A weekend in the rift valley

At the risk of representing my life as one spectacular trip after another, here’s an update about my weekend excursion into the great East African Rift Valley. I was accompanying Scott, who was on a trip to see Luke and Caleb at boarding school, and it was a chance for me to see a different part of this continent. We boarded a 4-seater Cessna here in Bundibugyo and flew out on the one-year anniversary of my arrival in Uganda. The next day we flew to Nairobi and hopped in a taxi for the hour and a half drive out to RVA. I was totally unprepared for what it would be like. We climbed higher and higher, reaching over 8,000 ft on the edge of the escarpment overlooking the rift valley, where the view of the plain several thousand feet below stretched as far as I could see, rudely broken by Mt. Longonot towering up into the sky from the middle of the massive valley. The sun breaking through infrequent gaps in the clouds created a beautiful speckled pattern across the plain as far as I could see. We began the descent down the side of the escarpment, and reached Kijabe, home of RVA and a remarkable mission hospital, about half way down, still perched around 7,000 ft with a stunning view of the rift valley. Despite the amazing views and spectacular landscape, perhaps the most amazing part of it was this: the temperature was cool. The air was crisp and clear, with a strong, cool breeze. The cold blue of the sky was unlike any I’ve seen in Uganda, and I commented to Scott that it felt a bit like September in New England – and that came from me, who spent 4 cold autumns in northern Massachusetts. The next morning was cold and rainy. I again commented that it felt like fall in New England. At a high altitude, even in the cool weather I burned badly in the sun after being outside all day Saturday, but this wasn’t the hot humid burn that I get in Bundibugyo; it was a cold, dry, chapped burn, reminiscent of the feeling I get after a day spent skiing. In spite of the discomfort, I thoroughly enjoyed being outside in the cool weather, as it is something I haven’t experienced much in the last year.

I met some fascinating people while I was there, including an American doctor who has been working there for 30 years, and a British doctor who calls his soccer referee’s license the only qualification that means anything to him.

After spending the weekend at RVA, watching the boys play soccer, checking out the hospital, and attending a wonderful cook-out, we got in a cab back to the airport. You might think that this would be a less interesting part of the trip, but you would be wrong. Nairobi is a dicey place at night. First we realized that the driver had alcohol on his breath. Then a policeman, after seeing white people in the car, attempted to stop us in traffic, likely to try to get some money out of the situation. The driver, probably both trying to avoid being extorted and to avoid trouble for drinking and driving, ignored the officer and tried to drive away on the shoulder. I looked behind us, and could only see two things: the policeman’s flashlight bouncing as he ran after us, and the barrel of his gun illuminated by the flashlight’s beam. After the officer slammed his hand down on the trunk of the car, the driver sped away on the shoulder. Next we saw a large pool of blood on the road. It wasn’t hard to imagine how that happened, as people were constantly running across the busy, unlit road. At the airport, the power went out as we were waiting to check in. That’s right, a major international airport, one of the main arrival and departure points on the continent, was without electricity, except for some emergency lights. With computer check in shut down, we waited as each passenger was checked in by hand, with hand-written boarding passes (incidentally, the woman checking us in didn’t have her own pen, asked to borrow one from me, and then asked to keep it, to which I said yes, if only because I didn’t feel like arguing).

The following morning we boarded a Cessna again for the flight back out to Bundibugyo, my first time making this flight. Right after takeoff I discovered a frog around my feet – welcome to the tropics – and briefly considered dropping him into Lake Victoria below us before I thought better of opening the window. Flying in these small planes is amazing, amid spires of cloud hundreds of feet high, one feels much more a part of the sky than when cloistered in a commercial jet that tears through the air at immense speed. Instead of taking us around the Rwenzoris, the pilot opted to go straight over the mountains, climbing thousands of feet as we drew closer. I’ll admit to being a little nervous as he tried to keep the plane under some heavy clouds and over the mountains, a task which gave him rather little elevation to work with. We moved through a lower pass, and I could look up at mountains on either side of us and see individual leaves on the trees below, and we then dove steeply down the other side, almost sliding down the back of the mountains as the pilot searched for a hole in the lower cloud cover to drop through. When he found it, we were almost right over the border and could see the airstrip, Nyahuka, the Christ School football pitch, and various towns in Uganda and Congo from thousands of feet. It was striking to see how close together so many things are, contrasted with how long it takes to move from one to another. Towns that are a 1 hour walk or 15 drive apart appear to be almost touching, with the poor, winding roads making travel between them difficult. Even towns on the other side of the border look to be only a stones throw away (ok, a pretty long stones throw). We swooped low over Nyahuka for Scott to get some pictures - again a bit too low for my comfort, probably only 300 feet - before dropping onto the grass airstrip. These pilots amaze me. The neighborhood kids were abuzz with excitement over the low-flying plane, and one commented that he thought I must have been the one flying it, since it came down so low. It appears that these kids understand, and attribute to me, the recklessness of youth. (I’ll work on getting some of those pictures from Scott. The aerial view is pretty cool).

Sometimes I feel like I’m always writing about my latest trip, the latest amazing place I’ve gone. For one thing, they’re the easiest to write about. But it is true that I’ve seen some amazing things in the past year. So it made me think: life here isn’t easy. There’s the stress of living in a foreign culture, many, many fewer conveniences, the separation from friends and family, the suffering that is constantly before my eyes. But there really are many benefits as well, including the opportunities to see some spectacular parts of the world that I never would see if I didn’t live here.