To Infinity (and back in the New Year)

A year ago Mercy Air was generously given a Piper Seneca III which we used quite extensively during 2013. The plan from the start though was to sell it and use some of the money to replace one of the engines on our Cessna 310.

Late last year a buyer was found and the process started to ferry the plane to its new home. Turns out the buyer was an airline pilot from Kenya which is four big African countries away from where we are. A trip that even cruising at 300 kph would take two days. We had hoped this would happen in November but paperwork delays meant that in order to deliver it in the 2013 calendar year, we had to travel on 30th and 31st December.

The weather for the days we flew

Due to the weather we had to pre-position the plane at the local international airport a few days prior to the flight and the day we left (at 05:30) the weather wasn't very good at all. In fact we were in cloud and rain for the first hour but then, a bright spot and even a glimpse of the sun and then, blue sky and a requirement for sunglasses.

The obligatory in flight shot.

So apart from the initial clag the first four hour leg from Nelspruit to Blantyre, Malawi was quite uneventful. The turnaround at Blantyre was quick and we were only on the ground for an hour before pointing ourselves north again and setting sail for Dodoma in Tanzania, another four hours away.

We flew along almost all of the eastern shore of Lake Malawi which is huge and equivalent the distance between London to Glasgow.

The Cape McClear Peninsula at the bottom of Lake Malawi

Just as we crossed the border into Tanzania the clouds got a bit more organised and we had to do a bit of dodging.

It's hard to get the scale here but even at 13000 ft many were still towering way above us and the tops were rolling around like naughty boys fighting under a blanket.

Eventually they gave way to a more predictable pattern and we arrived at Dodoma and landed at the airstrip in the middle of town.

Some of the MAF guys had graciously made themselves available during the Christmas break and put us up in a house on their compound which had a swimming pool. Turns out this is an excellent idea in a hot and dusty place.

On the last day of the year we took off for the last time to complete the last Mercy Air flight in the Seneca. Despite this it was still the first time I had flown at 13000 ft and had higher terrain showing on the GPS - the orange and red in the picture below.

This was Kilimanjaro and Meru Peak which were safely about 65 miles away.

What it looked like out of the window.

Kilimanjaro seemingly floating above the vast African plains

How to pass the time on long flights - take another selfie

The last landing followed all the other lasts and the aircraft was delivered to its new owner at Wilson Airport, Nairobi.

Turns out he was still busy with his own day job on New Years Eve but invited my to fly jump seat on his Dash 8-100 that afternoon.

Call it a bus-man's holiday but despite over 10 hours in a little plane the previous two days I jumped at the chance.

We flew down to the coast just south of Mombasa

And back!

We spent a few days in Nairobi while the plane got checked out and the Kenyan paperwork and bank transfer were completed. Then we boarded a half full Kenyan Airways 737-800 for a less than exciting four hour flight back to Johannesburg.

So, our little adventure involved 1770 miles (2850 km) which is enough to get you from London to well past Moscow or very almost from the UK to Canada.

Thank you

Paul and Cathy

Blood, sweat and gears.

It must be said that we do go cycling quite a lot. Social rides, races, keeping fit before or after work rides. So much so that we don't really blog about it too much. People might think it's all we ever do!

But last weekend we went out for a little jaunt which didn't quite end as expected.

We did some nice flowing single track bush tunnels on one side of the valley - see: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151756562466895
and then Cathy drove Willem and I up the hill on the other side.

So there's this Avalanche... where you get taken up a mountain to the start and then clap it back down to the valley. Mostly downhill, minimal pedalling, just point and shoot really.

The weather was brill and we were going great guns - at first, until Willem's world started to take on a different slant.

 

Cause - operator error, he wasn't even going that fast.

After verbally checking he was OK I gave him a thumbs up which could be considered the mountain bike version of the Strictly Come Dancing score cards, and to let him know that I was also OK.

 

His groans did encourage me to take a closer look and get some video evidence in case it was needed by a coroner later.

 

Turns out that wasn't necessary and all was good so we re-mounted and pointed ourselves downhill again. Beautiful scenery, perfect weather, single track as twisty as a politician's excuse, down down deeper and down. [I want all the world to see...]

