Ghana memoirs – the flight over the Sahara

The flight from Dubai to Accra takes a little under eight hours, six of which are over the desert lands of the Arabian Peninsula and the African Sahara. I was elated over the possibility that we might be flying over Egypt, but that was not to be. The plane turned southwest and flew over Saudi Arabia and Sudan, then headed straight west over Chad and Niger, before turning south again to hit the Atlantic coast and follow it to Accra.

It is a day flight, over a sandy waste interspersed with dark brown hills and mountains, otherwise mostly featureless and harshly reflecting the sunlight. The reflected glare off the lifeless, endless wasteland was so strong that the airline crew asked us to down the window shutters, and that is how we travelled for the entire six hours over the Arabian Desert, the Red Sea and the Sahara. At 40,000 feet we could sense the heat… it is easy to imagine how terrible it is on the ground !! Time to time I would raise the shutter a couple of inches to peek down – the view rarely changed, except for shape of the sand dunes and the brown hills here and there…..  

To think that there are so many countries in this area, each of them ready to fight or die for a piece of land that holds virtually no life, is to come to terms with the frailties of the human mind, the inherent fallacies of our thought processes…..

The only beautiful and heart-warming feature of this endless waste lay in the Sudanese part of the Sahara - the Nile, cutting across the desert, its turquoise blue waters silently meandering north, with patches of grasslands and familiar green-brown stripes of agricultural fields on either side, standing out in stark contrast to the yellow sands immediately beyond.

On one of these flights we hit a sandstorm over the Sahara. Its intensity was such that the plane kept bouncing even at 40,000 feet and all on-board services had to be stopped for a while. Outside the window nothing could be seen, except for a bright yellow cloud – so bright that even sunglasses did not help, and the shutters had to be drawn. We flew through the storm for well over an hour.

It is said that these sandstorms over the Sahara can be seen from the International Space Station as they carry fine sand to the Atlantic Ocean to the west.

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The return flight is in the evening. It flies east along the Atlantic coast for some time before turning north to cross Nigeria and Niger. Then it turns east over Libya and flies over Egypt and Saudi Arabia to reach Dubai.

All we could see for most of the time were a brilliantly star-studded sky in a deep purple-blue hue and an inky black nothingness below, which met along a horizon, faintly visible in the star-light. That was the Sahara at night.

A few hours into the flight, I noticed an array of brilliant lights stretching into the horizon to meet the stars above. Switched on the plane’s monitor to check – we were approaching Luxor in Egypt. As we got closer, the Nile was visible as a black ribbon running through a brilliant pattern of yellow lights on either side. I do not recall having seen a more brilliantly-lit city in recent times. We were flying too high above Luxor for me to make out any of its famous monuments, but the brilliance of its city lights, against the backdrop of the velvety black Sahara and under a diamond studded sky will remain etched in my mind for a long time...

I have tried to capture this night view of the Sahara in one of my poems :

“... Deep blue night o’er a sleeping land;

Blood-red dawn across desert sand –

Flying high with the sun so low

That quickly turns into a fiery glow;

But my home and hearth; they

Beckon me, wherever I go !!

Two-hour sunsets and four-hour nights;

Endless days on morning flights –

Over forests, plains and coasts we go

Over burning deserts and mountain snow;

But my home and hearth; they

Beckon me, wherever I go !!”