Israel to Ethiopia


Sunday, January 12, 2020

Everything went just as it was supposed to!  Finally, a travel day which went right.

Last evening I took Leah to the Ben Gurion Airport in the early evening for her flight to JFK, and was back at our apartment in Jerusalem in time to get to bed for a good night’s sleep.  Up at 5 AM, and the taxi we had arranged was waiting for us at 6 AM.  Check in went smoothly, but it was at the gate that we began to feel that we were going somewhere exotic.  The four of us, Carol and Paul Goldberg, Joyce and I, didn’t look much like most of our fellow travelers on the plane to Addis Ababa:




The Boeing 787 was just about full—that’s around 300 people.  It’s clear that the geopolitics of the Middle East and East Africa influence air corridors.  If you were to make a line on a map from Tel Aviv to Addis Ababa, well, we didn’t follow it.  We took off from Ben Gurion Airport and traveled southeast until we hit the Dead Sea, where we turned south and followed the Israeli border all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba.  At the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba, four countries come together—from west to east, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.  The weather was beautifully clear, so it was easy to see us carefully fly over Israel and the resort city of Eilat, and on over the water.  We then flew straight down the middle of the Gulf to the Red Sea, and south over the Red Sea.  I was wondering when we’d turn west, and the choices were to fly over Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, and/or Eritrea.  We stayed over the water until Eritrea and then turned inland.



The terrain where we turned west was the most forbidding you can imagine.  It looked like desert sands with black treeless hills and mountains.  It looked like a moonscape.


We arrived in Addis Ababa without incident, and had a little panic when one of Carol and Paul Goldberg’s suitcases didn’t arrive until after everyone else’s, but it finally came.  We are at the Sheraton Addis, a lovely hotel, but there was pretty significant security just getting into the hotel—like at the airport, with metal detectors and x-ray for the bags.

At dinner we met another of the nine in our group.  The trip formally starts tomorrow afternoon at 1:30.  More then.

Comments

  1. PeggyKJanuary 12, 2020 at 1:51 PM

    I am a long time follower of Paul’s posts (and have known him and Carol since 1960) and look forward to reading yours as well now that there will be “dueling posts”.
    Peggy

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ralph P. LockeJanuary 12, 2020 at 2:40 PM

    Fascinating about the air corridors. Makes sense, all things considered. Wow, that land is startling from the air. I once flew over something similar out West (the Badlands?--I wasn't looking at a map).

    Ralph

    ReplyDelete

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