Flying to Shinyanga

The other day I flew from Dar es Salaam to a place in Northern Tanzania, just south of Lake Victoria. This was my first trip out of the relative luxury of the big city and into the country. I had some ideas on what it would be like and I was a tad apprehensive.

The trip began with an intense search at Julius Narere Airport, an airport with a rather intense level of security. I made it through the front door in my socks and a hand on my pants to keep them up. My belt and shoes, the dangerous weapons that they are, got intensely scanned. On the other hand, no pun intended, my wrist guard with its thick, long metal bottom support was completely ignored! The reason for the wrist guard is a completely different story, suffice to say that my skateboard taught me a new lesson, again.......

Our plane was an old two propeller fifty seater job. Perhaps it should have bothered me but it didn’t. It was old inside and had seen many hard years at work. The carpet scrunched up under my feet as I tried to sit down and instead I managed to fall into my chair. My seat tipped forward and I hung in the balance somewhere between the floor and the seat of the chap behind me. Some clever law of physics intervened and I found my butt squeezing out of the back of the chair due to the base of the seat having shifted forward. It was all rather comfy!

The plane was remarkably efficient and we were airborne within seconds. In other words never judge a book by its cover! And in no time at all, we were approaching the landing strip in Shinyanga. Certainly not an ordinary airport....

For starters the runway was dirt. Now this cannot be something too extraordinary yet this would be my first dirt runway landing. With extraordinary skill the pilot gently touched down and taxied in no time at all to the airport buildings. So much for my fleeting concern about dirt runway landings! Now to describe the airport buildings as ‘buildings’ is perhaps an over statement. There was one solitary building that housed an impressive arrivals hall, about the size of a public toilet. I later found a departures hall that even had its own toilet. Oh yes, and there was a check in desk (just the one) and a security cubicle with just enough room to ensure that you could search the security guard as he searched you. I later heard that this was an impressive building by African standards, a little town called Kahama, to which I was headed, also had an airport and a container for its ‘buildings’!

I took a walk outside, which wasn’t too far seeing as I had only walked five steps since I was inside. I was struck by a beautiful baobab tree. Well not really but it really was beautiful to see this tree in life. With its grotesquely leafless fat limbs at odd angles and a trunk so large that it looked like it had been growing forever.

At long last I had arrived in Africa!

I turned and looked at the outhouse toilets. One for his and one for hers, shaded by a lovely tree. I looked at the solitary plane on the runway, with its one propeller lazily turning as it waiting for its next load of passengers. It would be only fifteen minutes from wheels down to wheels up, not bad for a small airport in the middle of nowhere. I then cast my eyes over the fire control station. The big fire engine looked good. The support vehicle behind it did not look so well with just three of its wheels missing. Perhaps I had missed something as I had just learnt that you should not judge something from the way it looks.

And this is Africa after all!