The city stirred before dawn. I wandered through the back alleys surrounding the massive open-air market where Ethiopians, Somalis, and Arabs struggle to eke out a meagre living in a world of sellers with no buyers. Men sat cross-legged, pencil thin, behind piles of wood, corrugated iron, hardware, electrical supplies, pots and pans, and plastic trinkets. Women with carefully arranged pyramids of oranges, dates, limes, spices, and nuts; colours and shapes, designed to appeal, were crammed into ridiculously small stalls. Liquid doelike eyes peered out from above the ubiquitous veils. The market sprawled as far as the eye could see, a teeming mass of humanity.
A soft rain fell, turning the red earth into rivers of mud. I tracked through the slippery narrow passages between stalls, surveying the array of goods on offer. Vendors silently endured the trickle of water dripping from old umbrellas and bits of plastic covering their wares. The lack of buyers said it all. Djibouti is a small and desperate world on its own, forgotten by its former colonial masters, the French—a country no longer of use or concern to the world.
My ancient Renault taxi sloshed along the main road to the airport. The car’s radio wailed Arabic songs, while beads and pompoms hanging from the mirror danced drunkenly across the driver’s line of vision. As the car pulled up under a regal line of tall and graceful doum palm trees fronting the Djibouti Airport, rainwater spurted from the open crevices of the old cement building. Pools of brown muddy water swirled over the murram (mud) road into swollen ditches. The humid air was suffocating. I was anxious to leave Djibouti, to be airborne again.
The airport administration office was cluttered with files, damp and smelling of mildew. Two soldiers slouched in swivel chairs, smoking and talking, guns across their thighs. They eyed me vacantly as I tried to open one locked door after another in an attempt to reach my plane. Unhelpful and sullen, they shrugged their shoulders at my inquiries. “Le capitaine vient bientôt. Il faut l’attendre.” I settled down to wait.
It took self-discipline and patience to wait three-quarters of an hour for the captain’s arrival. Eventually, a pompous little man with short-cropped hair and a self-important moustache burst through the door and strode directly into his office, without glancing to either side. Five minutes later, unable to contain myself any longer, I knocked on his door and requested a clearance to fly to Nairobi. I was informed he had important business to attend to and that I must wait. Fuming, I returned to my seat, contemplating revenge. Twenty minutes passed without development.
Two Swedish pilots and a Canadian Forces lieutenant joined the queue. The Swedes, flying a King Air, were on their way to Mogadishu, while the Canadian was attempting to make arrangements for refuelling a Hercules 130 that was due to land later that day. I now understood why pilots hated flying into Djibouti, wrestling with police, immigration, and airport officials. The four of us decided to join forces and take the captain on.
We marched into his office, refusing to leave until he processed our clearances. He immediately called for his soldiers, who shambled in through the door and appeared startled by the apoplectic look on their captain’s face. We stood our ground, refusing to leave. The captain’s options were limited; he could shoot us or find some face-saving compromise. Finally, he assigned one of his illiterate soldiers to our needs, so that he might continue with important military matters. We ended up processing the forms ourselves.
On the ramp, I discovered a fuel cap was missing and my wing tanks had been drained of fuel. In a fury, I returned to remonstrate with the captain, who smiled with enormous satisfaction at my misfortune. He took great delight in directing me to the east-side hangar where I could buy replacement fuel, pumped from unsealed drums at a cost of $1.75 a litre—more than three times the cost of fuel in Luxor. I was probably repurchasing my own fuel, but I had no choice but to pay the price and cast a special curse on Djibouti.
Shortly after takeoff I was instructed to fly at flight level 140 (fourteen thousand feet), as high as the plane, fully loaded, could climb. I circled for an hour before reaching my designated altitude; anything lower was not permissible south of Djibouti under instrument flight rules. I soon understood why as I caught a glimpse of the mountainous terrain through broken cloud less than four thousand feet below me.
The Ethiopian mountains rose in spectacular ridges up to ten thousand feet from sea level along that section and I was amazed to see telltale signs of cultivation on their upper reaches, almost always in cloud. What kind of people lived at those high altitudes?
The same impenetrable terrain was traversed by Sir Charles Napier, the British general, with an army of thirty-two thousand men in 1868. Under Queen Victoria’s directive, General Napier had been sent to defeat Emperor Theodore, the Abyssinian warrior king, whose outrageous defiance of the British Empire and her Sovereign Queen was considered intolerable. General Napier’s trek, complete with fifty-five thousand animals, including elephants shipped from India, took him across those mountain ridges below me, surely some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain.
A British emissary, Charles Cameron, held hostage by Emperor Theodore for five years, was the casus belli for that incredible expedition. Napier’s route from the coastal town of Magdala into central Ethiopia took almost six months, but the battle that followed lasted less than twenty minutes. Emperor Theodore lost the battle, his kingdom, and his life. The British recovered their emissary, their honour, and their reputation, leaving Ethiopia to sort out its own future through tribal warfare and natural anarchy—at a time before airplanes had even been invented.
At Mandera I flew into Kenyan airspace. After ten hours of flying I was closing in on my destination. Shards of sunlight pierced the towering clouds of cotton wool. The ground fell away from the mountains into forest clearings, spotted with thatched makutis (roofs) and the smoke of cooking fires whose wisps of smoke curled into the bluish haze of an African sky. The number of settlements multiplied, laced by red earthen paths through a patchwork of small farms with their bomas (thorn-bush corrals for herding goats). Corrugated tin roofs glinted in the sunlight, through the emerald-green baize of tea and coffee plantations. In the distance, the city of Nairobi rose faint against the murk of a polluted skyline. My heart beat faster.
The instrument approach into Wilson Airport, the smaller of the two airports servicing Nairobi, is linked to that of the larger, Kenyatta International Airport. Instructions on the approach plate for landing are confusing: midway through the procedure for Kenyatta Airport, the pilot is expected to break away and enter the approach for Wilson Airport—a most unusual arrangement and a lot to ask of a pilot after ten hours of flying at fourteen thousand feet.
My head ached from dehydration and the lack of oxygen. I had to rely on the controller’s limited patience as I stumbled through his instructions and eventually touched down on Wilson Airport’s Runway 07. I taxied the length of the field, crossed Runway 14 and pulled up in front of the Flying Doctors Service hangar.
A number of Flying Doctors Service pilots had gathered outside the hangar to watch as I cut the engine and swung out of the cockpit. Tousled, dirty, and lacking in sleep I could hardly make my legs work as they were stiffened from so many hours of flying. I approached the pilots, who were waiting at a respectful distance from the plane. So this was the consultant, come to help reorganize the Flying Doctors Service. At least they were impressed by my having flown from North America to Africa in a single-engine plane. That was a good start.
We shook hands and, after a brief discussion, I informed them that I needed food and sleep; their questions would have to wait for morning. They understood, offered to place my plane in the hangar, and helped me call a cab.
As the taxi careered and swayed along Milimani Road towards the city, my driver, who introduced himself as Michael, talked nonstop. He persuaded me to stay at the Nairobi Club, a perfect club for a gentleman from Canada, he claimed. He would vouch for it and for