January 13th: Nairobi
Through flooded side-streets pitted with potholes and scarred with ditches and ruts, our driver forges through the outskirts of Nairobi, a slow, grinding drive in traffic that barely moves. Cars wallow in the streets. Rain falls. Exhaust rises. People go about their lives in the deluge, walking on the muddy banks of the road, or working in the rows of shops alongside like blasted burrows made of tin and cement with metal and machinery spilling out into the mud, or working under battered cars or on the guts of mopeds in muddy lots, and all along the roads and the ragged buildings are carts and wooden stalls where people stand stoic in the rain and sell their wares to those walking by or to others simply sitting on the roadside. This is Nairobi’s morning commute, and for most people it is on foot.
It is about twenty-two degrees but people are dressed in jackets, frayed and wet. Women walk to work, proud, with bright cloth wrapped around their bodies, talking and laughing.
The weather clears while we are at the hangar for the static display of the aircraft. It is busy. Representatives are there from the Kenyan Police and border patrol as well as journalists and business people from Nairobi. I’m introduced to a pilot from the Kenyan Police who will fly in the copilot’s seat with me for the demonstration flight. I’m happy to have somebody along with local knowledge of all the unpublished VFR arrival and departure routes. He suggests we fly to the southwest and operate in the vicinity of Magadi Lake.
The low overcast and lingering thundershowers of morning have dissipated by afternoon. Clear skies arch across the wet green of the savanna as we take off and follow the climbing terrain to the south, towards a monastery, passing five hundred feet above houses and buildings until we clear the flank of a ridge, leaving the control zone as the ground drops away from us into the Rift Valley. This time of year the scrub is green from rain, vivid, and thick everywhere. The seasonal lakes have filled and lie dotted across the valley, shallow and irregular patches of water.
We are not far from Olduvai Gorge where Louis and Mary Leakey discovered the fossilized remains of hominids dating back nearly two-million years and established Africa as the birthplace of our species. It is from here that humanity embarked on countless journeys of exploration. Here I have come to begin my journey around Africa.
At three thousand feet over the Rift Valley I pull the power back and select ten degrees of flap. The aircraft flies stably at eighty knots while Mick demonstrates the EO/IR camera to the passengers. We fly over a grass strip and Mick locks on to a Cessna circling to inspect it and the camera follows as it sets up an approach and lands. He zooms in on goats in a pen amongst houses clustered on the lakeshore. We loiter over the lake and a salt mine. The tin sides of the plant stand angular and misshapen on a slender spit of sand amid the sharp angles and dull metal of machinery on the shore like the castoff carapaces of deformed monstrosities clambered from the shallows. The lake shore a white glaze brilliant in the afternoon sun.
January 14th
We fly to Zanzibar for a day off. Heat smothers the island like something malevolent bent on its destruction and eager to consume it.
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