My Travel Adventures

I arrived in Medina at nine in the morning and was out of the airport within fifteen minutes. A taxi dropped me off right in front of Quba Mosque, a glistening white building with three domes and four minarets at the southern end of the city. Quba prides itself on being the oldest mosque in the world, its first stone being laid by the Prophet Muhammad in the first year of his emigration to Medina (the Hijrah). The current building, however, retains little to nothing of the original structure, which underwent gradual changes over the centuries until it was abruptly knocked down and replaced in the 1980s.

I started my second day in Saudi Arabia by eating the leftovers of yesterday’s dinner, after which I headed to the old town of al-Ula. I had saved two parking lots on my phone: one just south of the old town and one just north of it. I did not like the idea of walking all the way from the parking lot into the old town under the scorching sun, but when I arrived at the southern parking lot, I found it had a whole fleet of golf carts and a minibus. I cannot conceive this whole operation to be profitable. The buses and golfcarts are free, and they depart as soon as a single person climbs on board, employing perhaps dozens of drivers. I ought to note that many of the drivers were women, which I did not find remarkable at the time, but it now strikes me as quite a large stride from the times when women were protesting in Saudi Arabia for the right to drive.

My return flight from London to Nairobi took me through Jeddah: in recent years, Saudi Arabia has been investing a lot of money into the national carrier and Jeddah’s airport, hoping to turn the city into another Dubai. The flight itself did not really catch my eye. It was only slightly cheaper than most of the other ones on offer and it involved a layover in the middle of the night. What did catch my eye, however, was the option of a day’s layover in Jeddah, which I had never visited before, and which opened the possibility of turning a day’s layover into a whole weekend.

With my time in Africa running out, I decided to spend one of my last spare weekends in Diani. I had intended to visit the local sacred forest when I last visited Mombasa, but a last-minute work commitment kept me from extending my trip by a Friday afternoon. Thus, I went with my friend Wei, leaving Nairobi by plane on a Saturday morning and returning late in the afternoon on Sunday. As far as I can remember, this was the first time I used Wilson Airport, and while I got lost a few times trying to find my way around the place – where each airline seems to have its own departures hall – I found the breakfast at the Safarilink hall surprisingly excellent.

Wei and I arrived in Zanzibar at around half past eight on Friday evening. Our plane had left Nairobi earlier than scheduled: as soon as everyone was seated, it simply headed for the runway and took-off. It seems some African airlines – especially the smaller city-hoppers – are more flexible and informal than their big and unwieldy counterparts. With the half hour we had saved, we had ample time to go through all the formalities at Zanzibar airport. We were apparently the last plane to arrive that evening, so a particularly motivated staff member did his best to rush us through the process, telling us to skip entire sections of the visa application form and shepherding us from one booth to the next.

On my second day in Luanda, I took a guided tour of the city. I had originally booked it since I was a little concerned for my safety in the farther reaches of Luanda and since I also wanted to visit the so-called Viewpoint of the Moon, which can only be reached by car or public transit as it lies over an hour southwest of the city. The Viewpoint of the Moon was the first place we visited. It is a lookout over a barrage of red and beige pinnacles that have been eroded out of the cliff close to the sea, forming a moonlike arena whose bottom is filled with small hills and baobab trees. I imagine these trees must be of special pre-Christan significance to local people, as there is an entire hilly grove of baobabs by the road just south of Luanda where people go – our guide said – “to be closer to God.”

I arrived in Luanda on a Friday morning just in time to clock into my job online. Angolan Airlines operates a direct route between Nairobi and Luanda, but it runs at somewhat strange hours and does not fly every day, hence why I caught my flight at six on a Friday morning and flew back at eleven in the evening on Saturday. Still, I was impressed by the quietness and smoothness of the apparently new and mostly empty Airbus. Not that I was expecting crowds on it, but I found it strange that when we arrived in Luanda, all the passengers fit on a single airport bus.