Recently on a flight to Dar es Salaam...

I looked outside the window as we crossed the Italian Alps and saw heavy snow cover, consistent with the record cold weather that Europe experienced at the end of March and in early April.

Less than two hours later our plane entered Libyan airspace and the desert below provided a stark contrast to the landscape I had seen over Italy. The temperatures were also obviously equally remarkably different.

A few days earlier, in Belgium and Germany, I had experienced what was reported as the coldest temperatures for late March in a hundred years.

In less than 16 hours I experienced the sweltering heat of Dar es Salaam and wondered whether I would rather be back in the bitter cold weather of Europe of a few days earlier.