I'm planning to fly to Mozambique for New Year's to soak up some salt air and far flung tropical beaches. Fine and good, but the Air Force will shoot me down if I don't have clearance, which I seem to remember is a bitch. I google 'Mozambique Clearance' and get a lot of links to clearing mines.


Ahhhh, Africa. You ask for a week in Paradise and get a $%^@* minefield.



note: I'm heading to the nice, Disney version, picture perfect bit of Moz. It's not in any way dangerous, the minefields are, like, elsewhere. At least miles away. But I've not been there since my first trip with my private pilot's license back in 2005. This was the trip where some hardened old bush pilots we were talking to caught onto the fact that we'd landed at Benguerra island in a 182 the week after passing our tests, and called their friends over because they wouldn't f--ing believe it, either. Scared the bejeesus out of me. I hadn't known that it was that big a deal to do?

Five days of rain. Three broken cars. A dog that desperately needs to get to the vet to have his stitches out, but I have no way of getting to him.

The bridge has been seriously flooded for a couple of days, and I'm on the outside. I could get around the back way, but without the bakkie and with all of this mud, wish me luck. In any case, the neighbor who comes to open the gate to let me through has been grumpy with people calling him at all hours, and I have no desire to be on his bad side. I'm staying with a friend. There's only one force greater than Mother Nature: Neighborhood Politics.

It looks like it'll stop raining on Sunday. So now I have Friday and Saturday to kill. My little dogs must be frantic and lonely, the staff are looking after them, but they hate being left alone, especially in this cold rain. What on earth happened to my dreamy, delicious summer? It was hot with afternoon storms last week, now London weather's come to visit, and I find myself sleeping an hour later, eating twice as much, and moping around in a fleece.

In other news, I'm very excited for Thanksgiving. I've always done a Thanksgiving of sorts in the 8 years I've been abroad, this year, I get to go large. I'm the guest chef at our local country restaurant, and get to go all out. Luckily for me, the real chef is a good friend, and I kind of think he'll do most of the work. I'm so not trained to cook for anything over 10 people.

Getting the right ingredients is so much easier with a restaurant to do the ordering. Anyone remember my struggles a couple years back when I simply couldn't handle the idea of blue pumpkin pie? Much easier now. I just tell them I need 3 kilos of croutons, and it simply happens. Magic. God I miss canned pumpkin and pre-made pie crusts though...

I've had these photos on my phone for ages. I just didn't really have a means of getting them to my blog. But here you go, for some Real Africa Fun. From the mannequins in the shop window that gave me honest to god nightmares to our glorious Fire Association HQ, I bring you...

The moments I wished I had someone next to me to turn to and say 'is this f--ed up or WHAT?'
Alternate captions are more than welcome. :)

And a teaser, as always...

Rambo's settling in a bit more. I think he's just got to learn to trust, but he's progressing quickly. thanks, everyone, for all of your advice!

I'm finishing my initial multi engine rating at the moment. I started it about a year ago, and do have some twin time, but never got around to doing it. I'm going to do my renewal on the Dutchess, the twin engine airplane I'm training on. Luckily for me, she's one of the most docile and well behaved twins out there.

When both engines are working, a twin is just a faster single. But when you're training on the twins, the engines aren't both working for longer than a few minutes at a time. At one point, the fuel cock on the right wasn't shutting down the right engine, as it should. My instructor, after the flight, wrote in the book "Fuel cock on right fails to shut off engine" I wrote underneath it "Cock on right constantly shutting off engine" (your instructor sits on the right hand seat.)

For those of you non-pilots, you can imagine what happens when one engine is shut off. You have a lot of power on one side now, and none on the other. The windmilling propeller creates massive amounts of drag on top of it. You can imagine what happens: the airplane turns. Quickly. First, it yaws (the nose moves towards the dead engine) then that leads to roll (that wing drops) and if uncorrected, would turn into a spiral dive. You need to boot that rudder, and hard, to keep the horizon where it should be. It's not hard to do, you just have to react quickly, and it requires some force from your legs.

Then we have what's called vMCA demonstrations. There's a minimum control airspeed - red line - where if you're on a single engine, you have to apply full rudder to keep it straight. Below this speed, there's not enough airflow over the rudder, and full rudder stops being enough. The aircraft "departs," that is, the nose just drops off to one side. The freaky thing is that this speed is quite close to the stall speed, and if you stall in that unbalanced condition, you're going into a lekker spin.

The problem with all of this is that the amount of force required to use full rudder on that thing is obscene. You have to just jam yourself against the seat back and lock your knee. Four vMCA demonstrations, ten engine failures, and an asymmetric landing in 1.5 hours is enough that my legs are almost shaking by the time I get out.

I will be so damn happy to get this renewal out of the way...

