Annals of Travel: Dubai to Entebbe Journal
Aug 18 On the Airplane
Long flights over huge bodies of water or land prompt one to think that being kind to oneself at my advanced age would be a good idea, including going Business Class. I’m in business class to Uganda, which is the only reasonable choice. I was thinking that I never go biz class, but in fact I took Economy Plus on Air New Zealand in 2012, which was the equivalent of biz (including price), and it was great; and I took First Class using miles on United from Hong Kong to SFO the next year. This time, the seats flattened out to make a real, if narrow, bed. There’s a lounge where you can sit and do yoga in the wee hours of the morning (well, I did it only when no one was around or paying attention), or hang around the bar standing and chatting with the other passengers and flight attendants.
Last night, hanging around with these guys in the bar who were drinking wine and eating salted nuts, I got into conversation with a man who lives in Grass Valley, works for Shell Oil, and goes to Basra every 28 days for 28 days, then back to Grass Valley for 28 days. Apparently oil and gas come out of the ground mixed together. All oil companies, the man said, recover that gas if they can. Sometimes oil companies will set the gas on fire instead of recover it if it looks as if there is too much buildup of pressure or something like that and they need to get rid of the gas quickly. These are called flares, and he was going to show me some pictures but didn’t find them on his iphone. But in oil rich places like Iraq the natural gas is burned off as waste because the oil is the target resource. Apparently the gas burns dirty, or if not burned drifts over to Kuwait and kills Kuwaitis, so it seemed the Iraqis did see it as a problem. The Iraqis don’t have the infrastructure to capture the gas, although it is a valuable resource and in addition the Kuwaitis complain when they are not dead. So Shell made a 30 year contract with the Iraqi government to build the infrastructure and recover the gas—Shell will make the investment in infrastructure and for thirty years own the gas they recover. But it seems that the Iraqi government is in charge of actually selling the gas on the open market (I asked where it went, where it was sold, and that’s what he said), and Shell has trouble getting paid. In any case, the operation is on a scale I cannot even imagine – the capital sunk into machinery and labor with expertise, the knowledge of how to deal with this stuff, the negotiations between companies and governments, the transformation the landscape and humanscape.
He showed lots of other pictures in the absence of pictures of flares (I think he said that you could see them in satellite pictures) – older bunkers, shells and rockets that didn’t go off or did and were spent, dust, a devastated landscape, buildings that look bleak and war-weary, jeeps with tidy rows of guns in the back for security, parked there by the guards if the compound they enter doesn’t allow them to take guns inside. He lives in a compound he calls a “reverse prison,” with security towers and guards built into the walls (pictures to illustrate). He showed a photo of his very modest room, which looked like a small austere room for something military—a bed, a table, a TV; and of the bathroom, which was tiny, but seemed to have a low-flow toilet (I pointed out). I commented on the scale of the operation and said I couldn’t imagine it, and we talked about how grim the place looked. He said that even in the 20s and 30s, Basra was a garden space, and the best European doctors were there, and Europeans went there for holidays. He obviously feels it. He must be making good money to tolerate it. He’s been on that schedule –28 days in Basra and Grass Valley, alternating—for several years, and he just signed a contract for another three years. He looked well into his forties. He’s a pretty crucial technical person – but my guess is quite low level and hands-on, but well paid for a tech job; he said he is a “corrosion engineer,” and he can make rust stop by reversing the ions, or something like that. He went to school for five years, paid for by Shell, to be certified by the National Association of Corrosion Engineers or some such.
My other long interview was with a flight attendant. It’s a diverse group – people who appear to be of Chinese descent, and Indian, and Arabic, though Theresa grew up in Bristol and has a fiancé in Dubai. The passengers, too, are mainly Indian (though perhaps living in Dubai, didn’t interview them, just played with a sweet 3 month old baby), American, South African, so far as I can tell. I asked Theresa about how you are assigned to business class as a flight attendant. It’s extremely hierarchical, as you make your way through and up the classes. Rookies serve in Economy and check in last and out last – purely through seniority. They are supervised fairly closely. It takes about 2 years of service before you can apply to be in Biz class, and of course you are evaluated after every flight. She, Theresa, is applying to be in First Class. I asked about the organization of getting the food, the purser, etc. etc., and each flight has a “senior” attendant to supervise everyone, but each person is responsible for making sure she has enough supplies etc. It’s the caterer’s job to get the right amount of things supplied- but then each attendant must do her own checking.
