Cover story
The unglamorous side of foreign travel
When you see the sun pulling out of the clouds to light up Dubai International Airport, you know the time to make your final leg home is fast approaching.
The cold steel metal chairs and the biting cold from the air conditioning makes you count every minute like your life depends on it. I pull at my thin jacket and wish I had taken the blanket off my last flight on Emirates airline from Jakarta, Indonesia. This airport, though sitting in a desert can sometimes be cold; very cold that everyone around you is either hugging a cup of coffee or running off to catch their next fight.
Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine sits on the chair across from me chatting with his ghetto homies, including Nubian Lee. It is not long before they also feel the cold and fall silent as we while away the minutes. From a distance, the cry of a baby wakes me; I pray that his mum takes care of him and shut my eyes again. But he is not stopping. He is sitting right behind Bobi Wine.
“Whose baby is this?” Bobi Wine asks, waking many of us up. The baby is sitting there with just a vest on and not even a diaper or panties. How careless can a parent be to leave their baby alone especially in this cold? We look around but everyone is looking at the other.
The baby continues to cry and we all get concerned. But the parents are nowhere in sight. When the boarding call comes, a woman of Indian decent arrives and dresses the boy up in a pair of shorts, ignoring the piercing accusatory eyes and murmurs of how careless she is.
Midway in the air, the baby starts to cry again. The woman gets up, dangles him by one arm and heads for the toilet. The baby has pooped. Right there on the cabin floor, because he does not have a diaper or nappy on. You can imagine how fast the smell engulfs this enclosed space. We are beyond disgusted.
I had never imagined that something like this happens on a long haul plane. I had thought that everyone who travels abroad has gone through some sort of class for etiquette or is smart enough around other people. When the stewardess offers the mother a diaper, she turns it down because she has her own. Well, why didn’t you place your baby in one in the first place? You could see that air hostesses were really trying to look like they didn’t mind cleaning the floor.
My family and friends tell me how lucky I am that I get a chance to board a plane. They imagine that all is glamorous up in the air and that when you get to your destination, chocolate flows on the streets, things from markets and malls are dirt cheap and probably the air you breathe and food you eat is a class apart.
I have to say, the countries I have travelled to are far more developed than Uganda. Remember this conclusion is drawn because I mostly stop in the city centres. No one ever tells anyone the unglamorous things about foreign travel.
For example, if you happen to be unfortunate to sit right in front of or behind the toilets, you will hear everyone flushing the loo. And that may be ok, but if someone uses it for a number two, you are in for some unpleasant smell all through your eight hours of flight.
It is not like you can open the window and let it out, no. The crammed-up space in cattle class, as my friend likes to call economy class, is no fan either, never mind that it is harder to breathe up there as the air is lighter. By the time you get off the plane, your feet are swollen from all the sitting and your neck is aching from poor sleeping position.
On a flight from Egypt, a colleague says one hour after takeoff, a passenger in the aisle seat died. He was travelling to USA for treatment when he passed away. The flight crew placed his body across three seats and upgraded his wife from economy class to first class. For the next several hours, a dead body lay right there. That is like sitting in a grave because a plane is also confined space.
Another colleague, while on a flight from Bridgetown, Barbados to London, saw the flight attendants run frantically up and down the aisles with first aid boxes; an elderly passenger had passed out during prolonged turbulence over the Atlantic Ocean. Luckily, they saved his life.
Another time I was on a flight from Singapore to Dubai when the plane was hit by turbulence, sending cups and plates flying in different directions. Then the plane started to drop at zooming speed. The lights went off and the oxygen masks dropped. Luggage fell out from the overhead lockers.
The air hostesses who were serving dinner scampered for their seats. And they say that when you see the hostesses panicking, you know you are in trouble. I was a cocktail of emotion; fear, screaming, praying, crying. The plane dropped again and I imagine we were about to hit the ground and burst into flames.
I grabbed my neighbour with every last ounce of energy I had. I could feel my stomach turning as I murmured “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God,” as many times as I could. Behind me, a group of youngsters were screaming with excitement like they were enjoying a joy ride in a theme park while I was dying.
Then the pilot tilted the plane to the side and we flew back to stability. Someone told me how after a plane he was on took off from South Africa, one of the engines dropped off. Another person said when taking off from Ethiopia, the plane had hardly left the ground when it came back down.
The pilot apologised, asked everyone to remain seated while they fixed the problem and tried to take off again. So you can imagine when the plane finally takes off and you are still seated on it well knowing it is faulty. Chances of surviving a place crash are slim to none.
The funny thing is that when you get off any plane from Africa and get onto another headed for Europe, Asia or America – even when the aircraft on both legs of the journey belong to the same company – everything is different down to the last details. They are newer, classier and even safer.
On these, you have touch screen TVs for everyone, the seats are a little bigger, you can charge your phone, laptop or tablet, use the internet and even make calls. Then when you arrive in some countries, you realise that racism still exists.
While waiting for my pick-up at Sokhearnno Hartta International airport in Indonesia, I took a seat on one of the benches in the waiting lounge. Every white – and Asian – person on that bench moved to all cram together on another bench. Then they went ahead to pull their children closer. When I looked up, I could see a couple of people pointing, some even giggling.
I was the only black person in sight. On my visits to the mall or the market in Indonesia, the same thing happened. Here in Uganda while children are fascinated by white people and go ahead to sing “Omuzungu, Omuzungu” around him/her, in Indonesia they run away in different directions calling for their mothers.
Cars would stop for people to stare. Women would come out of their shops to point and laugh before going back to discuss with their husbands. It was like I was carrying the plague or something. But I chose to believe that maybe they had never seen a black person before.
When I arrived at my hotel, if I can call it that, I was informed that I would be sharing a room with five people and sleeping on bunker beds. I thought they were kidding, but yes I had roommates and they spoke Spanish or other languages I didn’t understand. And I was going to live with them for two weeks, incommunicado.
Some of the participants at this conference could not stand the living conditions and got on the next flight out of Indonesia. Others said it could have been worse as at another conference, participants had to sleep on the floor sharing one big hall with men, women, rats and cockroaches. And the place did not have running water.
And then I realised, that no matter how smelly and dirty the streets of Kampala are, no matter how many potholes I rum into or how high Maria Kiwanuka raises taxes on everything in Uganda or how empty my bank account is, I could not wait to come back home, because there is simply no place like home.
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There"s simply no place like home
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