I had jokingly referred to the possibility of flying Borat Air on the last leg. I wasn’t far wrong. The terminal, which was different from our arrival terminal, was a Soviet relic and was decaying at every turn. A brief excursion upstairs was met with echoes and creaking wooden floors that threatened to give way with every other step. Entire sections of the exterior facade had fallen loose. Dilapidated airplanes and helicopters were everywhere in the knee level grass beyond the cracked and faded asphalt tarmac.
Some of the planes looked WW2 era that had been repainted for civilian use. That probably was not the case, but that was the impression. One craft even had a glass nose below the cockpit, just like a plastic military model that I had assembled as a child. I quietly hoped that I would be able to sit in the turret and man the machine gun as we flew over the countryside.
The reality was worse.
The only plane that stirred the air in the two hours that we waited was the one that had arrived from our destination and would make a return trip with us. It honestly looked as if 60 or 70 people disembarked from a craft that had only 24 seats! We later learned that the specific airline was not above flying with passengers standing up inside the plane.
The plane itself was a Yakovlev “Yak” 40, a craft popular for regional transport across the former Soviet Union. We could not help but laugh when we saw the 60’s era craft and as we got closer the harder our laughter became. The paint was faded beyond hope and a 15 section of Bondo discolored one side of the fuselage. The stairs used to load many boxes of cargo before our curious eyes were the same stairs that we ascended into the butt-end of the aircraft to be greeted by the luggage hold–two sets of shelves to our right–and 24 green fabric covered seats, with worn carpet toned between brown and orange. The boxes that we watched being loaded into the “cargo hold” were now in the front part of the cabin just beyond the seats. The left front of the seating area was willed with equipment from a vodka swilling extreme sports team on their way to a holiday celebration. The imbibed freely of drink that they brought on board, though if their behavior indicated drunkenness then they were plenty lit with they arrived at the airport to begin their trip.
When we began to taxi, the physical feeling of the plane was hard to describe. At one point it felt as if the tires had flat spots on all sides and at another if felt as if the main shock absorber had been replaced with the mainspring of a flea-market wrist watch. In spite of it all, we had a perfectly executed takeoff and landing two hours later. K—l, the capital of T–a, was absolutely gorgeous from the air with a clean, blue hued river at its edge, yet proved to be the same architectural makeup as every other former Soviet nation once viewed from the ground.
During our Moscow layover, our M friends were informed that the only hotel in K—l was either booked or they could not find our reservations. The hotel did not take reservations by phone–only by fax. The fax, however, did not go to the hotel; it went to a fax machine down the street. There, apparently, there was no rhyme or reason as to if or when the faxed request was actually taken to the hotel. So here we were, half-way around the world and mere hours from our destination with no assurance of a place to stay. The “F-word” of missions came to mind at this point–“flexibility.” So, we journeyed on with the possibility that we would be sleeping at the airport, though a subsequent call to a new contact in country gave us hope that some type of room would be able to be attained.
Our goal in going to this particular region was to try and engage a particular UPG [the Tuvan (Tuvin) peoples] having a pretty strong certainty that little access to the gospel existed outside the capital city. Imagine our wonder to find out that God had worked an utterly astounding circumstance in our favor. The only full day that we were to spend in the region was a national holiday during which people would come from all the outlying areas to the capital city to celebrate. Many dignitaries and even President Vladimir Putin were scheduled to be in K—l at the same time we were. (We later found out that out of the 88 regions that it was possible for Putin to visit during his time hosting Prince Albert of Monaco, he had chosen T–a. We also were informed that he was responsible for us losing our hotel reservation as the government party chose there to billet. The third photo down in the linked article shows a line of well wishers greeting the president; it’s the same line we were in as evidenced by the building seen in the upper left background. Due to time constraints we were unable to allow the President to meet us see the President.)
My heart truly quickened with anticipation over the news.