It’s clear that in Biz class they are supposed to be pleasant to the passengers. Last night a younger attendant begged Theresa to teach her how to make paper carnations out of napkins and straws, a craft for which Theresa is apparently famous in her circles, and indeed three of them were sprouting out of an empty wine bottle on the counter. I joined in the lesson, of course, and I shall try to teach the children of Kasese this craft, but I wonder about their supplies. I think of the joke from the Depression, “If I had some ham, I’d eat some ham and eggs, if I had some eggs.” If they have some napkins, I’ll teach them to make carnations out of napkins and drinking straws, if they have any straws.
We flew over Greenland and over Russia and the Ukraine in a grand arc. Looking at the map, I see how that plane could have been shot over the Ukraine a year or two ago. I presume it is partly due to the curvature of the earth, but Theresa said it was also more efficient due to the prevailing winds.
Prevailing winds! Who would have thought that a giant aircraft in the twenty-first century would be influenced by prevailing winds! I thought of Malacca and the fact that it was an entrepot. It was on the Strait of Malacca, both narrow and shallow, and the only convenient entrance from points west of it (the Levant, Europe) into the South China Sea. But it was an entrepot because for six months of the year, the wind blows in one direction, and for the other six months, in the other. So it was perfect for boats coming from two directions to meet, exchange products, hang out until the wind changed, and then go back from whence they came. That’s in the 16th century and on for Europeans, earlier for Muslim traders. The point is, in spite of mind boggling technology, planes still fly so they are aided by the winds, and oil companies constantly fight against the elements to keep soot from drifting and pipes from corroding.
And they couldn’t really organize the airplane without the strict hierarchy and assigning carefully specific duties to each role and enforcing them with clarity. Planes are just like boats. I used to wonder why sea captains and even boat captains tend to be such martinets, until, many years ago, I took sailing lessons. It turns out there is only one thing on the boat that is optional, and that as I recall is how you secure the halyard. For everything else, you must tie those lines in the right knots at the right place or there is a good chance they will come apart and you will DRIFT or something will LEAK and you will DIE, ditto the procedure for docking and moving away from the dock. So the captain has to know what he’s doing and make sure everybody else does, and his authority must be unquestioned. No rethinking the principles, never mind the practice, on a boat; no innovations and good new ideas and thoughts about a different way to do it.
Planes and boats are the same because they are self enclosed capsules hurtling across vast distances in an alien medium with no signposts or guiding infrastructures. Humans would die in them if it weren’t for the capsule, and the passengers are passive recipients of the competence of the staff. Everything must be ship-shape, tidy, orderly, people cannot get in each other’s way, there must be justice (the justice of meritocracy on the plane) or a mutiny occurs and life is endangered. So – red and green lights for starboard and port on both, tight discipline, enforced good practices for safety first and smooth-sailing, profits second. The airline bureaucratizes respect and the captain’s authority, depersonalizing it so you don’t have a Captain Bligh and you don’t depend on one man knowing everything and enforcing everything by sheer force of will and the authority given him by the crew. But the logic is the same.
Aug 20 – Dubai
(Basically I skipped the 19th … there are 11 hours difference btw CA and Dubai.)
Arrived last night and after some flub-dubbing around I got my hotel voucher and was whisked off to an Emirates hotel, the Meridian Dubai, minutes from the airport. It was too late to go into town to see the fountains – it’s a half-hour taxi ride, and it was 9:45pm, and the fountains close at 11, and I had no local money and the taxis don’t accept credit cards and the hotel had no ATM, so I decided to forego it.
Everything is super corporate and super security safe and made to look luxurious – lots of marble, mirrors, chandeliers, and glistening surfaces. Perfectly comfortable, luxurious hotel, and the various food options (I ate a late buffet supper in the hotel) are European, Indian, Chinese, and Arabic.
Aug 21 -Entebbe
Crossing over from San Diego to Tijuana is like passing through the thinnest of curtains –a few steps across a bridge– and finding yourself in a completely different world. Crossing over from Dubai to Entebbe is like that, to the nth power. In Dubai it is gigantic buildings, massive security, unfathomable capital –massive structures with shining slick smooth surfaces of chrome and marble and mirrors, beyond a human scale, putting mere puny humans in their insignificant place. Except for Beijing’s airport—which is in the shape of a dragon, visible from above—I’ve never been in an airport as beautifully designed to signify the presence of power and the power of capital. A few forgettable hours in the liminal space of an airplane are like your steps across a bridge to land you not only in another country and not only in another world, but on another planet—poor, dusty, crowded, in colors of brown and beige: Entebbe.
After some confusion and delay, I was met by a really nice cab driver named Mugasa, sent by my airbnb hosts Hilde and Patrick, Belgians who live a few kilometers from the middle of Kampala, which itself is about an hour’s drive from Entebbe. A lovely breeze greeted me outside the airport as we rolled my huge bags to the cab.
