One of the great things about travel is that things happen and then you have time to think. Most times in life there is nothing happening and too much time to think or there is too much happening and no time to think about it. Travel interrupts our emotional and mental habits through unusual states of exhaustion, rest, loneliness, new acquaintances, and new experiences. And it enforces periods of thought between events as we move from one place to another.
Well, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean with my altered emotional/mental state and plenty of time to think, it struck me that I am doing something crazy and only just now realized it. I was trying to remember why I, of all people, was on that plane flying across the Atlantic. And the only reasons I could think of were ridiculous to the point of insanity. I don't know anyone who's done this and I don't know anyone who thought it was a good idea until I sort of sold them on it. And the only ones who think it is a good idea are the people I would describe (affectionately) as those who are crazy enough to trust my judgment and hope for something that has never really happened before – honest, clean, just African government. What we are doing here is probably vaguely akin to going outside at night and flailing in the sky with a ladle trying to scoop up a dipper full of moon dust. It's just not supposed to be possible. And if there is a person who could do it, that person would look very different from me.
These thoughts were tumbling around my head as I drifted past Spain, over France, into Rome, and through various stages of consciousness. I woke up somewhere near Sudan, stared out the window in the dawn twilight and realized a few things. 1) Being crazy is scary but also kind of fun. 2) There is a really big desert in Africa and, even when you are flying fast, it takes a long time to get across. 3) There is a really big river that runs plumb through the really big desert. This is a strange thing – so strange that one guy died arguing about where it came from and many others died trying to find out.
As a matter of fact, the river is so strange and people wanted to know where it came from so badly they sent this Scottish guy to sort it all out. He went over and walked around looking until he died – and he took a long time to die. People went over and walked around trying to find the Scottish guy. A lot of people died trying to find out if the Scottish guy died trying to find out where the big river came from. After the Scottish guy died, they took his heart out and buried it. Then they carried the rest of him 1500 miles to the sea. From there they took him by ship for a few thousand miles and buried what was left under the floor of this really old church in England. (In case you ever want to find it, his grave is in the nave.)
That big river in the big desert has caused a lot of trouble. But when I looked it was perfectly peaceful and just as strange as ever.
More practically though, my plane was late and the connecting flight only leaves once a day. That meant that, at 10:30 Saturday morning I was left alone for the day to roam the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Ethiopia's queen of Sheba once went to visit King Solomon to see his riches and hear his wisdom. She was really impressed. She gave him gifts and, according to lore, he left her with the makings of a crown-prince that carried his genes, establishing a Solomonic dynasty in Ethiopia. And just to remind me about it, Ethiopian Airlines let me sign up for their "Sheba Miles" program so that I can someday get a free flight if I stay crazy and keep doing stuff like this.
Ethiopia claims to be where the first people lived and to be the only African nation that never fell under European control. It ranks just behind Cambodia for democratic government and is considered to be on a scale somewhere between a "flawed democracy" and an "authoritarian regime".
Ethiopia is poor. They have 78 million people living on a mountainous corner of the Big Desert. But the thing that struck me in my cursory observation is that there are shanty-towns scattered throughout the heart of the capital city. One of the main palaces has an over-crowded section of tiny, odd-shaped, tin-roofed shacks for its next-door neighbor. All the poor nations' capital cities I have seen or heard of are "sanitized" so that you have to go to their outskirts or even leave the area to find people living in dire poverty. Addis Ababa is the opposite and this gave me cause for a good deal of thought.
Okay, it wasn't precisely true when I said I was left "alone" in Addis. I was actually left in the same situation as a lively college student who was bound for Malawi to spend the winter mini-term doing AIDS education. We walked around together heroically staying awake and seeing a city we'd never really thought of seeing and, in my case, never really thought of at all. We sorted out the hotel's quirky elevator, discovered that the fire escape on the 10th floor makes a great overlook, and sat at the roof-top restaurant listening to the "people noise" on the street and watching the rolling blackouts sweep the city below. We even got "swept" a couple of times.
Someone was supposed to meet me at the Lilongwe airport, but a tire had been slashed on the pickup and people don't repair tires on Sunday. So I sat there until some formerly-Rhodesian mzungus took pity on me and gave me a ride home. They even gave me some free advice on traveling by road through Zambia. When we got home, a new guard took a look at me and my escorts and refused to let us in. Several minutes went by while we got impatient and the guard took his time trying to find someone who could verify that I was safe. There's nothing quite like coming home after a 4-day journey and being faced with a brick wall, an electric fence, a stranger, and a locked gate. They finally let us in.
Who knew so much could happen on a simple trip from DC to Lilongwe?
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