Aaaah, Algeeeeeeeria!

My Beautiful, Kooky, Bullfrog lovin better half during our brief RI stint...

It is Friday, June 22nd, 10am. Outside the dry air is already close to 115 Fahrenheit. It is sweltering. The wind is a steady 20 knots, making the conditions outside comparable to a convection oven.

I sit inside a concrete room with 1 small window and an air-conditioning unit that struggles to keep up with its difficult task blaring away in the corner. From the tiny bathroom I can hear a toilet running continuously, leaking away what in this world is liquid gold. Beside me on the bed lays a novel I’ve been reading which is based in Antarctica, a clime which couldn’t possibly farther away from the reality in which I currently find myself. It is therefore quite surreal, albeit a dream like surprise, when I finish a chapter, walk to the door, and peer into the blinding light and steady wind out towards the beautiful void which is the Sahara desert.



I am somewhere. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The nearest ‘town’ is more than 150 miles away by aircraft, and probably twice that distance by a dirt road which is often times engulfed by the shifting orange sands. Therefore I say I am somewhere. Somewhere about 150 miles SSE of Hassi Messaoud, Algeria and SSW of the sharp end of Tunisia’s pie slice like national border. Around me is nothing, and yet so much.

I left the United States this past Sunday. In all honesty, coming back to Africa was one of the last things I wanted to do. The overwhelming majority of my spirit yearned to evict my tenants in Durango, pack up my stuff on the East Coast, buy two tickets, for Elizabeth and I, and move back to the land of fly-fishing, skiing and gleeful beer consumption. Had it not been for the woeful constraints put on me by my creditors (and myself...) I would most likely have done just that. I spent nearly 10 days with my family and fiancé in Rhode Island running errands, completing wedding preparations(ok, she did most of them, I just smiled and said agreed, because she was correct [honestly honey, you were]), fishing, and just enjoying the spoils of having a great family and momentarily living in a 1st World nation again. Life was good. Yet there was family issues as well that made it very difficult for me to, in good conscious, hop on an airplane and run away again. And yet I did.

When I stepped off the aircraft in Algeria on Tuesday morning, arriving from Madrid I mentioned to my new employer’s representative who had come to fetch me, “It’s actually a lot cooler here than I had expected”. She snorted and sighed “It’s early dear, give it an hour”. I now understand.

SAND
My first day was chaotic, to say the least. To start, after arising at 0330 AM (yes, 3:30am!!!) in Madrid, and hiking nearly 1.5 miles to the subway station, I was more than disappointed to learn that the train was shut down until 0600, which was 40 minutes AFTER the check in for my flight closed. In a panic I considered my options and realized, after staring down the streets devoid of conscious human life forms, that I had few. A slew of beautiful American curses rang thru the streets of Madrid early Tuesday morning, approximately 0400 local time, when I realized my only real options were to walk back to the hotel or hike another 2.5 miles or so to the airport boundary where I’d surely find a cab. Laptop in hand, daypack strapped to my back and a 40lb. duffle bag thrown over my shoulder, I cumbersomely clacked my way down the dark Spanish street in full uniform towards where I presumed the airport should lay. About 10 minutes into my trek, as fate should have it, a cab had stopped to eject a drunk at the drunk’s apartmento. I ran, clack, click, clack, to the car just as the driver was pulling away, slapping the roof with my palm, causing him to stop and let me in. Tossing my belongings inside I said, through heavy breathing, ‘El aeropuerto, PRONTO, por favor!’, knowing I had only 2 euros on me. As I prayed I would be able to find an ATM close to where the cabbie dropped me off, I could still smell the lingering alcohol in the car, which I hoped was from the departed drunkard. I found my ATM and checked in.

After landing in Hassi Messaoud, an oil town in southeastern Algeria, I was picked up by Annette, the operations manager for Air Express Algeria, the company I am ‘third party-ish’ flying Beechcraft 1900Ds for. We arrived at the main base, a large hotel like building housing an operations center and nearly foreign and national pilots. I was immediately given a stack of paperwork to complete, which was followed by briefings, lunch, more briefings, and then a shockingly hasty command that I’d be flying to ‘Bla-bla-bla’ with ‘Boo-bla-boo’.

‘Where, with who?’
‘Bla boo boo bah with Bah Bah Black Sheep.’
‘Oh, I thought so. Any chance I could have a siesta first because I am a jet lagged, borderline narcoleptic, incoherent freak right now...?’

After a nap which I could barely raise myself from, I was taken with Eves, another Captain-from Belgium, to the airport to first do a test flight and then a revenue flight to Bla boo boo bah. Luckily (in an abstract way) the airplane failed the test flight and I was allowed to have the rest of the evening off.

The following morning we arose at the Algerian ass crack of dawn and flew east first to Bir Reeba Nord, where I sit this minute, north to Constantine, which is 20 miles from the Mediterranean, to Algiers, the nation’s coastal capital. At the very least, I was dumbfounded. The coastal area of Algeria was beautiful and could not have been farther from what I had expected. Moderately green, treed mountains tumbled down straight into the aquamarine waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Blonde beaches as wide as Central Park sat below beautiful sheered cliffs for long stretches, and occasionally crashing waves battered offshore sea mounts that rose 100 feet vertically above the azure waters.

‘This is Algeria???’ I asked Eves.
‘Yes, amazing isn’t it?’ he responded, later acknowledging he had been just as shocked the first time he’d caught glimpse of it. Yet later, as we flew back over the endless sands of the desert he mumbled ‘welcome back to the earth’s largest prison’, and I found myself back in the Algeria I had imagined.

MORE SAND...
Since then, just last night actually, they cut me loose and sent me off with a green First Officer, into the world of Algerian-trans-Saharan flying.

I’d be lying again if I said I wasn’t nervous as hell. I’ve seen 6 of the 14 airfields they expect me to fly to, and of those 6, 4 were in populated areas: easy to find and served by instrument approaches. This means the remaining 8 aerodromes are just lonely GPS coordinates in the middle of gigantic, orange sand dunes. They lie, as Eves stated, in the middle of the world’s largest prison. Once your in here, if someone doesn’t come to fetch you out, you’ll most likely stay until you die.

I said I wanted a new adventure, and it sure looks like I got one.