No Stars on the Perimeter

January 17th: Livingstone to Rundu to Lubango to Luanda

Northern Namibia is a desolation of arid scrub that crawls across the verge of the Kalahari Desert. We stop in Rundu for fuel, the airport an abandoned patch of busted asphalt with no apron, no tower, no controller and no traffic. Fuel is brought in a tank on a crude trailer towed by a tractor.

The high plateau of the continent continues to rise as we leave Namibia and fly north through Angola to Lubango, where we make a tech stop at fifty-seven-hundred feet of elevation and take off heavy with fuel, the power levers firewalled and the aircraft staggering airborne as the engines wheeze, sucking the hot thin air at high density altitude, the temperature nearly thirty degrees even in the rarified air of these high, expansive plains, green and broken by the backs of lone mountains and ridges rising even higher in their refulgent isolation.

We have gone far enough now that I am amazed by how smoothly things have gone, especially all the tech stops. The stories of having to pay bribes to get the fuel truck to show up or a stamp in your passport seem to be myths. At least I hope they are, as we have a lot of ground to cover yet. But in nearly every location the fuel truck is waiting for us and we are greeted by grinning handlers that give us their names and shake our hands and ask questions about our strange aircraft and our unbelievable voyage.

In Angola, the people speak Portuguese, a reminder of the patchwork colonial legacy into which we are headed on the west coast. Soon Christophe’s French fluency will become very useful.

Radar seems to be a rarity in Africa and it is notably absent on approach into Luanda, a large airport in the middle of what was once an African Communist stronghold. We are back to radials and DME reports as the controller blindly coordinates traffic, bringing us in behind a 777. As we are driven through town to our hotel, the legacy of communism and the civil war which ravaged the country from 1975 until 2002 are as apparent as the anachronistic air traffic control. The battered shells of ex-communist tenement blocks stare vacuously down upon the crumbling streets, caged storefronts, and squalor in the ring of urban disarray at the perimeter of a more modern downtown core, which we never get to.

Out hotel is sunken in this bleak perimeter and when we get out of the transport the handler shoos kids away, swarming, begging, and insistent, as we drag our suitcases across broken concrete to the front door and into the lobby. Check-in takes over an hour. Nothing works. Payment is impossible and must be covered by the handler. Meanwhile we make multiple trips up and down the tiny elevator with keycards that are duds.

Konstantin finds a Portuguese restaurant online that has great reviews and we decide to brave the four blocks through the dark and derelict streets on foot. I haven’t felt this level of latent menace since I wandered into the wrong part of town in La Ceiba, Honduras over twenty years ago. All eyes are on us and the starless night is ragged and wrapped around tortured mortar and trash and carts laden with fruit alongside the uneven sidewalk gaping with legbreaker holes. Scrawny dogs slink with their tails between their legs. Horns honk. The pavement is black and stained with oil.

We go the wrong way and end up on the wrong side of the block. Some men sit in the murk and answer our questions, giving us directions with impassive faces. When we find the restaurant, it is buried up back alleys and dirt lots, ensconced at the epicenter of the block. The place has a large outdoor patio and a bar inside and is almost empty, but we are told they don’t have a table for us. Everything is reserved. We are eventually seated on the condition that we leave by nine-thirty and we soon see why as expats start streaming into the place. They step out of cars driven by hired drivers, safely delivered to the front door. It is quickly full and I wonder who these people are and what they are doing here. Later, I google “expats in Luanda” and find stories of muggings and cloistered communities in walled compounds and luxury hotels. Angola is one of the most expensive places for expats to live in the world.

Barbequed meat, dripping, hangs vertically on steel spits hung in the center of the table.