The journey had been quite uncomfortable: the robot flight attendants on Uzbekistan Airlines had short-circuited, one after the other, a couple of hours after take-off.
At first, they started serving tea and boiling coffee, with the usual jet from their index finger (right for coffee, left for tea), onto the passengers instead of into the cups.
 
Then one of them switched the clearing programme with the erotic entertainment programme for Superfirst class customers.
A pensioner paid the price and almost died, while from the front of the plane you could hear someone shouting: “I'll stick that fork up your arse, you ugly pile of scrap metal”.
 
Two others were chasing each other between the seats, armed with broomsticks, tearing off all the oxygen masks and speaking seven languages at once in the style of “The Exorcist”.
In the end, it was almost a relief for the passengers to see them fall with a clang of metal and a few buzzing sounds of surrender. The flight continued with self-service snacks and assurances from 14-year-old captain John Katana Baraghelli:
"Welcome to “African Air Commander”, the real-life aerogame. Today we have chosen route C, we are playing at medium difficulty and at the height of Sudan we will receive a bonus of 30,000 kilometres, which will take the captain of this aircraft to sixth place in the online world ranking of charter pilots. We apologise for the inconvenience caused by the robot flight attendants. On the return flight, we will make up for it by offering a prize competition with the chance to win a trip on the shuttle boat over the pyramids of Egypt, with a stopover in the virtual oasis of Luxor."

The sunrise over snow-covered Kilimanjaro was a sight that took us by surprise.
All that blinding white and the streaks of fuchsia in the sky made those who were waking up rub their eyes and utter faint sounds of amazement.
I pointed the optical window towards the slopes of the great mountain and activated the zoom.
I saw deer, fallow deer, the royal ibex, the polar bear and traces of the Masai Yeti.
Anyone who managed to photograph it would win a 980-megapixel digital camera.
Snow also partially covered Amboseli Park.
I had been told that there would be a risk of ice when travelling to Malindi in January, but I had chosen this trip to see the animals: the arrival of the spotted lynx in the savannah, the coastal lion, the domestic giraffe and other mutant species of the third African millennium.
I didn't care much about the much-vaunted Atlantis of the Indian Ocean.
I had been there as a child with my parents, but back then Silversand beach was still there and you could swim.
Although we had been promised that the Malindi International Airport would be inaugurated that week and that our flight would be the first to land directly in the town, everything had been postponed to a date to be determined.
So we landed at Mombasa airport at eight in the morning.
The computerised baggage carousel was stuck, so we were forced to walk with our luggage, retrieved with the case card from the belly of the plane, for two hundred metres along a tunnel with a temperature below zero.
The African winter is no joke.
In the customs capsules, however, the heating was on full blast. As usual, the infrared rays stripped me naked (the control officers laughed at the size of my sexual organ), examined me and found something wrong.
A bottle of eye drops and a nail file.
A blue light flashed intermittently and an Arabic-sounding siren went off.
I felt like I was inside a jukebox. The customs officer arrived, a skinny black man riding an electric scooter with a liquid crystal display visor.
He communicated through the monitor without opening the capsule in which I was imprisoned.
‘Eye drops are against the rules, you can't carry liquids,’ he said in a metallic voice after activating the simultaneous translator.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn't know.’
‘Impossible,’ said the officer's translator, ‘even children know that. Then there's a knife.’
‘It's a nail file.’
‘Knife.’
‘Nail file.’
‘How much do I owe you?’
‘Keep it.’
The officer pressed a special button.
‘Have a nice stay in Kenya, hakuna matata,’ and two more minutes of various nonsense.
‘Thank you.’
The capsule opened and I finally made it to the airport exit.

The Mombasa wind immediately hit me.
The fur-clad taxi drivers looked up from their tablets.
‘Nec zumka don huang dedrescny agraf ma?’ one of them said to me.
‘Ak máte ísnyeska ling hu Malindi tam vezmem!’ added another.
They spoke Chinese, Slovak, Turkish.
Not one of them knew Italian.
Then an old man appeared, bent over, with wild eyes.
‘Italian? Half a century ago there were many of you... I was a beach boy, they called me Toblerone...’
‘Toblerone?’
‘Yes, because of my big chocolate bar between my legs. Now I tie it to my thigh with an elastic band... want to see?’
‘No, never mind, thanks. And now, what do you do for a living?’
‘Nothing, I'm unemployed. I'm too old to learn to ski or ride the ski lift.’
Just then, a double-decker Malindi Shuttle arrived.
You got in by inserting your credit card next to the door. I inserted my card, but the mechanism jammed.
‘Oh, holy sh...’
The driver arrived, kicked the door twice, and the technological elephant of sheet metal spat out my card and opened the door. I was glad that something in Kenya had remained the same.
Leaving the airport, the bus took the ring road and then tried to enter the tunnel that passed under the harbour canal. But the city's mega underwater junction was impassable. Two mkokoteni carts, one carrying potatoes and the other coal, had collided and overturned, and the two drivers were still arguing while waiting for the police to arrive.
‘You crushed ten kilos of potatoes,’ said one.
‘Make mashed potatoes out of them, you idiot. You crushed my coal!’
‘Here, cook your potatoes in foil, you moron!’
The problem was that since the Chinese had solved their traffic problems with these monumental works, there were no alternative routes. So we had to wait two and a half hours in the cold.
‘Sorry, there's a fault with the bus heating system,’ warned the driver. 
Luckily, there was a documentary on TV about the chalets in Tsavo East in Russian with Cantonese subtitles.
Sitting next to me was a Korean couple who had come hoping to see the Northern Lights.
In front of us, a group of Norwegian schoolchildren were worried about the ski racks on the roof of the vehicle.
We arrived in Malindi before evening.
Seeing the Kilifi creek frozen at sunset was an incredible sight.
At Mida, the driver got out to put chains on the bus.
But he didn't have the original ones; he had brought chains with a padlock that he had borrowed from a mzungu's villa.
 
