Transcript
It's a bit unusual for Navy folks to go to an airport to leave their family behind for, you know, I think it was, we thought we were going to be over there for about six months. So not that unusual for us, you know, to do that, but to actually go to an airport and do that was a bit of a novel thing for us.
So yeah, we flew out of Sydney, we met up with the contingent, went through the, you know, security, immigration, you know, customs and immigration. And then, you know, just started sort of getting your thoughts together. Flew over to Perth, and then from Perth to Harare in Zimbabwe and just overnighted there, which was a bit of an interesting place to go.
First time I stepped foot in Africa, I'd always spent most of my time sort of in the Pacific or up in Southeast Asia. So overnight in Zimbabwe, and then from Zimbabwe into Nairobi, and then spending a couple of days in Nairobi, just acclimatising, working out who was doing what, and then getting a UN charter flight into Mogadishu with a bunch of UN civilians, as well as the Australian contingent that was going in on that particular day, which was very interesting, because part of the part of the process of us getting over there was we, we had to carry some weapons with us.
So, you know, getting those on to aircraft and getting them off was a little bit interesting. But once we got on to this, we got onto a, what they call an L100, which is a civilian version of a Hercules, you know, the old Hercules aircraft, got on board the aircraft and then started sort of buckling up and sitting down and, you know, getting basically told what we were going to be doing as soon as we got to the other end, and then started, you know, the reality of it all was starting to put the weapon together.
You know, we had it in a few pieces, just so we could get through what we needed to get to. And then just waiting for the, I think it was about an hour's flight from Nairobi into Mogadishu. And then, you know, you could see the civilians on the other side, which had come from all over the world to sort of help out there realising that maybe they were sort of going into somewhere as well, that was not quite, you know, as stable as what people might have made it out to be.
The flight in was pretty straightforward. Aircraft landed, taxied through to, the UN had an apron, an area where they park their aircraft. And the movement control unit at the airport was Australian, and with some Kiwis, who were helping unload aircraft and doing some of the supply work, met us on the ramp. The ramp come down, the heat hits you, you know, and then the juices start flowing because you're sort of not really sure what you're up to.
