Up in the Air in Mozambique

Using a small regional airport is a totally different experience than the one we normally have at LAX, our home mega-airport.  Here in Tete there is only one terminal and one runway.  There is no traffic and no trouble finding parking, but that's not an issue for us anyway, since we don't have a car.  The entrance is not too far from the main road, so it's not difficult to manage on public transport.  Last time our mini-bus driver was so excited for us, he left us right at the door instead of having us walk up the long drive-way.  Tete's airport was recently upgraded to an international facility, adding a direct flight from Johannesburg to accommodate all of the foreigners rushing in to exploit the province's mineral wealth.  It now has an x-ray machine and a metal detector, something the even smaller Chimoio airport, which we used for site delivery, does not have.  Security is much more mellow than in the US, sometimes they don't even check ID's, and e-tickets are usually just a handwritten list of names at the counter.  Once Luc only had a photocopy of his passport and it was no problem.  There is a balcony overlooking the long paved runway, so everyone waits there to see the plane arrive and depart.  At night time, you know the flight is arriving soon when the landing strip lights up, and the control tower turns on its beacon.   When the plane first appears, it looks like a star on the horizon, growing larger and larger, until finally it touches down, and the spectators applaud.  Since only a very select portion of the population has access to air transport it is the country's elite that monopolize the flights, which means you can have some interesting conversations with the people sitting next to you.  Last time Janet flew she met the National Director of Forests, the coach of the Women's National Basketball team (the current champions of the Southern Africa region), and several coal executives.  Another time Luc sat next to a sharply dressed Lebanese diamond smuggler flying to buy stones under embargo from nearby Zimbabwe to sell as if they had been mined legally in Mozambique.  LAM, Líneas Aereas de Moçambique, is the only domestic air carrier permitted in the country and their legal monopoly shuts out any hope for competition and guarantees poor service.  Luckily they have a good safety record, and their Brazilian planes are mostly new and comfortable.  Still, local English speakers call LAM 'Late and Maybe' since they  frequently cancel or delay flights without notice, or add extra destinations, like Janet's last flight which was scheduled as a direct, but made a stop in Quelimane, causing her to arrive two hours late in Maputo.  Once for our Reconnect Conference, our group of volunteers had already boarded and taken our seats when the flight attendant demanded that one of our colleagues disembark so a last minute VIP could take his place.  When he refused, she made our friend talk to one of the LAM bosses on the phone who tried to convince him to disembark.  When he still refused, the airline simply took all of our luggage off the plane as punishment and left it on the tarmac.  We got it a few days later, but we resented the insult more than the inconvenience.   The power went out during Janet's latest arrival, and since the luggage carousel is useless without energy, everyone had to go outside and look for their baggage on the little service hand carts.  Mozambique is a big country, so often times there's no feasible alternative to flying, especially living in far away Tete, so as long as LAM keeps getting us to and from our destinations safely, we shouldn't complain, especially if we compare it to a 35+ hour bus ride.