The photo of the bags of grain remind me of a trip into Gondar. I was in Ethiopia on an airland detachment, later on in the RAF's time out there when it had started to rain. Gondar was a short dirt strip facing a large hill, so we landed towards the hill and took off away from it. I had previously been up to the storage shed for the grain and seen the stockpile they had there - we were delivering it more quickly than they could distribute it - so there was no real pressure to get in there.
Anyway this day there was a huge thunderstorm over the hill and as we approached we could see on the weather radar that it was moving towards the strip. Definitely not a day to go around! After landing it was just beginning to rain. I said to the Loady that I would give him 5 minutes and then we were closing up and getting out of there and take back whatever was left of the load.
As you can see from the earlier photo, it was all manually off loaded. We had our Loady, a young mover and the locals. We started the stop watch and after 3 1/2 minutes I asked how they were doing and got the reply " Just tidying up, start taxying and I'll let you know when I am ready". They had manually offloaded 25000 lbs in that time - and our loady had just gone up hugely in our estimation.
After the first sortie out of Addis Ababa each day, we used to load up from a strip at Assab which is on the Red Sea coast. At first glance you wondered why the strip was parallel to the coast, but a visit in the afternoon when the sea breeze had got going showed why - 40 kts blowing down the strip was not uncommon. One day, after a discussion about Khe Sanh over a beer or 2 the night before, I did one of these approaches into Assab. For those who haven't seen them, they are quite impressive and the stronger the headwind, the better they are. We landed and taxied in and parked by the storage shed. Normally the locals were ready and grain was being onloaded as we shut down. Today there was nobody to be seen so I walked over to the shed and they looked at me in amazement. When I asked why they weren't loading the aircraft, the chargehand said "We saw you coming in but thought you had crashed so we came back in here to wait for the next aircraft". To give them their due, there were crashed aircraft close to a number of the airfields we used - in particular one off either end of the runway at Addis.