"Caravan" to Africa

Khartoum, Sudan

I am delighted beyond words to be able to make this post from Khartoum, a stop which we had not originally planned. Relations between the govt. of Sudan and western relief agencys are much improved. For a Christmas gift to the children of Sudan this year, Samaritan's Purse chartered a giant Russian cargo plane (the AN225, currently the largest airplane in the world, of which only a single example exists), and filled it in New York with 80,000 "Operation Christmas Child" gift and relief bundles. With the cooperation of the govt. of Sudan, these were flown into Khartoum by the AN225, and distributed throughout Sudan by the AIM-AIR / Sam's Purse DC-3, which flew from Nairobi to Khartoum for the occasion. All this has been going on during the past couple of weeks.

Sam's Purse director Franklin Graham was received in Khartoum for a personal visit with Sudanese President Al-Bashir. Click here for a story about this remarkable meeting, as published in the local press here in Sudan.

With this recent history of cordial cooperation, AIM-AIR felt that we might be allowed to land in Khartoum for this flight. Permission was requested and granted, so here we are.

Here are some photos of the flight from Crete, a 1500-mile journey that involves such a dramatic change of scenery that it seems like a flight half-way around the world.

Here's what the port city of Iraklion, Crete looked like at the time of our departure this morning.



Northern Egypt had a scattered cloud layer over desert..



Southern Egypt - a portion of it I had not seen before - is mostly empty desert, but there are patterns in the rocks and sand of remarkable beauty and regularity. Many of the patterns are repeated for many miles, some of them from horizon to horizon, with such perfect uniformity that the images of them could almost be used as wallpaper designs. Several photos follow. My apologies to those of you with dial-up internet; these might take a while, but I was really impressed by them.













Mike is in command of this flight, and he has finally put his uniform on, after flying across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean in blue jeans, etc.



We crossed the Nile River, and the Egypt / Sudan border near Abu Simbel and Wadi Halfa. 23 years ago Dale and I passed this area while flying low and following the Nile river in the course of delivering a 206 to Nairobi. There are two large statues at Abu Simbel: images of seated Pharaohs carved into the face of a cliff, and guarding the entrance to a temple. These date back to around the time of Moses. Dale and I had a good look at them then. Today we were obliged to remain at 11,000 ft., and they were too small to photograph.

We have not yet achieved our goal of landing at a daily destination before dark: it was just after sunset when we touched down here in Khartoum. Insh'allah, we will finally achieve that goal by landing in Nairobi tomorrow afternoon. Posted by Barry at December 20, 2003 02:41 PM