A life of excess (baggage)

One of the unfortunate and inevitable implications of mounting filming expeditions is excess baggage fines. A typical set of equipment that I take on location weighs in at around 350kgs. This consists of cameras, housings, support equipment, tripods, dive gear, lighting, monitors; the list goes on. Its not really possible to reduce this weight at all, pretty much everything is essential. Obviously we have to pay to get this equipment to and from wherever we’re filming; sometimes it’s possible to send the gear by cargo, which can be cheaper. Other times we have to take it on the flight with us, and here we can choose to take a gamble between prepaying the excess on-line, which means paying the full price (either per kg or per bag), or we can take a gamble, go to the airport and see if we can get the charges reduced by smiling and being friendly at the check-in desk.

On the way out of Djibouti, I hit a stumbling block that almost left me stuck with few options to get my equipment out of the country.

The problem; Due to a technical hitch, the airline was only accepting cash payment for excess baggage; I’d planned to pay on my credit card.

Whats the big deal I hear you say?

Well, it was a big deal actually; there were no banks that would let me withdraw enough cash to pay for the excess. Once I found this out, I hit panic stations a bit. If I couldn’t pay for the excess on my credit card, couldn’t pay it through the website, and couldn’t draw money from a bank, how would I ever get out of Djibouti with all of my equipment?!

I worked out how much I thought the excess was going to cost in the local currency, and then decided I was just going to have to haggle the airline down to however much money I could get my hands on.

I went to the closest ATM that was working, and withdrew as much cash on each of my bankcards as I possibly could. As I expected, when I tried to withdraw more cash on the same card twice, it didn’t work, and immediately my cell phone began to ring; security alerts from my bank. I’d managed to draw some cash, but nowhere near enough to pay for the excess.

I went back to my hotel, and then a couple of hours later repeated the process, sometimes I was able to draw cash, sometime not. This process carried on through the night, you can see from the pics how many times I had to make this journey!

I worked out how much I thought the excess was going to cost in the local currency, and then decided I was just going to have to haggle the airline down to however much money I could get my hands on.

Long story short, I managed to get enough cash, and after quite some time haggling at the check-in desk, I made it through; myself and my luggage were both on the way home.

And the moral of the story… well I don’t know really.

Perhaps it; ‘always carry large sums of cash when traveling’. But this doesn’t sound very wise.

Travelers cheques? Maybe.

Or perhaps its; always pre-pay excess baggage, but to me that’s throwing money down the drain.

The only lesson I can take from this one is just to expect the unexpected, and to know that there is always something else waiting to catch me out on expeditions.