Bill Bryson's African Diary Read Online Free PDF

didn’t put the windscreen wiper on, then looked more closely and saw there wasn’t a windscreen wiper. I glanced across at Nick and we shared a single telepathic thought: There’s no windscreen wiper!
    Actually two thoughts: There’s no windscreen wiper and we’re all going to die!
    Nino was now bobbing around in his seat in the manner of someone who is trying to land an airplane while being attacked by fire ants. It appeared that from looking out the side window he could get a very rough fix on our location, but only very rough evidently because twice he banked very sharply, as if swerving out of the path of a big building or something.
This was rapidly becoming worse than my worst nightmare.
    But still he pressed on. For one long minute, nothing much happened.
We just flew forward in a seemingly straight line, continuously descending. When we were some small distance above the ground—70 or 80 feet, say—and there was still nothing to be seen in front of us, I was pretty comfortably certain that we were going to die in the next few seconds. I remember being appalled, peeved even, but nothing more than that.
    And then bang—and I use the word advisedly, of course—right before us, rushing at us at a ridiculously accelerated speed, was a runway. Nino tilted the plane and dropped us with the sort of suddenness that made our hats rise off our heads. We landed hard and decidedly off center, and for a long moment—the one truly frightening moment of the whole episode—it seemed that he wouldn’t be able to keep control, that we would hit the grass and somersault into a thousand pieces. But he managed to hold us steady and after a small eternity we came to a stop just outside a hangar.
    “I’m naming my first child Nino,” Dan said quietly.
    Nick was staring at his hand and a large piece of fuselage that he seemed to have pulled off in the course of the landing.
    Nino took off his headset and turned around beaming. “Sorry about that, chaps,” he said. “Had a little trouble spotting the runway.”
    “W-w-why is there no windscreen wiper?” I asked with difficulty.
    “They’re no use with a single engine,” he said, pointing to the propeller directly in front. “Best wiper in the world couldn’t keep up with the spray off that thing.”
    Somehow this didn’t seem an entirely satisfactory explanation, but I was happy to leave it at that. Besides, I had a sudden overwhelming urge to drink my body weight in alcohol.
    And I can tell you this for certain now: however many years are left to me and wherever fate takes me, the only way I will ever be killed by a light aircraft is if one falls on me.

Thursday, October 3
    And So
to western Kenya. We set off bright and early to drive to Kisumu, Kenya’s third city, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Kisumu is only about 300 kilometers west of Nairobi, but the roads are potholed and slow for much of the way, so we had to allow five hours to get there. I didn’t care. None of us did. We were four feet off the ground and wouldn’t get any higher all day.
    The countryside was gorgeous—green and grassy with long views to the rugged Mau Escarpment in one direction and to the green hills of Aberdares National Park and central highlands in the other, all beneath vast blue skies and baking sun. Here and there along the heights overlooking the Rift Valley there were roomy laybys where you could pull off to take in the views, each with 15 or 20 forlorn trinket and souvenir stalls waiting for customers who these days mostly never come. There was wildlife, too—families of baboons dining on road kill along the shoulder, herds of impalas and zebras dotting the grasslands, soda lakes carpeted with thousands of bright pink flamingoes. There was no question that we were in Africa now.
    Kisumu has the distinction of being the poorest city in Kenya. Almost half the people live on 50 cents a day or less. Curiously, it looked more prosperous than many of the other places we had