Africa…round two

Returned to East Africa, after yet another exasperating (and fruitless) job search back in Canada. Flirted with Belize, but in the end opted for the path more familiar. This time I arrived in Africa on a one way ticket as I haven’t a choice but for it to stick.
This round began from Nairobi as my entry point as opposed to Dar es Salaam, being only a three hour drive to my friends place in Arusha, shaving off about 6 hours compared to the Dar run. In theory. Crossing the Kenya/Tanzania border in a shuttle bus was a lively experience, and tested my nerves and adaptability. But back to that later.

Jomo Kenyatta International in Nairobi is a popular airfield for the foreign pilots. A friend was chatting up a British Airways flight crew the other day and they recounted their approach and landing with child-like alacrity. They were thrilled when warned by the tower to exercise caution due to animals in the vicinity of the runway. There was a cheetah on a early morning stroll, trotting alongside the runway. Apparently unfazed by the landing Boeing

After climbing aboard the shuttle bus to arusha it was about 90 minutes to the border, but here in East Africa you need to clear exit, as well as entry customs as well. This would appear to be an uneventful and minor inconvenience – until of course the bus leaves without you. Not to worry I told myself, I had a compass and there were a couple other passengers left for dead – strength in numbers. I can also run real real fast. That worked out just fine, as I found our bus across the border and tied up in traffic.

Arusha

I arrived at the new house in Njiro to a big expat/bbq/shindig. All of my friends in one place. And what a place it was. The property was sequestered from the immediate neighborhood by a towering wall of flowered vines, and was populated by a dizzying array of flora and fauna, for such an intimate plot. Banana and papaya trees, four amorous turtles, and three half-grown (and hopelessly incorrigible) puppies – Tibi, Scooby, and Gizmo. Within the first week back, I suffered my only disaster when the puppies sat down one night for a snack and devoured my flip flops. As disasters in Africa go, one I can live with.

Soon after I arrived, I got the chance to do some flying in a Cessna 404, first with my Aussie mate Moses, then with mon ami Percival. From Kilimanjaro to Lake Manyara and all points in the Serengeti, I enjoyed the birds-eye view of many of the physical splendors that Tanzania has to offer. It was late summer (winter here, south of the equator) and it was the dry season. The tones and colours reminded me much of the South Western United States. Never have I imagined there were so many shades of beige. The 404 will fly comfortably at around 200 kmh, and at 50 feet off the deck along the Masai steppe and immediately south of Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru, make for a veritable feast for the senses. Hugging the Earth, swerving and banking to evade the ubiquitous dust devils, whose vortex can generate enough energy to propel its twisting dance up to a couple of miles, is certainly an experience I will not soon forget.

Just a day or two later, I encountered a passage from Karen Blixen’s ‘Out of Africa’ that eerily mirrored my own experience:

“You have tremendous views as you get up above the African highlands, surprising combinations and changes of light and colouring… The language is short of words for the experience of flying, and will have to invent new words with time. When you have flown over the Rift Valley and the Volcanoes of Suswa and Longenot, you have traveled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon.”

Hyena's and hundred dollar shampoo...

My first gig here in Africa was an unexpected one, fell on my lap. It couldn’t have come, however, at a more inopportune time. I received a call from ‘Mike the Greek’ – owner of Air Excel – while holed up in my hotel room in Dar es Salaam, studying furiously for the commercial pilot conversion exam at the Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority. Well, Mike the Greek was in the midst of a hard target search for any available pilot for his old buddy Charlie, a Yank but third generation Congolese who was flying for the Dubai Royal Family. Though I only had about five days left before my scheduled exam, and it was to be a three to four day affair, I leapt at the chance. One minute I’m buried in study, sweating in the midday Dar heat, whirling fan and Moslem call to prayer, the next it seems, I’m standing on the tarmac at dawn hopping aboard the ‘Twin Otter’ for a flight to a hunting camp in the western region of the Serengeti – Kishwa.

Kishwa was beautiful. Green, rocky, rolling hills. Patches of thick canopy. Leopard country. It the ‘family’s’ personal hunting camp, and was erected from scratch, the three or four times per year that they come on holiday. Built with typical urban infrastructure: sewage and transportation – roads and runways – managed with help from the heavy machinery flown in from Dubai prior to the guests’ arrival.

Now, it may well have been a temporary tent camp, but there were washrooms and hot showers, and it was the first (and most likely last) chance I’ve had to wash my hair with one hundred dollar shampoo, flown in from Harrods’s of London. In the middle of the Serengeti no less. They even had satellites propped up in every corner for all manner of communication, some referred to as ‘repeaters’ that enabled them to use their cell phones to make local Dubai calls.

Our job was to essentially be on call in the event there was a re-supply flight, Medivac, or late night pâté run. Nothing came up during my three days and so I was anxious to earn my keep; I would have washed dishes, dug trenches, whatever. As a pilot, I was deemed a ‘professional’ and was therefore not to lift a finger and was to be taken care of. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I was nothing more than a two-bit thug. So I ate my ‘three hots’ a day in silence and marveled at the exquisite middle-eastern cuisine they were able to fire out of that nondescript tent.

