MARCH 21 AND 22, 2016: TAMPA TO NAIROBI
Penzance and its pirates are way below, along our first
landfall in Europe. Up here, 7 hours into our flight to Frankfort, folded into
steerage on this Lufthansa silver suppository, I stare down at my ‘special meal’, Hindu
vegetarian, garbanzos rolling around in a sea of dispirited spinach. To my right
is a South Asian family, bound for Bangalore, mama in jeans and tee shirt,
Grand mama wrapped in yards of bright flowers flowing over her sari. They are
Hindu, but clearly not vegetarian. My drooling and covetous glances at
their bacon and eggs are not returned.
They are busy, bacon and eggs making a perilous arabesque
journey to the moving target of a hyperactive 2-year-old. He is cute, big eyed
and wide smiled, with cappuccino skin and eye lashes worthy of a mature
giraffe. His Olympian lungs and megaphonic vocal cords suggest that aspirations
to the opera stage, or hog calling, may be in his future. He has been
practicing his operatic aria of discontent much of the night. Still, cuteness
counts, and he wins my vote.
The flight over the Atlantic has been worthy of Bette Davis:
‘fasten your seat belts, it’s gonna be a bumpy night’. And it is...In two
languages. Frankfort airport however is smooth, but complex and long going, up,
down, and around, on terrazzo floors, escalators, a tram and through super
vigilant security. I wince in sympathy as a most polite Herr Efficiency
confiscates รข bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label from the disbelieving guy in
front of me and pours it away. Our two-hour connection time, with no checked
luggage to reclaim, is enough. Just
Frankfort Airport is a connection hub for the world, a Star
Wars speakeasy of variety. A tall Middle Eastern man lopes by in full floor
length robe, and accessorized with the universals of the young: backpack, and
baseball cap, brim to the back. There are many women with head scarves. Are
these refugees from the torment raging to the south and east? A suited man in
his seventies gently drapes a fake fur coat and a thick towel over his prone
wife, spread over several chairs, gently arranges a pillow on her purse for her
head and pats her shoulder before walking off. She pulls her red head scarf
over her eyes. Their Aldi supermarket carry on bag says ‘it’s all about
saving green’. She sleeps.
Improbably dressed travelers, often twanging in the accents
of our side of The Pond, flap by in various versions of Fashions by
Trump: loud, vulgar, rude, tasteless, insensitive.
There are a few Black African faces waiting for Nairobi. The
soft cadence and rippling consonants of Africa’s contributions to the sounds of
English are aural massages softening the visual cacophony. I am so ready for
Africa.
Flying over Dubrovnik with Tirana, Albania ahead. I wonder
if Albanians know that their most famous export, Mother Theresa, is now a
saint? Is she Saint Mother, Saint Theresa…of which there are several already
cluttering up the pantheon-- -or Saint Whatever Her Birth Name Was? The burdens
of beatification are many.
Special Hindu Vegetarian lunch, SHVL on the aluminum foil
cover, is anything but S, verging on the awful, skirting indigestibility, messy
to manage with the arms-tight-to-the-sides gymnastics required on this anorexic
and ancient tunnel, Lufthansa flight 0590. It has been eons since I last flew between
continents in seats arranged in 2 narrow rows of three. My padded perch on the
aisle is cramped and a bit dangerous. Overhanging left arms are helpless
targets for the food and beverage behemoths plying the string like aisles.
There’s no relief to my right. Wedged in the middle seat is an expansive
testimony to the power of a Beer, Broth und Bratwurst diet and to protoplasm’s
ability to flow outward. He’s nice but he does balloon. And snore.
I constrict, cover my eyes and sleep. I awake with 1700
miles to go. On the screen is a landscape devoid of landmarks: southern Egypt
from 37,000 feet. We cross the Nile and Lake Nasser. I remember sailing
silently for days on these green swaths through the buff sand. Two days ago I made
my final crossing of the stage as a guard of pharaohs in Verdi’s fictional
Egypt. Now I’m 7 miles above the real thing.
Later, we’re over Sudan and I see the great ‘S’ where the
Nile curves back on itself. Somewhere down there is Napata, a crucial spot in
Verdi’s melodic version of Egypt. That may have been true in fact as well. If
so, its importance has been diminished by the millennia. We camped there 3
years ago, near stone pillars asleep, like us, in the sands.
Now, we’re above Khartoum, Sudan. The label on the screen is
unnecessary. You can’t miss the spot where the White Nile, flowing northward
from Its source in Uganda meets the Blue Nile rushing northwestward and
downward from its source in the mountains of Ethiopia. We’ve been to both
birthplaces and to their meeting in Khartoum, swirls of currents mixing
water of two colors (shades of muddy, neither being white or blue) into the one
Nile. That day we saw a man draw a great fish into his log canoe from just at
the very spot where the Nile is born. I doubt he cared whether the fish was
spawned in Uganda or Ethiopia.
Most of the fertile silt that the Nile deposits in Egypt,
and which has made life in Egypt’s desert possible for millennia, comes from
the Blue Nile as its scours the mountains of Ethiopia. And, therein lie the
roots of a serious geopolitical problem. Ethiopia wants to dam the Blue Nile to
extract hydroelectric power. Dams prevent the silt from reaching Egypt.
Stalemate.
Ethiopia, quite possibly the birthplace of humankind 6
million years ago, is also the birthplace of Egypt. We will return there in 5
days.
A view from 7 miles above suffices for now. We’re skirting Ethiopia’s
western border. Green is overtaking dust. It rains here. Sometimes. For
the first time Ethiopian place names are on the screen. Lake Tana, source of
the Blue Nile is a smudge on the screen’s horizon.
Africa is huge. We’ve been flying for 7 hours, most of it
over Africa. Nairobi is an hour and a half and 800 miles to the south. Several
hours beyond that is South Africa, and beyond that, Cape of Good Hope, where
Africa dips its toes into the southern oceans.
Dry sands reappear, conquering the green, then we see the
blue of one of Africa ’s sublime immense lakes, water-filled rents of the Rift
Valley.
As we drop closer to Nairobi and the dreaded festivities
associated with entry procedures in Africa, my elegant Lufthansa plastic water
cup cracks as I drink. There’s hardly enough space for water to flow in this
plane, but flow it does, down into my shirt, over my passport and 3 of the 4
forms required to enter Kenya. The passport shrugs. The forms shrivel. Fortunately,
no one collects them and we pass muster at the visa counter. Fifty dollars
poorer, we walk into Africa.
Our driver is not there, but we expect to wait. Nairobi
traffic is horrendous. We chat with a young guy from Tampa here to do some
volunteer work with his doctor girlfriend. In due time our driver arrives.
The delicate and soft spoken Joseph was of course caught in traffic and
then in the parking mess common here. He charms us with a radiant smile and a
gentle welcome. Karibu, welcome, he says, and one of my few Swahili words
surfaces: asante, thank you.
We are in Africa.
Asante.
