It is nearly ten thirty on Monday
evening and I am still flying, having left CS at 2:00 Sunday afternoon. CS to
Denver to Chicago to Frankfurt to Munich to Cairo. I had no time at all to make
a connection in Frankfurt that had left before we arrived. It is a first world
airport, most of the time. Except for those times when an airline from a third
world country (that would be Egypt in this case) sets up shop. Having missed my
lovely Lufthansa flight to Cairo, it was off to Egypt Air, whose motto is (as
Dave Barry might say) “No Crashes Since the Last One”.
I got to the gate about five
minutes before departure to find this situation: there was no plane, half the
crew and all of the passengers were locked out of the departure area, nobody
was checking anybody in, the clocks were all broken, and one of the Egyptian
pilots looked more like Moses than an airline pilot. Long white beard, the
whole bit. No robes and staff, but I didn’t know but what they all had to
change into robes when they got into the cockpit. Heck, maybe they had to fly
towards Mecca at prayer times, so we all wouldn’t have to get up and find east.
Plus, as I said, the clocks were
all broken. You need to know that when Germany got rid of God a few generations
back, for some reason they got really uptight about being on time for things. You know, being pretty precise about things and all, without God to sort of
oversee everything, I think they got so they thought the world would fall apart
if they were a few minutes late for a train or something.
(By the way, I am writing this on the flight
to Cairo – I’m glad I watched the movie coming into Frankfurt. It’s the same
movie on this flight, but with Arabic subtitles all over the bottom. I don’t
want to sound like the total Arabic illiterate person that I am, but it looks like some taggers with spray paint got
into the editing room and thought the movie was a bridge. It's actually quite lovely, apart from getting in the way of the actual movie.)
Cairo – I saw the Pyramids. I also
saw the Pyramids Pizza Hut right outside the entrance. KFC was next door, I
think.
Then I went to Bahrain.
Did I mention that my suitcase
didn’t? It went somewhere else. It’s Wednesday night, and I am wearing the same
clothes I put on at home Sunday morning in Colorado. The
nice little man promised me it would come on Thursday. I tried to stand close
enough to him so that the smell would make him more helpful, but smell is
pretty common in this part of the world where many folks wear full
body-armor-style robes all day long in 140 degree heat. They make the women
wear black. They go with the men to the beach, and the men get to swim, and the
women get to sit and watch in the sand, covered completely down to their
eyeballs in black.
So what I’m saying is, he didn’t
notice my body odor, because the main air quality problem they have out here is
all from body odor.
Thursday I got desperate and
bought some clothes. Socks. Underwear. A couple of shirts. Some deodorant. That
was key, deodorant.
I saw Bahrain. Bahrain could
generously be described as flat, hot, and dusty. Sunny, though. Really sunny.
All the time. This would be the Sahara desert, I think. An easy job would be
weather reporter. I was told that the reason that all the flights leave in the
middle of the night is that it is too hot for them to sit outside during the
daytime – the fuel might explode. Exploding planes are bad for tourism. Plus the air is too hot for the planes to get any lift on take-off. They'd have to drive through the desert to get anywhere. No lift - not a good thing for a plane.
I went to the airport to leave
that same day. I arrived at about 1:30 in the morning. Did I mention that my
suitcase didn’t? Yes, well, I went back to the airport for a 6:40 p.m. flight,
only to find that my bag was scheduled to arrive at (go ahead, guess) 7:00 p.m.
You can imagine my joy.
The good news was that my flight
was delayed two hours, so once again I saw my bag. In fact, this time I got to
touch it, if only to roll it from customs downstairs to the check-in desk
upstairs. I couldn’t exactly open it or anything, but at least I had felt it
with my fingers briefly. I longed for
clean jeans with a longing that could only come from five days in the same
pair.
In Kuwait, my bag arrived. It’s a
miracle. I burned my jeans. Wasn’t hard, just threw them out on the pavement
and they caught fire almost immediately. It was over 100 again in Kuwait.
That’ll about do it for Kuwait. Apart from the gold Lincoln Continental with the really large gold fist punching up through the roof. I think it's a war memorial. Not really getting the symbolism.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the
UAE. The UAE could generously be described as flat, hot, and dusty. Sunny,
though. Really sunny. All the time.
Flying on Emirates Air (this
year’s best airline in the world – this is true) is great. Not only do we have
touch sensitive TV screens at every seat, and remote control units with a phone
on the flip side, the cabin TV screen periodically shows us how far we are from
Mecca, and what direction it is from us. So that we can orient ourselves in the
right direction when it’s time for prayers. First class get their own VCR at
every seat, with a choice of videos personally delivered by lovely air
hostesses.
I don’t want you to have to worry, so I’ll tell you
now that my bag made it the rest of the trip with me. It would have been
funnier if it had continued to follow me, meeting me briefly in airports as I
pick it up from customs and carry up to check it in again, but not funnier
enough for me to have been happy about it.
Random trip stories : I
was told of an African man who recently got drunk and fell asleep by the side
of the road late one night. He woke up to find that a python had swallowed him
feet-first up to the chest. He got out somehow – a black man, he was bleached
white from the chest down to his toes;
Leaving Bahrain (where Muslims go
to sin), we had to stand in a long line to be searched by the Booze and Porno
Police, who were checking to see if any of us were trying to smuggle liquor or
dirty videos into more strict and fundamentalist Kuwait;
Some fishermen on Lake Victoria
from Uganda got tired of actually fishing, so they decided that it wold be lots easier to just throw poison
in the water and scoop the dead fish up
in nets. They sorta forgot that what is poison for the fish is poison for the
fish-eaters, so after a few dozen people died from the fish, they had to ban eating
any fish from the lake. Bad idea.
Actually, that first sentence was bad. We did not see any giraffes driving home
– it’s illegal for wild animals to drive in Kenya. The actual human drivers are
wild enough. First, the roads have apparently been bombed. Your basic path
weaves through the potholes like a drunken sailor, and that’s if the roads used
to be paved at some point in the past. Most of the roads are dirt, with ruts
big enough to swallow aircraft carriers. Add to that two opposing lanes of
traffic, and the whole enterprise gets pretty exciting as everybody weaves and
bobs through the potholes and ruts and cars coming from the other direction and
donkey carts, plus jaywalkers and the occasional elephant. OK, I lied about the
elephant.
Plus there are these vans called
“mutations” or “matatus” or something which are driven by crazy people who jam
as many people into the van as possible and then drive like suicide bombers. I
think they kill a lot of people on the roads in Kenya.
We did get to go to the Nairobi
Game Park, which is sorta like a city park only it’s 625 square miles of
stunning African plains with animals that can stomp or eat you, instead of
squirrels and pigeons. We were hoping to see lions, so don’t ask me why we were
sitting on the roof of the jeep. We maybe saw a cheetah. We did see elands and
impalas and cape buffalo and a rhinoceros and baboons and giraffes (more than
just heads), but no zebras, and hartebeests and cool birds that I don’t know
what they’re called.
In a final irony, as I stood in
line at Entebbe International Airport, waiting to check in to board a gleaming
British Airways 747, all the airport power went out and the computers went down
in the terminal, forcing the agents to check us in laboriously by hand.
