Monday, October 20, 2008

Counting The Hours En-Route


Current Location: Tamale, Ghana / 9° 24′ 27″ N, 0° 51′ 12.24″ W

It starts to get tiring after hour five of being in mid-air. First to go are the cluster of muscles on your neck. It begins as a subtle stiffness, then before you know it, all feeling is lost and you slowly put yourself into mental retard position--head tilted to one side, eyes wide open, and saliva dripping down your mouth. OK, maybe I'm exxagerating just a little bit, but you get the point. Sixteen hours of extraneous flying can drive any photog crazy.

At hour eight, my eyes start to blur--and for the life of me, I cannot sleep. Babies cry from four rows down and two old geezers behind me are arguing about what to get their grand kids for Christmas. My blurred vision is extremely disconcerting. As a precaution, I reach for my small bottle of
Visine and start dropping dribbles into each eye. I repeat this every ten minutes until I run out of Visine. Shit.

By hour eighteen I crumple into a hotel bed located somewhere in Accra, Ghana. My mind and body are too exhausted to even care where I'm at. As the darkness, heat, and exhaustion seeps in, I grope for my alarm clock. I have about four hours to sleep before I must wake and head to Northern Ghana.

The next four hours were indeed the best of my life.



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