Hayestack

Sunday melted into Monday as we flew above the clouds over Eastern Europe, Turkey and Iran towards our change at Dubai.Miss Potter entertained us as did the seemingly endless flow of food and drink which stopped thinking that we were in a huge chunk of metal weighing hundreds, if not thousands of tonnes, flying 36,000 feet above the earth’s surface, supported by nothing more than air and trying to defy the inexorable pull of gravity.

It’s good how you can choose your own film/game/music entertainment on your own monitor.  And, you don’t need a twelve year old computer geek to explain the controls.  Good job, since there weren’t any around.  Georgina sussed the controls, no problem.  After the film she started to play computer “Patience”.  She’s good at it having been married to me for yonks.*  William Wilberfororce and his “Amazing Grace” proved too taxing for my exhausted brain and I gave up after about ten minutes.  It was a shame because the small bald man with the continuously shocked expression (some Duke or other) was turning out to be quite amusing.

I defy anyone to sleep comfortably in an aeroplane seat (economy, that is).  The back is too upright.  It reclines about 2 inches, max.  I lean this way and then that.  I stick my leg out to the left and nearly trip up an old woman going to the toilet.  I stick out my leg to the right and kick Georgina in the shins.  I feel hunched up and can’t breathe.  I throw my arms over my head.  I still can’t breathe.   Maybe, if I lie in the aisle….?  Three hours later I wake up….still breathing, just in time for breakfast.  It’s funny how a tiny omelette with an even smaller piece of bacon and a cocktail sausage leave you thinking you’ve just had a full sized meal

There was a camera at the nose of the plane which allowed you to see take-offs & landings from the pilot’s point of view.  You could not only feel the wheels hitting the runway and bouncing up and down for five minutes and the swerving off the white line.  You could see it too. More white-haired passengers got off the plane than had got on.

When you leave the plane at Dubai the wall of heat smacks you in the face.  You could cook an egg on the tarmac.  Actually,  my omelet had tasted slightly strange.  The inside of Dubai airport looked curiously familiar.  Then it clicked.  It was Lakeside Shopping Mall.  The shops and shiny floors were the same.  The chromes and plastics were the same.  The ethnic mix with the occasional burqa was the same.  Even the queues at the women’s restrooms were the same.  We said goodbye to Dubai and, after a quick stop at Addis Ababa we landed at Entebbe Airport, Uganda.  Have you ever tried skimming a smooth pebble over a lake to see how many times you can make it bounce?  I swear our pilot was doing that with our plane ever time we landed.

The entertainment at baggage reclaim was watching an Alsatian dog clamber over the bags as they made their way over the moving belt.  If its job was to knock every tenth bag onto the floor, it did it well.  It didn’t find any drugs and its handler seemed indifferent anyway.

Isn’t it good to be met at an airport, especially if you don’t know the place, the people or their customs?  What a relief to find Moses with his car waiting for us.  And there were monkeys roaming wild.  This was Africa.  We had arrived.

Tags: 10 Days in Uganda, Georgina, monkey, shopping

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 7:45 am and is filed under Uganda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.