So there's this tunnel on this avalanche... A big corrugated iron one that allows a whole valley's worth of water to drain under a road.

This was taken on a previous visit when it wasn't quite so wet. We entered the tunnel

 

You can tell by both these pics that it is also fairly long. Long enough that after a few metres you can't see the wall, or the floor, or the ceiling. In fact all you can see is a little dot at the end.

It's also, therefore, fairly hard to know whether you're in the middle, and as it happens you only need to be a few inches to one side before the angle between slippery wet tyres and slippery wet corrugated iron exceeds the value required to stay upright.

There was a thump and some loud groans and a fair amount of pain before I managed to get back on my feet. I've fallen off my bike before but I knew this wasn't a good one. I dragged myself out of the tunnel and we both looked at the damp squidgy redness and decided not to investigate further until we had cycled the last 5 km to the car. Turns out I'd landed on one of the bolts that hold the corrugated sections together - but we didn't know that then.

Once there, a peeling back of the shorts revealed a large hole out of which parts of me had already exited. That was the also the cue for Cathy to go into hospital mode. Nee na nee na.

But that was a 50 km drive and a short limp away.

 

It was actually a day clinic and once they saw the furrow in my thigh...

 

and prodded it a bit... they said it was far too serious for them so...

..they dressed it and packed me straight off to a big hospital.

The surgeon wasn't available till the next day so there was a bed, a sleep and the first night.

Early the next morning a man in a white coat visited me and asked a few questions and said he'd see me again at 09:00. But that wasn't before another man in a gown asked similar questions and said he'd be able to put me to sleep in under 10 seconds. He was right, and an hour later I woke up with a 12 rung via ferrata up my thigh.

The stability of the whole thing was still somewhat in question so there was a bed, a sleep and a second night.

Turns out the nurses in this hospital aren't half bad, especially if you can bring your own.

Another doctor type person visited on the third day and was murmuring words suggesting a fourth day, but a bit of fast talking by the personal medic convinced him to let us vacate the premises and continue the convalescence back home.

So, I managed to get home on C'mas Eve and also managed to avoid a certain amount of C'mas shopping.

Good stuff.

Paul and Cathy

Incommunicado

The Long Walk to Communication

On the night of 6th October our telephone cables were stolen.

There was a 700 metre length strung between the poles from the road, across the fields and down to our offices. Now the only purpose served by the poles seems to be as somewhere for our resident Crested Eagle to perch.

Two months later Telkom came, on a Sunday, with a big JCB and a load of men and dug a trench alongside the airstrip into which they threw a cable. Problem was that the cable wasn't quite long enough and stopped a good 100m short of where it was supposed to end up. How hard can it be to measure 700m accuratley?

This is how short the first attempt was.

If we misjudged distance like that it would be called landing short of the runway and would cost us a few million dollars and possible a life or two.

So another week goes by before the missing metres are replaced. Then after another week we get a message that Telkom aren't going to sort the problem out cos they can't afford to replace cables that are stolen so often. 'But this is the first time our cables have been stolen and you've already dug a hole and laid a new cable anyway.' Oh, OK, err we'll be down to join it all together then - thanks!

And so it happened - after a few more days, and we now have land lines and internet access.
Notice the white cable in the picture above. That was the power to the electric gate at the entrance to the farm. It was cut seven times and is still not fixed. We now have to charge the gate motor battery up each day and install it each evening to provide access security for the farm.

The interim solution was a dodgy dongle, laptop and a cell phone.

Paul and Cathy

Nacala - First Missions Trip in the Kodiak

Our first mission flight in the Kodiak was to Nacala in the north of Mozambique.

Perhaps two maps here might give a better idea of where it was.

After the 8-10 hr legs of the ferry flight, 6 hours to get to Nacala didn't seem too bad.

One of the real advantages of the Kodiak is how easy it is to operate in terms of ease of loading and load carrying capability. We took five people, 700 Kg of cargo and enough fuel to fly further than the length of the UK. Still took a while to cram it all in though.

