Kelli’s African Odyssey, Book 1: Expeditious Travel

[This entry was written on the first of the many flights it took to get from Nouakchott to Kigali.]

So, I’m on the way to Kigali via Casablanca, Dubai, and Mombasa, Kenya. The adventure continues. Getting to the airport in Nouakchott and through check-in & security was a breeze, thanks to the friendly embassy expediter. I think I need to hire one of these guys full time, to just move slightly ahead of me and deal with any obstacles that present themselves. It’s fantastic.

Anyway, the driver picked me up dark and early (and after only about 4 hours of sleep due to a late dinner the night before, boy, did I feel it!), then proceeded to a hotel to collect 2 coast guard guys who were also on my flight, having spent the last week working in Nouadhibou, a town a few hours north of Nouakchott. Upon arrival at the airport, we met the expediter, who helped the 3 of us navigate the airport, something we probably could have handled, but at 5 am on 4 hours of sleep, it was nice to have an expert to whisk us through. (Also, the expediter helped me get the check-in guy to check my bags all the way through to Kigali so I wouldn’t have to pick them up and re-check them in at any point along the route. This made a huge difference in my level of happiness throughout the journey!) So, my bags were checked through, although I’m putting the odds of them both arriving at the same time I do at about 20%. That’s a lot of airports to get through.

Anyway, everything went well at the airport, then my new coast guard compatriots kept me entertained with increasingly wacky/bawdy/borderline inappropriate tales of their time in the service while we waited to get on the plane. After about an hour and some considerable confusion over which line to get in to board the place to Casablanca and not the one going to Brazzaville (there were no announcements and both flights were boarding through the same doorway, so it basically amounted to walking out onto the tarmac and picking the plane that said “Royal Air Maroc” on the side in big letters), we figured it out and took off pretty much close to on time.

Taking off from Nouakchott was incredible. I didn’t have a window seat on the flight in, so I didn’t fully appreciate the scale of Nouakchott, dwarfed in comparison to the vast desert surrounding it, but holy cow! The city all of a sudden just dead ends into a massive expanse of nothing but sand. It’s kind of eerie. Unfortunately my camera was stuck in the overhead bin so I didn’t take a picture, but the juxtaposition of the tiny city and the gigantic desert is really remarkable. It truly gives you an appreciation for just how remote many places are! Later, I did get this one of the mountains as we flew over Morocco.

And this is a shot over the desert – the plane window wasn’t really clear, but the colors are sand, ocean and sky. That was it for most of the way between Nouakchott and Casablanca.

So the journey has just begun. As Frost would say, I have miles to go before I sleep – literally. When I get to Kigali, I will have traveled about 9,300 miles, more than twice as far as the actual distance between the two cities! But things are off to a good start, and getting better – there’s a coffee cart coming up the aisle! Yay!