09 August 2005

air tanzania

On a whim, some of us went to Zanzibar for the weekend. We flew, because Zanzibar is more than a day of travel by bus and boat but 50 minutes by plane. Zanzibar is incredible and amazing and worthy of an entire week's worth of posts on it's own when I get the time, but the topic of the day is Air Tanzania.

The Jessica (the plane that flies from Dar es Salaam to Kilimanjaro to Zanzibar) is about 15 rows long and five seats across. Not bad. Not like the Beechcraft or the former Rwandair Express plane. Perfectly reasonable. But for some reason they fly it like crazy people. No turn is smooth. The wings are never level during the landing. The plane, in fact, is never quite side-to-side level. Considering that it's an old plane from somewhere in Scandanavia (one knows this by the signs on the exits, which have the little dots and the null-sign looking letter - is that Denmark?), I try to pretend to myself that it's just because it was from before the days of power steering - you know, the pilots have to constantly adjust like drivers in pre-power steering cars, but I find myself just constantly praying, "Please keep this plane safely in the air. Please."

I never felt that way on the 12-seater Beechcraft. Somehow, when I'm traveling for a purpose I never believe I'm about to die. The UN plane wouldn't crash, right? When I travel for fun, I always think the plane is about to go down. God doesn't want me to have fun in Zanzibar. Now that he's seen how completely I was willing to disregard my health by getting completely fried in the sun by forgetting sunscreen, that's probably correct, actually.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hilarious- "God doesn't want me to have fun in Zanzibar."