that towered nine thousand feet into the night. I set the controls to maximum power and pitch for the steepest climb speed, waiting with bated breath during the three minutes of climb it took to reach eleven thousand feet and safe clearance. It was long enough to dwell on my oversight, a sure sign of fatigue. I badly needed to reach Djibouti, to get my feet on the ground.
An hour later, I started the descent into Djibouti through a corridor of mountains. Minimum navigational aids into Djibouti made the approach tricky, one any pilot would prefer to make in daylight. With a renewed sense of concentration I entered into the instrument approach, passed the directional beacon outbound, and a minute later circled into a teardrop turn, back across the beacon inbound on the final descent, breaking through cloud three hundred feet above the runway lights that shone like a diamond bracelet directly before me.
Safe on the ground at last, I shambled across the tarmac, glanced back at my plane, sitting with its nose in the air, and reflected on what could have been our last flight. We had flown so many hours together, she and I, as faithful companions. How could I have endangered us in such a slipshod way? I turned away, documents in hand, and headed over to the airport tower encircled by barbed wire.
The whole airport at Djibouti was abandoned save for a lone controller, locked in the airport tower along with his Second World War instruments and a small sleeping cot. It was ten-thirty at night, and there were no officials, no taxis, and nowhere to go. Resigned to spending the night on an airport bench, bitten by mosquitoes, I was nevertheless grateful to be alive. Neon lights hanging from the ceiling cast a greenish, funereal glow over the vast hall as they buzzed and flickered. A driving thirst had me drinking tap water that smelled and tasted polluted. I had completed thirteen and a half hours of difficult flying, only to end up sleeping on an airport bench. Still, I was safe, and my final destination, Nairobi, was now only one more long-distance flight away.
An hour later, a car drove up to the airport. After protracted negotiations, I was able to convince its driver to take me into town to the Hotel du Ciel. Too tired to find food, I fell into bed reflecting on my good fortune to be alive in Djibouti, Africa.
Djibouti is an unlikely country. Tucked within the folds of overlapping mountain ranges it guards the western portal of the strait, Bab Al Mandeb (Gate of Tears), the narrow entrance at the southern end of the Red Sea, which sits at the base of the Horn of Africa. Only thirty-five miles separate this part of Africa from Arabia and both sides are visible on a clear day.
Djibouti is really a city state, a border town between North and sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam and the Christian Coptic religions meet. The Jewish community has virtually disappeared. North African Arabs rub shoulders with black Africans, exchanging goods and services in Arabic, French, and Swahili. The restaurants, mostly empty, still produce good food, influenced by the French. Ethiopian girls in brightly coloured skirts have a saucy look in their eyes, fully prepared to meet you later in a bar. Prostitution is rife, but the lack of paying customers a problem. The occasional out-of-place European youth wanders lost and dirty along the broken sidewalks of the main street. Djibouti, it seems, is a cosmopolitan dumping ground of human misery.
Historically, the city has been one of the principal gateways into Africa. Arab dhows loaded with merchandise arrive with the monsoon, seeking trade. Times are tough and trading thin. Nevertheless, enormous quantities of cheap goods from as far as China pass from trader to trader before reaching Djibouti’s sprawling open-air market. Prices rise and fall with the monsoon, like so much else along the Indian Ocean coast. Arrivals and departures, fortune and misery, seem dependent on the trade winds.
The city stirred before dawn. I wandered through the back alleys surrounding the massive open-air market where Ethiopians, Somalis, and Arabs struggle to eke out a meagre living in a world of sellers with no buyers. Men sat cross-legged, pencil thin, behind piles of wood, corrugated iron, hardware, electrical supplies, pots and pans, and plastic trinkets. Women with carefully arranged pyramids of oranges, dates, limes, spices, and nuts; colours and shapes, designed to appeal, were crammed into ridiculously small stalls. Liquid doelike eyes peered out from above the ubiquitous veils. The market sprawled as far as the eye could see, a teeming mass of humanity.
A soft rain fell, turning the red earth into rivers of mud. I tracked through the slippery narrow passages between stalls, surveying the array of goods on offer. Vendors silently endured the trickle of water dripping from old umbrellas and bits of plastic covering their wares. The lack of buyers said it all. Djibouti is a small and desperate world on its own, forgotten by its former colonial masters, the French—a country no longer of use or concern to the world.
My ancient Renault taxi sloshed along the main road to the airport. The car’s radio wailed Arabic songs, while beads and pompoms hanging from the mirror danced drunkenly across the driver’s line of vision. As the car pulled up under a regal line of tall and graceful doum palm trees fronting the Djibouti Airport, rainwater spurted from the open crevices of the old cement building. Pools of brown muddy water swirled over the murram (mud) road into swollen ditches. The humid air was suffocating. I was anxious to leave Djibouti, to be airborne again.
The airport administration office was cluttered with files, damp and smelling of mildew. Two soldiers slouched in swivel chairs, smoking and talking, guns across their thighs. They eyed me vacantly as I tried to open one locked door after another in an attempt to reach my plane. Unhelpful and sullen, they shrugged their shoulders at my inquiries. “Le capitaine vient bientôt. Il faut l’attendre.” I settled down to wait.
It took self-discipline and patience to wait three-quarters of an hour for the captain’s arrival. Eventually, a pompous little man with short-cropped hair and a self-important moustache burst through the door and strode directly into his office, without glancing to either side. Five minutes later, unable to contain myself any longer, I knocked on his door and requested a clearance to fly to Nairobi. I was informed he had important business to attend to and that I must wait. Fuming, I returned to my seat, contemplating revenge. Twenty minutes passed without development.
Two Swedish pilots and a Canadian Forces lieutenant joined the queue. The Swedes, flying a King Air, were on their way to Mogadishu, while the Canadian was attempting to make arrangements for refuelling a Hercules 130 that was due to land later that day. I now understood why pilots hated flying into Djibouti, wrestling with police, immigration, and airport officials. The four of us decided to join forces and take the captain on.
We marched into his office, refusing to leave until he processed our clearances. He immediately called for his soldiers, who shambled in through the door and appeared startled by the apoplectic look on their captain’s face. We stood our ground, refusing to leave. The captain’s options were limited; he could shoot us or find some face-saving compromise. Finally, he assigned one of his illiterate soldiers to our needs, so that he might continue with important military matters. We ended up processing the forms ourselves.
On the ramp, I discovered a fuel cap was missing and my wing tanks had been drained of fuel. In a fury, I returned to remonstrate with the captain, who smiled with enormous satisfaction at my misfortune. He took great delight in directing me to the east-side hangar where I could buy replacement fuel, pumped from unsealed drums at a cost of $1.75 a litre—more than three times the cost of fuel in Luxor. I was probably repurchasing my own fuel, but I had no choice but to pay the price and cast a special curse on Djibouti.
Shortly after takeoff I was instructed to fly at flight level 140 (fourteen thousand feet), as high as the plane, fully loaded, could climb. I circled for an hour before reaching my designated altitude; anything lower was not permissible south of Djibouti under instrument flight rules. I soon understood why as I caught a glimpse
