is taking it for me to the Houston Passport Agency tomorrow and will overnight it back to me (or courier it on a plane and meet me at the aiport, if necessary). I rebooked my flight for Friday, booked a new hotel for Saturday night, and scheduled a new flight to George, where (presumably) someone can pick me up and I will start playing with the sharks on Sunday.

So, I suppose, the world is not ending. I was just so ready to get there and start this. I've been anticipating it for so long and putting it off for two more days is just pretty heartbreaking. I guess, on the bright side, finding this out upon landing in South Africa after a 19 hour flight would have been worse... especially if I got deported or whatever. The guy at the Denied Boarding Desk was telling us about three people who had just been sent back from India for a similar thing. So it could have been worse, but hearing all this in the airport as I've got everything prepared for this trip was pretty crushing. Hopefully now it is all sorted out, and we will try again on Friday, I suppose. I'll keep y'all posted.