Cheese-Burundi-Plane

I had written a nice long post last week and the ol' internet quit out on me as I sent it. So it goes.

In it I talked about the at-the-time hot gossip in Kindu. We had had a pretty bad rain storm that afternoon (incidentally I was on a boat on a the Congo river with no raincoat and arrived so what that I could squeeze water out of my underwear, but this is a different story). A cargo/passenger plane, after circling the airport three times, decided that he could land. And he did, only instead of touching down at the end of the runway, he hit towards the middle and just kept on going. This wasnt one of those little cessna planes. It was a jet. The landing gear was destroyed and the wings were quite damaged (apparently it wobbled and the wings scraped the ground). Luckily no one was hurt, but the plane raced by the bolivian and indian camps. Can you imagine being in the shower and seeing a plane out the window? Now the darn thing is just stuck in the field, like a boat in a sea of yellowed grass, and no one is moving it.

I had a week in Kinshasa and have just gotten back to Kindu. My luggage is in Burundi, a tiny little country east of the Congo, which I somehow transited through. Now, among other things, I am without my toothbrush, ipod charger, and cheddar cheese. Yes, cheddar. I was so happy to find it in Kinshasa so I bought it with the intention that it would only spend a few hours outside a frigde. That was two days ago, and now it is sight-seeing in Burundi with it's buddy Goat Cheese. Next time I will wisely put it in my carry on.