18 July -- Transportation
Whew…today was really African.
Started when I was two hours late for my flight to Gonder. My guide had misread my itinerary, and he showed up at the hotel an hour after take-off so I could get to the plane two hours early. No problem though, because the flight hadn’t left yet.
He got me to the airport, and I joined the sleepy throngs who’d arrived at 5 am for a 7 am flight. I got there at 9 am and was feeling pretty good about the extra sleep and the Ethiopian breakfast I’d had. I felt pretty good til about 1 pm, when I started to winge and try to talk my way onto any other flight going more or less the same direction. The delay was classic – one of the engines had gone out as the flight was leaving this morning, and by the time they’d unloaded everybody and fixed the engine, the continuing rain in Addis had spread north, and fog was preventing landing up there. Anyway, the fog cleared in Bahir Dar, just south of Gonder, so I talked my way onto a plane headed there, bringing along a young, lost-looking, German logistics volunteer for medicines sans frontier.
It was a kinda bumpy ride, and the new-flyer, young Ethiopian woman in a robin’s egg blue scarf beside me kept things snappy with gasps, screams and sudden arm clutching. It was kind of like going to a scary movie with David. I won’t mention what the woman sitting beside the volunteer did, but she wasn’t an experienced flyer either. When we landed at Bahir Dar, Ethiopian Airways announced that we could go no further, so I wasn’t going to see Gonder today.
I wasn’t stranded, though, because someone from the travel agency had found out I was on that plane and called someone to meet me. We were going to try for a dash to the Blue Nile falls, so I got in his VW van along with a half-dozen airport workers, and we went through the back parts of town, dropping his buds off. (Don’t ask me where the German ended up…no idea. They might have taken the plane back to Addis.) Anyway, Bahir Dar was an Africa I hadn’t seen in 25 years – men sitting around listening to music and talking, women standing around talking, young girls pounding grain in those gigantic mortar and pestles. I should add, too, that it was continuing to rain on and off.
I was eventually transferred to a bigger bus and headed out of town to the falls with a group of five Ethiopian tourists who’d had the same idea I had in Addis and who, like me, had been stranded. This place was green like you couldn’t imagine – wet, fertile, rich. Guys plowing fields with oxen and wood plows reminded me of Mali 30 years ago. I saw some big, brilliant blue birds (rollers?) and a fish eagle in a tree. Then I saw dark clouds, and soon I saw a deluge. Since you have to walk about a mile to the falls, we decided to give up the Blue Nile for the day and head back to a hotel.
That’s Africa. Rain where you expect desert, delays, waiting and beauty.
Started when I was two hours late for my flight to Gonder. My guide had misread my itinerary, and he showed up at the hotel an hour after take-off so I could get to the plane two hours early. No problem though, because the flight hadn’t left yet.
He got me to the airport, and I joined the sleepy throngs who’d arrived at 5 am for a 7 am flight. I got there at 9 am and was feeling pretty good about the extra sleep and the Ethiopian breakfast I’d had. I felt pretty good til about 1 pm, when I started to winge and try to talk my way onto any other flight going more or less the same direction. The delay was classic – one of the engines had gone out as the flight was leaving this morning, and by the time they’d unloaded everybody and fixed the engine, the continuing rain in Addis had spread north, and fog was preventing landing up there. Anyway, the fog cleared in Bahir Dar, just south of Gonder, so I talked my way onto a plane headed there, bringing along a young, lost-looking, German logistics volunteer for medicines sans frontier.
It was a kinda bumpy ride, and the new-flyer, young Ethiopian woman in a robin’s egg blue scarf beside me kept things snappy with gasps, screams and sudden arm clutching. It was kind of like going to a scary movie with David. I won’t mention what the woman sitting beside the volunteer did, but she wasn’t an experienced flyer either. When we landed at Bahir Dar, Ethiopian Airways announced that we could go no further, so I wasn’t going to see Gonder today.
I wasn’t stranded, though, because someone from the travel agency had found out I was on that plane and called someone to meet me. We were going to try for a dash to the Blue Nile falls, so I got in his VW van along with a half-dozen airport workers, and we went through the back parts of town, dropping his buds off. (Don’t ask me where the German ended up…no idea. They might have taken the plane back to Addis.) Anyway, Bahir Dar was an Africa I hadn’t seen in 25 years – men sitting around listening to music and talking, women standing around talking, young girls pounding grain in those gigantic mortar and pestles. I should add, too, that it was continuing to rain on and off.
I was eventually transferred to a bigger bus and headed out of town to the falls with a group of five Ethiopian tourists who’d had the same idea I had in Addis and who, like me, had been stranded. This place was green like you couldn’t imagine – wet, fertile, rich. Guys plowing fields with oxen and wood plows reminded me of Mali 30 years ago. I saw some big, brilliant blue birds (rollers?) and a fish eagle in a tree. Then I saw dark clouds, and soon I saw a deluge. Since you have to walk about a mile to the falls, we decided to give up the Blue Nile for the day and head back to a hotel.
That’s Africa. Rain where you expect desert, delays, waiting and beauty.
posted by RogerD at 10:22 AM
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