Making Bail (aka paying the hotel bill)

Tuesday night late, I was to check out of my hotel (which by the way is a "dry" hotel stemming from its Lutheran religious affiliation), and lo and behold, the credit card machine would not connect. My only other card was Amex, which they did not take. After numerous tries and failures, the hotel clerk suggested I withdraw the money from an ATM and pay in cash.  A $560 hotel bill comes to over 1.1 million Tanzanian shillings.  With the help of the driver I'd hired to take me to the airport, I drove around to multiple ATMs only to have the first set down for maintenance, the next having a limit of 400,000 shillings and thereafter, my bank would not allow me to withdraw any more.  I went back to the hotel with my stack of cash (10,000 seems to be the largest denomination), and after some back and forth, the clerk remembered that there was a hotel that takes Amex cards.  So away we went to that hotel which fortunately has a 24 hr business center.  They were able to withdraw the other 700,000 shillings I needed (at a horrible exchange rate), and with my even bigger stack of cash, I went back to the hotel.  1.1 million plus a handful of extra shilling I had left over, plus some US dollars, and my bill was paid.  Imagine paying your US hotel bill in $5 bills and you can picture how ridiculous this looked.

A couple hours later I was departing Kilimanjaro airport on my way to DC via a quick stop in Mombasa to pick up passengers, and a change of planes in Istanbul.  It feels good to be home.