We arrived in Malindi at ten o'clock, while bicycles ridden by fur-clad young people cheerfully overtook us.
At Flavio I airport, we were greeted by fog.
It was a blanket of smog.
The bright Chinese signs on the buildings guided the bus towards the centre to drop off each of the passengers.
We passed White Mountain, the exclusive pub-restaurant and disco on the slopes.
Then we stopped at Karen Freezer and Brr Brr.
There was also Pata-Agonia, which was full, packed with elderly customers, all completely frozen.
“How do they stand it?” I asked the driver.
‘They've been living here for many years, they were hibernated there of their own free will.’
‘Ah, I see.’
I asked to be dropped off at the White Mammoth, the charming resort of a 112-year-old Tuscan artist who made beautiful ice sculptures of extinct animals such as rhinos, giraffes and jaguars. But we couldn't get there. The road ended at the small square, which had become a fortress on the sea that reminded me of Saint Malò in Brittany. There were bars promising hot chocolate and mango punch. 
‘How do we get any further?’ I asked the driver.
‘Either you take the hydrofoil or you go down the underwater passage.’
It was just as I had been told. After the Indian Ocean had eaten away the beach on this side and entered the hotels, Silversand and Casuarina sank beneath the sea. In order not to lose everything, the entrepreneurs, with a stroke of genius that only we Italians can muster when we are really in the shit, created the first underwater tourist resort in Africa and the world.
Before getting out, I looked for the black market money changers.
A mzungu approached me, and I thought he was looking for them too.
‘Russian? Romanian? Where you come from?’ With his bizarre pronunciation, he could only be a fellow countryman.
‘I'm Italian like you, good morning.’
‘Ah, good, nice to meet you! My name is Simba, I was born in Frosinone but I've been living here for twenty years. Do you want some shillings? The exchange rate is good today...!’
‘But look, I'd wait for the Muslims who are always around here.’
‘They used to hang around here... now they run banks, one of them owns Malindi Tiktok TV... the money changers are me and another guy called Tommaso, but everyone knows him as Abarigani.’
How strange.
I changed my money and headed towards the underwater tunnel.
Entrance fee: one thousand shillings, ah but...
The tunnel was pressurised and heated, full of glass windows on the right and left.
On one side, you could enter bars, restaurants and boutiques.
There was I Love Pesce, then the Ostricheria and the Baby Marlin.
On the other side was the world under the sea.
But I also saw the shacks of the Curio Market, the sellers of shellfish, life jackets and diving suits. I couldn't believe it: they were covered in diving suits and breathed through very long tubes. I stopped at Coral Key and met the Italian console, Cassandra.
She was very kind and explained everything to me: ‘We're fine down here, tourism has picked up again and we have more freedom. The only problem is the oxygen supply from Power & Air, which sometimes stops working. We always have to have lots of spare tanks, otherwise there's a general rush to the surface.’
‘I imagine diving is very popular... but what about those who want to go to the beach?’
‘We take them to Venice 2, a group of small islands off the coast of Mayungu, with artificial LED sunlight, of course.’
‘Ah, yes... I knew them by another name.’
I said goodbye to the console and headed towards the marine park.
Here I found another Italian, a man called Oscar, with a kiosk selling odds and ends.
 
‘Want to go underwater?’ he asked me. ‘I'll rent you a diving suit. Come on, try it! Only 1,000 shillings an hour.’
I let myself be persuaded and put on the diving suit with a 50-metre-long tube.
Here I was in Neptune's kingdom! I was thrilled to realise that I wasn't the only mzungu.
 
It was full of underwater tourists!
There were women lying on sunbeds wedged between the corals, sunbathing with special tanning suits. One had a lobster on a leash and was stroking it gently, while another couldn't stay on the bottom because her large fake lips kept pushing her back up to the surface.
 
Some people were doing crossword puzzles in waterproof e-books.
Behind a rock, I also saw an older man who had found a girl “different from all the others” and was having a great time... but, oh my God! She was really different from the other women!
She was a black mermaid!
And she wasn't wearing a diving suit!
 
A mutant mermaid!
At that moment, two local boys approached me and asked if I wanted some seaweed to smoke or coral powder to sniff.
They were beach boys, also without masks or snorkels.
 
How could they breathe?
They surrounded me, blowing bubbles in my face, while the mermaid rubbed herself against me with her sensual scales.
Sea monsters, help!
An overweight old man with lots of white hair came to my rescue, sitting comfortably in a large pressurised ball that rolled here and there.
‘Dear tourist,’ he said, ‘the Giriama have been living under the sea for twenty years. In order to survive, they once learned Italian in ten minutes, Russian in a day and Chinese in a week. Do you think that in twenty years, in order to sell you something, they haven't learned to breathe underwater?’