The Africa Journals
Chapter 6
You can take the girl out of
the country, but…
Not all those who wander
are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien
Promptly at 7, I left my hotel room and the door closed behind me. Then, I unwittingly turned left rather than right in the hallway, thereby taking myself farther away from the elevators and instead finding the stairwell.
Oh, well, I
thought. The mezzanine level is only a couple floors down and I need the
exercise. I pushed open the door and
starting descending the stairs. That’s
when I realized I didn’t have my key card with me. It was held fast behind an impregnable hotel
room door. Dang.
Oh, well, I’ll just go back and take the elevator to
the lobby and get a new key card and then go to breakfast. That’s when I
discovered the stairwell door had no handle to open it from the inside.
Oh, well, the ground floor lobby is just below the
mezzanine. I’ll just walk down to the
ground floor. And
down I went. And down, and down, and
down. Finally, there were no more stairs
to go down and I was relieved to find a door with a crash bar to push and open
the door. But, there was something at
the top of the door I’d never seen before.
Holding
the door closed was a cylinder, inside of which was a glass tube. “Break glass to open door,” read a sign. Ummm, never one to break glass
intentionally, I instead pulled on a red plastic handle attached to a chain
which was attached to…well, something up by that glass tube. The chain, still attached to the handle, came
off in my hand.
I
pushed on the crash bar. Nothing. I pushed again. Nothing.
I reached up and broke the glass tube.
Nothing. I tried to reattach the
chain. It fell to the floor.
Not
one to let a lit bit of adversity get the better of me, I stepped back three
feet and kicked the goddamned door as hard as I could. Several times. By then I needed a shower.
Stairwells
are not air conditioned. WTF? What if the hotel was on fire? How could people get out? What options did I have? Thinking of possible solutions (while
kicking the door) was difficult because all I could think about was Brian’s
voice saying:
PLEASE
BE
PUNCTUAL!
Nobody
knew where I was. Nobody could help
me. I’m trapped in this wretched
stairwell and Brian is going to be soooooo pissed off when I’m not PUNCTUAL for
the coach trip to Mabula.
Rats. (Or, maybe I
should say something more African, though I’m sure there are rats in Africa.)
Elephant Shrews!
PS: I did not cry.
PPS: There were photos of the stairwell, a
door with multiple footprints on it, broken glass on the concrete floor, and a
red handle with chain attached, but for some reason they were all out of focus.
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