Mozambique's opposition party has recently announced it was abandoning the 1992 peace accord with the ruling party that ended the country's 30 year civil war in which over a million people died. There had been a number of attacks of military and civilian targets and traffic on the main north-south road was having to travel in military guarded convoys. We had also heard that some charter flights had been prevented from continuing past the initial airport of entry and so we decided to fly in 'civies'.

Almost ready to go.

Crossing the Rio Save (pronounced Sarvey).

We landed at an old military airport in Nacala, a now booming coastal town, that was still home to a squadron of Mig 25's which you can just glimpse as you taxi in.

Unloading was somewhat easier with many hands on deck to help

To get from Nacala to the village of Memba where Martin and Simone Schumann live there was still a two hour drive on a dodgy dirt road that had even claimed a grader.

This was our fifth time we had flown in support of World Outreach International, the mission that Martin and Simone work with. The bulk of the cargo we'd flown up consisted of 130Kg of Artemisia tea and 2400 audio Bibles.

Go and weigh a tea bag - never mind, I have one here (that I prepared earlier) and it weighs 4 grams.
This isn't any old tea though and a course of 14 of these particular tea bags (56 g) taken over a week can cure Malaria as well as a whole long list of other things. So 130 Kg of the stuff is enough to treat over 2300 people and well worth the effort of raising the money to cover the cost of flying it there.

Getting it from the donors near Durban wasn't too hard - it just arrived on a truck. Getting it to Nacala, on the other hand, was a different story - in the past. Nacala is half way back to the equator from where we are and 200 km further east than Moscow. However, with the load swallowing capabilities of the Kodiak, this years flight was relatively easy.

The next day Myriam came to collect the tea. Artemisia was discovered in China and has been used for thousands of years as an effective cure for various diseases including Malaria. Martin and Simone along with Myriam Wahr, have set up many rural clinics and use natural medicines, many of which they grow themselves. Unfortunately the Artemisia plant will not grow properly where they live due to bad soil and irregular rain.

 

On a previous visits we had helped build the Schumann's first house.

The first house and ample porch under which we slept.

On the last visit we installed the wiring for their new house which was now mostly complete, but with the rainy season just round the corner the bolts that held the roof on still needed some attention. Martin did count the bolts and came up with a figure of about 2500. So, my job over the next three days was to seal the holes on their roof and the roof of another mission family that were also building a house.

Talk about a cat on a hot tin roof or should it be, 'mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun'.

It was silly hot and soon became apparent that to accomplish anything worthwhile I would have to get up at 04:30 before sunrise and work as long as I could and then return at about 15:00 and work until I couldn't see what I was doing. Turns out that just before dawn there was quite a bit of dew which made the roof something of an ice rink for the first hour.

But, with the help of one of the other passengers we had brought up we managed to get a shed load of these...

 

 ...to look more like this...

Mercy Air's other pilot John was also kept busy with a number of mechanical tasks including fixing the generator for the new mission family who will use it to power their mobile dental unit.

 As well as maintaining the Schumann's vehicle which takes a pounding on the bad roads.

 

The other major occupier of weight allowance and cargo space on the flight up was 2400 audio Bibles donated by Mega Voice in Pretoria (http://megavoice.com/envoy.html).

 

As well as little heard Mozambican languages these little audio players contain the complete Bible in a number of languages including Mandarin and Gujarati to cater for Chinese and Indian immigrants and Martin uses them extensively in his work with the local communities.

Martin and Simone live 50 metres from the beach and I suppose it stands to reason that their eldest daughter is just going to have the best shell collection ever.

Martin had a fairly extensive list of jobs he wanted us to help him with and despite the humidity and temperatures that dipped to a night time low of only 27 deg, which basically meant we spent five days leaking perspiration, we actually managed to tick everything off.

The day before we left we met a guy on the beech who sold us a fish. Good job the Kodiak had a large external cargo compartment!

The Kodiak was impressive on the flight back too. The absence of cargo meant we could fill the fuel tanks to the brim and this allowed us to fly from Nampula to Nelspruit direct in 5 hours and still land with 2 hours fuel in the tanks.

The Zambezi River

And how it looks according to the Garmin 1000 avionics suite.

We were welcomed back by the Mercy Air staff who were eager to find out how our first trip in the Kodiak had gone.

Thank you.

Paul and Cathy