Bill Bryson's African Diary - Bill Bryson [8]
Gedi wasn’t rediscovered until the 1920s, by which time it was completely overgrown, but excavations since then have uncovered mosques, tombs, houses and a grand palace, spread across a 45-acre site. Monkeys run along the ruined walls, discreetly keeping an eye on visitors. The site still seems to half belong to the jungle, with mighty baobob trees growing up in what was once a busy lane or someone’s sitting room. At the end of the day, with long sun beams slanting through the forest, it was inexpressibly gorgeous. We were conducted around the site by Ali Abdala Alausy, the curator, a droll and cheerful man who was so clearly glad of visitors that he gave us what can only be called an exhaustive tour. There wasn’t an alcove or pediment to which we weren’t given a full history, not a pit or dwelling whose excavated contents weren’t thoroughly described. We left packed with knowledge and admiration, and ready for a very large drink.
We spent the night at the Driftwood Beachclub Hotel. The only other customers in the large dining room were a family of four at a distant table—white Kenyans on holiday, Nick supposed.
Everybody was tired after the sleepless train journey of the night before, but even so we were unusually subdued. I didn’t realize it at the time but this was because, with the exception of Jenny, who fears nothing, we were all quietly certain we were going to die in the morning.
Wednesday, October 2
A few years ago, I was on a scheduled flight on a 16-seater prop plane from Boston to my local airport in New Hampshire when the plane got lost in bad weather and couldn’t find the airport. For 40 minutes we flew around in a perplexed manner, occasionally dropping through the low clouds (which, I couldn’t help noticing, we shared with many mountaintops) before the pilot got his bearings, or lucky, and put us on the runway with a descent so steep that I sometimes still sit upright in bed at 3 a.m. thinking about it. I vowed then that I would never go on another light aircraft. Then two years ago I flew in a light aircraft across Fiji almost, but not quite, ahead of the leading edge of the biggest tropical storm I ever hope to experience and I vowed then that really, absolutely and under no conditions would I set foot on a light aircraft again.
And now here I was about to fly 400 kilometers into bandit country in a charter plane in a Third World nation. I mentioned my reservations to Nick Southern at breakfast.
“I know just what you mean,” he said with feeling. “I’m petrified myself.”
“That’s not quite what I was hoping to hear,” I said. “Absolutely bloody petrified,” he repeated for emphasis.
“I was rather counting on you to tell me everything is going to be fine, and that these planes never crash.”
“Oh, no, they crash all the time,” Nick said.
“I know they do, Nick. But I was hoping that you would tell me that somehow in Kenya they don’t and that for some reason that hasn’t occurred to me the world’s most outstanding pilots come here to do charter work.”
Nick didn’t seem to be listening to me any longer. “Crash all the time,” he said. “Poor Richard Leakey lost both his legs in a plane crash in Kenya, you know.”
“I’d heard that,” I said.
“And he was one of the lucky ones,” he added enigmatically.
Dan, also a piteous flier, arrived at the breakfast table just then. He was as white as a sheet, a condition somewhat exacerbated by the fact that he had inadvertently brushed his teeth with sun cream. Then poor Justin Linnane turned up looking similarly ghostly. He was uneasy because he had never been up in a small plane before and now learned that his debut experience was to be in the company of the three most hysterical fliers in Africa. Only Jenny remained serene.
Thus it was that