Traveling
I’m back in Liberia with no travel complications along the way (ok, they did stop me at customs and inquired why I didn’t have a re-entry visa and me asking why I needed a re-entry visa when I have a residence visa that lasts until August 2013, with them explaining that I need both a residence visa and a reentry visa and, when finding out I work with at the US Embassy, telling me to talk to the embassy folks about getting my papers in order) of my 30 hour transit time. I didn’t sleep much on the flight - 3 real hours of sleep with a couple hours of just resting my eyes - and last night I was worried about jet lag. 12 hours after the instant I put my head down to my pillow, when I woke up, I realized jet lag was not going to be a problem. Now if I can just get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight and sleep/wake up normally . . . .
30 hours of transit time is pretty rough. Mostly you do things to try and make time pass faster (mindless movies on the airplane [turned off the moment you think you can actually fall asleep], reading engaging books that don’t require much thinking, or stretching, walking and grabbing a real latte while in the airport waiting for the next too-long leg of your flight). But traveling is more than just getting from point A to point B as quickly and as painlessly as possible, which is something I need to remind myself of every so often.
Being that I’m naturally introverted, I don’t readily pick up chatting with people. It’s not easy or comfortable for me to start a conversation with a complete stranger (at least I’m well beyond that stage of wishing I had smooth-talking pick-up lines for attractive young ladies), but when I do, or as is more often the case, when someone starts chatting with me, it’s interesting to hear about other people’s reasons for traveling. Yesterday on the lay-over in Abidjan (Cote d’Ivoire), the couple behind me asked me why I was heading to Liberia. They were surprised to find out that I’ve been here for almost a year (time sure does fly) and I was surprised to find out that the wife hasn’t been to Liberia in over 20 years (her family left at the beginning of the first conflict) and that he (a doctor) was coming for his third trip in 3 years after an equally long break. She was visibly nervous about what she’d find and wondered how it would compare to her childhood memories. I found it interesting that I was telling her about Liberia.
On other flights I’ve met equally interesting travelers and I really do need to make more of an effort to meet people instead of just people watch (and wondering what their stories are).
One thing I do a lot of is try to learn about new environs as the opportunity arises. And yes, you can do that from the air (there was a reason I took geomorphology in grad school!). On the return leg of this trip, I had a window seat that faced east and was looking forward to looking out to see the topography of Northern Africa, namely the Sahara desert. I’ve observed the beautiful US landscape many times from the air and this time this leg of the trip would be during daylight hours. Our route took us from Brussels, over Barcelona, and the Mediterranean Sea. The Mediterranean was much bigger than I’d expected, but once we hit the Algerian coast I started looking. At first the topography changed a lot (as one would expect), but after a few minutes the desert hit and, while there was some diversity in landscape, it quickly evolved into that desert consistency you can see when flying over the US deserts.
One bit of advice, if you’re going to photograph out of an airplane window, make sure you can get your camera to focus manually at infinity. Otherwise you find out how scratched your window really is.
After taking a few moments to figure out how to do it with my point-and-shoot (menus, menus, menus - at least I figured out how to get manual focus to shift to that nifty ring on the front of my camera) I got a better image that actually shows the desert.
I took a couple of shots then put my camera away. If I’d been thinking about writing this blog post, I would have left it out so I could easily take a few more shots of the Sahara Desert over the next couple of hours. Yes, you read that right. We were over the Sahara for several HOURS. I’d watch a bit of movie, then slide up my window shade and look outside - desert. The movie would end, slide up the window shade - more desert. Start a new movie, about halfway through . . . you can guess, yet more desert.
It wasn’t until we were over Mali and the in-flight map said we were near the Niger River that runs through Mali did I realize what was so peculiar about looking down at the Sahara Desert. Time after time that I looked out I saw the rhythmic pattern of wind-blown sand and topographic elevation changes, whether mountains or suddenly rising buttes. Occasionally I saw man-made formations - the occasional road (mostly at the early portions of the flight over Algeria) or a small village (not many of those either until much later in Mali); what I did not see, which is what I almost always see even in US deserts, were riparian formations. Erosion patterns and earth forms created by moving water. Think of Mars and how excited NASA was when they observed photographs that appeared to show riparian formations in a crater (thought to be sub-surface ice, melted by proximity to the surface and exposure to the sun, leading to melting and eroding the surface before evaporation). Simply put, there appeared to be no moving surface water in the Sahara Desert. For hours of flying time. What an inhospitable place - yet people live there. Wow.
So traveling is an opportunity to learn. At least I try and take advantage of that. Now I just have to get the courage to start chatting with fellow travelers.
