Jon Snape

It was a few days after Christmas some time in the nineteen eighties, I found myself walking across the tarmac of Nairobi airport toward the bulbous and I must say uninviting shape of a Hercules c130 transport aircraft. Walking up the vehicle loading ramp and eventually into the cavernous and unbearably hot interior. I immediately became aware of the smell of the fuel and hydraulic oil mixed with a unique metallic flavour common to military aircraft.

I tried to not to think about the fact that shortly I would be sealed inside this overheated, ear shattering noisy and odious aluminium tube for nine long hours. The flight was to take me to Cyprus, over the East African plains and the Western Sahara followed by a brief refueling stop and then over the Alps and eventually on to the U.K.

Flying at a relatively low altitude, certainly by commercial standards, I imagined and indeed looked forward to the ever-changing vista unfolding beneath me, The Western Desert followed by the Alps, not something that one can experience everyday. But first I had to force myself into the airless, fume filled interior. The doors were sealed, the intense heat adding to the feeling of claustrophobia. The engines were started, adding noise and vibration to the cocktail of unpleasant sensations, vibration and noise increased as the propellers clawed at the rarified air and in only a few hundred yards the Herky Bird was climbing at a steep angle toward the cooler air above.

We eventually leveled out at an altitude of about twelve thousand feet, not ideal for flying due to turbulence and relatively thick air, almost like flying through syrup! But absolutely ideal for sight-seeing with even the smallest detail on the ground being easily recognisable. Kenya is a beautiful lush green country consisting of open savannah and extensive forest, not to mention the Nairobi National Park with its plethora of exotic wildlife, all laid out for me to witness in just a couple of hours. One of the first things that I noticed was the wildlife, or should I say the lack of it. I was so looking forward to seeing Basil Fawltys, “herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain” I was so disappointed, it must have been their day off or something, not so much as a Wombat! which I guess is understandable. (Please don’t send me E mails about antipodean marsupial wildlife). The emerald greenery of Kenya eventually gave way to the more arid hues of Southern Ethiopia, again apparently no wildlife, but lots of cows, cows everywhere, not in herds but singly or in twos or threes, I’ve never seen so many brown cows in my life. Occasionally a few would burst into life running away from the sound of our engines as we rushed northward toward the Sudan.

Nearing the half way point it was time to break out the “in flight meal”, this consisted of a brown paper bag containing an apple two large cheese sandwiches and a carton of orange juice, one of those cartons with a pull off straw that you have to stab into a hole in the top, it had a picture of an orange “Mr. Man” on it… One of the guys said, “this cheese looks like orangey, red plastic.. What does it taste like”?…. Someone else crackled over the intercom, ”orangey, red plastic”! Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with military food, until the cooks get their hands on it. At about this point I noticed that my “orangey red plastic” cheese sandwich was exactly the same colour as the Sudan. Could have been what one imagined a Martian landscape to be, somehow hostile, someway to our left lay Khartoum the capital. Couldn’t help thinking of General Gordan’s defeat, or at least reading about it when I was a lad. Another failed imperial adventure, nothing ever changes. We had been made aware of the fact that some Sudanese have a habit of taking a pot shot at anything they fancy, and I’m not talking about the ancient Bedouin rifle variety, we were to high for that. What we had on our minds was the overenthusiastic individual armed with a second-hand Soviet SAM launcher, and bearing in mind that anything coming at us would come from below.. With buttocks firmly clenched, we thundered toward the northern border with Egypt.