I was excited about my birthday this year. Something about being so close to 30 makes me feel like I have almost, maybe, come to verge of “arriving”. Arriving to true adulthood or maturity or something. When you are 23 and you present your wild and crazy ideas to the world, people smile sympathetically, pat you on your head, and tell you that it is simply your naivety that makes you think the way you do. But when you tell someone you are 30, they are suddenly a little less justified in assuming that “life” will eventually jade your rose coloured glasses. I am not for a second suggesting that I know all there is to know or have seen even a fraction of all there is to see in my 29 years on this earth – but it is nice to be given a little bit of the credit that living life grants you.
Back to the point – I was ready to turn 29.
And thanks to a small rock on a particularly long runway at Banjul International Airport, I rang in the beginning of my 30th year of life with an experience that I can now add to my list of ways I have lived.
So, it all started with a bird. Or what we thought was a bird and turned out to be a rock. We had stopped in Banjul – capital city of the Gambia – to drop off about half of our flightmates and would have been carrying on and arriving in Freetown, Sierra Leone, approximately an hour later.
Except that we never took off. The plane sped down the runway and just as we would have been about to take off …
“THUNK” ….. followed by a smooth deceleration….. followed by a screeching stop (when the runway, which ironically and thankfully is significantly longer than the average runway, ended).
The captain came on the overhead to announce that a bird had flown into the engine and we would have to taxi back to the airport to check the plane and make sure it was safe to fly.
At which point, I decided that I wasn’t going to see the Africa Mercy any time soon. Because you see folks, this was not my first time in West Africa. Within a few minutes, a crowd of people had gathered around the plane – some of whom appeared official with uniforms or fluorescent vests; others of whom seemed to just have shown up because there seemed to be some commotion. Some people started crawling inside the engine. One dude shone his pen light into the cavity in an apparent effort to help identify the problem. Cameras were out and everyone seemed to have an opinion about what was wrong and how to fix it. Our stewardess even ended up out there having a look. Just didn’t seem like an effective recipe for “airplane repair following bird damage”.
To no surprise, three hours later, after having checked in to a lovely Gambian hotel courtesy of Brussels Airlines, I was sitting down to my first African dinner in over a year with all 150 of my flight 0225 mates, under a blanket of palm trees, minilights, and stars.
And two days later, I turned 29 and found myself still stranded in the Gambia – which turned out to be about the loveliest place on earth to be stranded on one’s birthday. Between pina colodas, a trip to a treetop café, a cherrycheesecake – esque dessert that the hotel chef made for me (which ironically tasted terribly, considering how beautiful it was) , and pretty much lying by the pool for the entire day…..I really couldn’t have asked for anything more.
That, plus the fact that after traveling the entire next night, I finally did arrive, safely and soundly on the ship, made me a fairly happy, legitimate almost 30-year-old.