My days were great. Between meals, I would park my chair just outside of the camps perimeter, face the immediate hills of the park and flip through my aeronautical texts. At the times, after a still and prolonged silence, a Thompson’s Gazelle (common in them thar parts) would stray nearby my little outpost. The size of a small dog, they are as lithe and graceful as their larger cousins, just in miniature. They didn’t appear to be as wary of the loud and stinky intruders as I would have guessed.

Nights were something else. 3am the first night I casually stroll out to the white bathroom cubicle sitting behind my tent, tend to my night waters, as per usual, and stroll back. Never does it cross my mind that there, beyond the high grass and firm wall of black, could there be wildlife. In my advancing years, a little restless sleep has all I’ve had to deal with as a consequence for my nocturnal slash. ‘Prey for nocturnal predators’, alongside ‘sleepy at the office’, are not always logically paired. The realization didn’t hit until after I zipped up the flap on my tent and climbed back into my bed. First it was a cacophony of yelps and the patter of dozens of paws trotting around and past my tent. Hyena’s, and loads of them. Cool, but wasn’t I just walking outside, alone and defenseless? A quick and ignoble end – all for a three o’clock squirt. So, if there were Hyena’s, wouldn’t there also be Lion’s? Oh yeah, there were Lions… The series of deep and throaty roars sent my heart a thumpin’, and was made all the more anxious by its seemingly directionless nature, coming from parts unknown in the thick black. But unmistakably immediate.

Those Arabs are an amusing lot, warm and hospitable, as one would imagine, but with a dark and ruthless sense of humour. I, of course, was immensely fond of them. At night around the fire after supper they enjoyed recounting their favourite practical joke they play on the uninitiated. After a day of hunting, a zebra carcass is chained to the back of their tent just before they turn in for the night. It doesn’t take long for the Lions to descend on the bait, thrashing the carcass about, so violently as to bring the tent to the point of collapse. A terrifying ruckus. One poor fellow was found in such a state of shock that a flight out of Kishwa the morning and back to Dubai was warranted. They loved it.

After my brief tour of duty was up, I flew back to Dar and stood my exams. With that regulatory unpleasantness out of the way, my Aussie mate, Skidmark (so nicknamed by the shocking volume of methane he is able to produce, unable to control) and I jumped the catamaran to Zanzibar for a fresh round of job hunting. While there, Congolese Charlie called me again and wanted to know if I was free to help him ferry the aircraft back to Dubai. As luck would have it, I was.

From the Serengeti plains, to the Straight of Hormuz...and back

One of the great adventures of my life, the low-altitude journey began at Kilimanjaro International Airport and took us through Kenya, Ethiopia, an overnight in Djibouti, a crossing of the Gulf of Aden, flight up the length of the Yemeni coast, over the vast expanse of the Omani Desert and then finally into Dubai. Please feel free to follow along at home.

I had to do a double take when the words: “…Mogadishu control…” flew out of my mouth. It dawned on me at that point that I was a long way from 1584 Vernon St.

It isn’t all rollicking adventure and romantic imagery though. The Kenya airways flight back to Nairobi delayed and I missed my connecting flight to Kili. It was at that time that my antibiotics ran out and the fever set in. The next seven hours were spent underneath a discarded newspaper, lying on the concrete floor in some random hallway of Jomo Kenyatta, shaking and burning, with a horribly active and uncooperative intestinal ‘situation’. Not sure what its cause was, perhaps the steak tartar in Djibouti – not one of my better decisions.

Things to do in Arusha when you’re bored…

The first thing one sees upon arrival by air to Arusha, is the caption printed on the face of the control tower welcoming you to the: “…Geneva of Africa…” so named for the ongoing Rwandan war crimes tribunal taking place in town.

What I found so interesting was the fact that the current proceedings are open to the public. On the U.N. website (

http://196.45.185.38/ ) you can find the schedules and the full affidavit for each trial.

Before I moved from Arusha, I managed to observe four sessions of the same trial. The defendant and circumstances I found particularly intriguing. Her name was Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, and what made her case unique was that it was a trial of two firsts: the first time rape had been classified as a crime against humanity, and it was the first time a woman was on trial for acts of genocide. Her case was one of unspeakable horrors.

On April 25th, of 1994, the affidavit contends, with the Hutu’s ethnic cleansing of the Tutsi’s well under way, Miss Nyiramasuhuko acting as the National Minister of Family and Women’s Affairs, ironically, disseminated information around the city of Butare that the Red Cross had set up a safe zone in the local football stadium, to provide food and guaranteed safety. Once assembled within the stadium, she calmly ordered in the local Interahamwe (those who attack together) to butcher the lot of them. However, she made particular care that all of the women were first raped. Consistent with the modus operandi of other Hutu leaders, one solitary survivor was released, albeit horribly disfigured, to serve as a ‘witness to god’. It was this very woman who now testifies against the former minister. In fact, dozens of these similar survivors now live under witness protection in Arusha and continue to be involved in the tribunal, sitting at the core of prosecutions efforts.

After the genocide had run its course and just under a million people had been slaughtered, Miss Nyiramasuhuko slipped quietly into Kenya and lived as a fugitive for three years before being apprehended at a grocery store in Nairobi in 1997.