Almost there!

I'm over Somalia right now. From Qatar, we flew down the Arabian peninsula, across the Gulf of Aden, and onto the Horn of Africa. I've kept the flight map on my TV the whole way, keeping track of where I am. Of course, yesterday's flight was over the Atlantic for the first half, but then it got more interesting. We flew across Ireland and England, then across Europe, coming down the west coast of Türkiye. I had a super seat mate on that flight, a woman who is also traveling to Cape Town. She's studying at Wharton, and the two of us decided that neither of us understood the other's field of study. I know nothing about business.

Anyway, we were trying to figure what the flight path would be to get to Qatar. Clearly, no commercial aircraft is going to cross a conflict zone in the Middle East. We had figured that the flight would probably continue east and go south through Iraq. Wrong!

From Türkiye, we headed south across the Mediterranean and down the Sinai Peninsula. When we were south of the conflict zone, we turned east again, flying across Saudi Arabia. I did not have Sinai on my Bingo card.

Notice anything odd about the map? The program would zoom in on the flight path (I took the picture as it was zooming), but I don't think at any time the map had the word Israel on it. I could be wrong, but you can see Palestinian Territories and Jordan labeled, but not Israel. I guess the main reason I thought that was odd is that I had heard that Qatar was one of the nations trying to effect a resolution to what's happening in Israel and Gaza right now. And Qatar definitely recognizes Israel. Per Wikipedia: "Qatar established trade relations with the State of Israel in 1996, the first amongst all nations of the Arabian Peninsula..." Anyway, maybe Israel was on the map and maybe it wasn't. It certainly wasn't labeled in any of the photos I took.

I had longer than expected in Doha, due to a problem yesterday (a fuel spill) at the Cape Town airport. It delayed the flight from CT, so we're about 2 hours late. I enjoyed walking around that amazing airport though. Hamad International Airport has some cool stuff. There are some statues and other art (I missed the most famous, a bear statue of some kind).

I found the clown bizarre, but liked the golden pearls.

The airport shops are really high end! I just window shopped, as most of it was not stuff I'd buy even if it weren't way out of my budget. But the best part of the airport was a huge jungle garden. Within the garden there were many paths and benches, plus areas of fake grass. People were sitting or sleeping all over, but it wasn't crowded. It was very peaceful.

The garden was kept cool as the sun rose higher by misting hoses high in the trees. I got some coffee and a chocolate croissant and enjoyed some quiet time. By the way, it was going to be over 40˚C there today—that's over 104˚F. My only exposure to the heat was walking to and from the planes.

I've take so long to write this that we are about to cross the equator. We are offshore now, still along the coast of Somalia, but almost to Kenya. Still have 5.5 hours left to go. I'm pretty tired. I took a nap on the first flight, but my body was telling me that it wasn't bedtime yet. I took a brief nap on this flight, and felt refreshed, but it's catching up with me now. I may try for another nap.

I was trying to remember the last time I crossed the equator. I think it was when I was about 30, and I took a trip to Chile.

Next post will be from Cape Town!