The road between Entebbe and Kampala is lined with brownish buildings and shacks and make-do structures facing the road with people selling things in front of them. Lots of factory-made bricks and cement blocks, with occasional signs for Hina or Tororo, two cement companies. Dresses on hangers, none the same (they are all used clothes, imported in huge bales from Europe and the U.S.), covering the fronts of the buildings. Workshops selling wooden furniture and huge and hugely overstuffed chairs, the luxury of a nineteenth century bourgeois home reinterpreted in a tropical country by local carpenters and upholsterers. Some little eating places with umbrellas sporting ads printed on them, shading plastic chairs and tables. Roofing supplies, tiles and corrugated iron. Children’s playground equipment in bright colors. Some signs I noticed: Mnlowooza Property Consultants; White Star Magic Detergent Powder; Crazy Cock Malt Whisky (“Seriously Crazy”); God’s Plan Supermarket; God Cares Beauty Salon. The traffic flows more or less on the left, since this is a former British colony, and people and cars and trucks and minivans and buses and motorcycles weave in and out, crossing the street at an angle, pulling over, making right turns in front of you. The minivans edge along the shoulder, collecting passengers and letting them out, seldom getting fully onto the road. These are matatu or Taxis, allowed to carry up to 14 people. Buses are licensed for up to 24. Motorcycles are merely motorcylces; boda-boda are motorcycles that take passengers. They seem to be unlicensed, but many people who drive motorcycles are in business to carry passengers who hail them (stand by the side of the road, wave your hand, yell “boda-boda” at motorcycles approaching you, and maybe one will stop). A lot of bare arms, bare legs, no helmets on boda-bodas flitting and weaving through the other vehicles, … and rather deep open drains on the side of the road, made me wonder whether I would risk taking a boda-boda. I think on the whole not.
We passed a large body of water – Lake Victoria! In the distance it broadened out and you could see the curvature of the earth, or perhaps I was imagining that, but it really did look slightly arc’d. It’s huge. I saw that horrible movie Darwin’s Nightmare some years ago. Thankfully it didn’t look like that on this end of the lake. I asked if you can eat the fish, or is it too polluted, and Mugasa said you can, and it is much nicer because it hasn’t been refrigerated. This requires further investigation before I do it.
Immediately outside the downtown of Kampala, roads are often steep and unpaved, full of potholes and ridges and rocks. When it rains, they are made of mud; when it’s dry, they are made of dust. They always feel as if you are riding a bronco, if only a small one.
Arrived at my airbnb at Hilde and Patrick’s house; not luxurious, but definitely spacious and gracious with a large veranda and rattan and bamboo furniture with cushions in large tropical-looking flower designs, overlooking a rather luxuriant garden. Hilde is an agronomist working for a Belgian NGO helping advise and get funding and negotiate regulations for small business agriculture and agricultural products; we seem to be on the same page about many things. Patrick has been in many businesses, but here in Uganda he started a filming and cinema-equipment rental and repair of business. He has done a number of short films, which I plan to look at on the computer.
By the time I arrived it was close to 5pm. I met their 10-year-old African daughter NoeLinda and the gardener Leonard, put the mosquito netting down around my bed before evening falls and lights are turned on (which I believe will attract mosquitoes into the room), unpacked the minimum necessary, set my devices to charging with the help of Universal Chargers provided by Patrick that accept any prongs, and settled down with a cup of tea on the veranda to enjoy the sight of the gardener still clipping and watering. There’s a lovely breeze coming up from the garden. We are, I think they said, 1000 meters above sea level, something like that, and it is blessedly somewhat humid—so my hair continues to curl and my breathing is easy, not like in the dried-out airplane climate, where my hair turns straight and looks and feels charged with static electricity, and my mucous membranes feel like those pictures of the Burning Man site when it’s not being used; and not like the heavily warm and humid outside air in Dubai, which, if you step out of the air-conditioned airport or hotel, feels as if a wet warm washcloth has been wrapped around your head.
Aside from broad-leafed plants and flowers, the garden is strewn with small rabbit huts made of wooden corner posts surrounded by chicken-wire walls and topped with corrugated iron roofing weighed down with rocks. Hilde is raising the rabbits for meat and for sale – an experiment that has already succeeded, and they have a bigger property where they have bigger production, a little way from here. James cares for the rabbits and brings them to an outbuilding at night where he feeds them and gives them fresh water. They have to make their own rabbit food because they don’t trust what you buy from China, and they dry it into pellet-y crumbles on the house roof. (Of course, I didn’t find that out until later). There’s also a beautiful interestingly shaped tree that looks very African, though I’ll have to analyze why it strikes me so. And many many birds, including a loud type that caws and caws assertively.
They fed me and themselves something simple- cheese brought from Belgium in their suitcases, because they got back the day before I arrived- and bread and bananas, as I recall, and we all retired for the night.