When I landed at Juba International Airport a few weeks ago, it was calm, overtaken by that mid-afternoon African heat-induced lull. Just another small airport serving a few flights a day from Nairobi and Addis Ababa.
Au contraire. I arrived at the airport at 8 am on Thursday morning and found quite a different scene. Dozens of tiny planes, some unmarked but most bearing the logos of the humanitarian world (World Food Program, Médecins Sans Frontière, International Committee of the Red Cross) were being loaded, NGO SUVs pulled up to them, people in logo t-shirts wandering around. One by one, they finished loading, taxied down the runway and took off for the many remote corners of South Sudan. Just another Thursday morning rush hour at the Juba Airport.
My plane was no exception--a tiny United Nations Humanitarian Air Service plane bound for Yambio airstrip, on the South Sudan-Democratic Republic of Congo border.
It's not surprising to see this--South Sudan is fairly massive and has very few tarred roads of any kind. A vehicle that was recently sent by road from the Juba office to the Tambura office with supplies took more than a week to arrive. It's a similar situation for most places. South Sudan is the size of France and has 50 kms of paved roads (mostly in Juba) and no paved highways. It gets even more complicated when you realize that many of these dirt roads become entirely impassable during the rainy season. And obviously commercial airlines are not flying these routes--low demand to out of the way dirt airstrips. Logistics is a nightmare.
My window seat afforded excellent views of the crashed jet just off one side of the Juba runway.
After an hour and a half, we began descending towards Yambio. It couldn't look more different from Juba.
We touched down on the dirt airstrip in Yambio.
Immediately after we landed, people reappeared on the runway and continued about their (walking) daily travels. Also, a dog came to meet the plane. Hartsfield International this was not.
Yambio has one of the loveliest trees I have ever seen, a massive baobab.
Yambio wasn't my final destination, just the closest I could get on an airplane. No, I was headed to Tambura, another 180 kms (103 miles) down an "improved" dirt road--a slightly more than 3 hour drive. The UN is rehabbing about 2,000 kms of dirt roads, and fortunately this is one that's mostly done (though we did occasionally have to veer off to bumpy dirt tracks through the forest in areas where it hasn't been completed). The UN is actually supposed to fly planes to Tambura twice a month but usually doesn't because the airstrip isn't maintained. A driver from the Tambura office met me and we headed off with our military escort leading (a requirement for NGOs in this area, where the Lord's Resistance Army is still active).
More from Tambura. I was supposed to leave on the Saturday morning flight but the travel department in our office forgot to book it (a complicated procedure involving dispatch of the flight list from Khartoum on Thursday midday as they are closed Fridays in the Arab north), so I'm here until the Tuesday morning flight! If only I had packed for a 5-day trip and not a 2-day one...
Au contraire. I arrived at the airport at 8 am on Thursday morning and found quite a different scene. Dozens of tiny planes, some unmarked but most bearing the logos of the humanitarian world (World Food Program, Médecins Sans Frontière, International Committee of the Red Cross) were being loaded, NGO SUVs pulled up to them, people in logo t-shirts wandering around. One by one, they finished loading, taxied down the runway and took off for the many remote corners of South Sudan. Just another Thursday morning rush hour at the Juba Airport.
My plane was no exception--a tiny United Nations Humanitarian Air Service plane bound for Yambio airstrip, on the South Sudan-Democratic Republic of Congo border.
It's not surprising to see this--South Sudan is fairly massive and has very few tarred roads of any kind. A vehicle that was recently sent by road from the Juba office to the Tambura office with supplies took more than a week to arrive. It's a similar situation for most places. South Sudan is the size of France and has 50 kms of paved roads (mostly in Juba) and no paved highways. It gets even more complicated when you realize that many of these dirt roads become entirely impassable during the rainy season. And obviously commercial airlines are not flying these routes--low demand to out of the way dirt airstrips. Logistics is a nightmare.
My window seat afforded excellent views of the crashed jet just off one side of the Juba runway.
After an hour and a half, we began descending towards Yambio. It couldn't look more different from Juba.
We touched down on the dirt airstrip in Yambio.
Immediately after we landed, people reappeared on the runway and continued about their (walking) daily travels. Also, a dog came to meet the plane. Hartsfield International this was not.
Yambio has one of the loveliest trees I have ever seen, a massive baobab.
Yambio wasn't my final destination, just the closest I could get on an airplane. No, I was headed to Tambura, another 180 kms (103 miles) down an "improved" dirt road--a slightly more than 3 hour drive. The UN is rehabbing about 2,000 kms of dirt roads, and fortunately this is one that's mostly done (though we did occasionally have to veer off to bumpy dirt tracks through the forest in areas where it hasn't been completed). The UN is actually supposed to fly planes to Tambura twice a month but usually doesn't because the airstrip isn't maintained. A driver from the Tambura office met me and we headed off with our military escort leading (a requirement for NGOs in this area, where the Lord's Resistance Army is still active).
More from Tambura. I was supposed to leave on the Saturday morning flight but the travel department in our office forgot to book it (a complicated procedure involving dispatch of the flight list from Khartoum on Thursday midday as they are closed Fridays in the Arab north), so I'm here until the Tuesday morning flight! If only I had packed for a 5-day trip and not a 2-day one...
If I had a dollar for every time that I was stuck in Tambura for an extra few days...
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