Gimme Clips

Bahrain International Airport

The cheapest tickets we could get from South Africa to Egypt were on a Gulf Air flight through Bahrain. It involved a 12-hour layover and a night's stay in fancy hotel with soap and everything. The bed was springy and warm, and I was dead tired, so it worked out perfectly.
Except for the fact that they lost our luggage.

It wasn't too surprising, I guess. We flew from Cape Town to Jo'Burg on Nationwide Airlines, and then had to switch to Gulf Air in Jo'Burg for our flight to Bahrain. We had a tiny amount of time to make the switch, and we were jumping from a domestic to an international flight. It involved us exiting security, switching terminals, checking into Gulf Air, going back through international security, through customs, and finally to our gate. They were a lot of steps to go through, and less than an hour to get through them. (Because of the time crunch, I missed out on my VAT refund, too, which would have been like $200.) We managed to barely make it, about five minutes before they closed the gate. Unfortunately, our bags did not.
They're stuck somewhere in Jo'Burg now. We reported them missing in Bahrain and they are sending them along, but we won't be able to pick them up here since our flight is leaving in about an hour. They promise that they'll send them through all the way to Cairo. This means that we're going to have to stay in Cairo longer than expected. We had hoped to be able to leave the day that we arrived, so we could catch the total eclipse in Egypt's western desert. But, now we can't leave until our baggage arrives. If that only takes a day, we can probably still make it. However, I have a feeling that dealing with the bureaucracy of international baggage handling across three countries will take longer than a day.
So, no eclipse for us.