I'm hopeless at dog psychology. I'm a cat and horse person, and am a bit concerned with little Rambo, my stray from the veldt.

Listen, the dog is sweet and tries desperately hard. He follows me around with a pleading look on his face, wags and quivers when I give him attention, and will sleep in my lap. He's even sitting here watching me type, begging for just a little scratch behind the ears. He gets soppy and affectionate towards my friends, even. 3 weeks ago, he wasn't approachable by humans, he was way too scared.

But I think he's actually a bit of a dangerous dog. Twice now, he's bit me. Once, when the vet was examining him and touched him where his testicles used to be, he bit me on the arm but didn't break the skin. That's fair enough, he was neutered with a bread knife, and having a human hold him while another touches him there has to being back bad memories. Another time, he'd been sitting on my lap for an hour, I might have brushed him inadvertently there, he just snapped at me.

He also is pretty racist. He adores white people, and chases after blacks. That's about the norm for this country, sadly - almost all dogs are racist, they must get it from their humans - but he takes it to an extreme. The vet says the people who abused him were probably black. But we have a lot of people coming past the house, including children, and he chases them. He even went for my maid Ginet, who he knows and who has been feeding him!

Basically, he's starting to get super protective of me. He won't let anyone near me (unless they're white) and guards the house like it's Fort Knox. Nice to have a protective dog, but I won't have him mauling a child. He was trained as a fighting dog, which involves incredible acts of cruelty towards the dog to make them aggressive enough to fight. So he's been deliberately hurt and made into an aggressive dog, and while he's nice to me, I need to let him know that that needs to change.

Any ideas...? :(

Every year, around this time, I post something about how now I remember what it's like to be behind a flooded bridge. Examples are here, here, and here. I know it gets old for all of you dear readers, but can you imagine how old it gets for me?

And so I sit, driving down every couple of hours to check on it, knowing that poor Poncho is sitting at the vet, waiting to be picked up. Shame, poor old boy.

So what is there to do here in my cottage alone all day long? I've picked wildflowers, done some exercise up and down the hill, tried on all of my old formal dresses, done my nails and my toes, and played with the dogs. failblog, pages 1-26, are read, so is wedinator. Someone find me a project before I start painting the puppy's toenails, training the jasmine to grow around the car, and making new curtains out of woven veldt grasses. Actually, that could be quite cool. Hey, I could even use chongololos* as curtain hoops, if they'd only stay put..



* six inch long millipedes that are everywhere these days. Sweet things, but don't step on them. The crunch will stay with you for days. I just wish they'd stay off my bathroom floor at night...




EDIT: PS.. Bernie made it over. He has more balls than me, and a bit of a bigger car...

OK, well, it wasn't a Lion in the end. It turned out to be a Hyena. Which is marginally better, but sadly, not for my poor dog Poncho. He was attacked by the Hyena and, well, savaged. He's ripped to shreds and at the vet for a few days. He's expected to live, but he's in pretty bad shape. Poor old guy.

It's awesome to live in a nature reserve with things like Kudu and Jackals and whatnot, and it's exciting for this area to have game like that. I can't really object too much to having a hyena running around - we chose to live in a game area, and we did that because we love African wildlife and being in the bush a bit. I'm sad for poor Poncho, but it really just means we must fence the dogs off so they're not attacked. Better for the wildlife and better for the dogs.

I just hope poor Poncho is okay.

From the neighborhood security sms service...





?!@?#?!@?!??!?!@?#

I had a poitjie party at my cottage. A poitjie is a round pot, similar to a witches cauldron. You put your meat and veg in and simmer over an open fire for about 6-8 hours. It's brilliant. About 25 people showed up in the end, I even ran out of food for the last guests. I didn't get many pictures of the party, I was too busy hostessing, but I will indulge those of you who want cute puppy pictures...

( some photos of my poitjie and the dogs! )

more pictures are here.

I went last night to the year end ball of the South African Lipizzaners, the only riding school in the world to be affiliated with the famous Spanish Riding School in Vienna. A friend of mine is lucky and talented enough to ride them in performances, she invited me to the ball.

Any old excuse to get dressed up works for me, especially if it involves champagne and horses. The stables were lit up, and cocktails were served around the fountain while the horses performed for us. Absolutely stunning creatures. They had ladies piaffing daintily in sidesaddles, the quadrille, the levade, the capriole, it was just magic. I'm more then a little jealous of my friend for being able to ride these incredible beasts so elegantly. Then, at the dinner, they brought horses into the ballroom (ok, the performance arena done up!) to be auctioned for sponsorship. Magnificent horses wandering around a ballroom is Good Stuff. Somehow, the thousands of streamers waving from the rafters didn't cause any of them to bat an eyelid. Good Horses.

Luckily, unlike at some notable balls, my horse refrained from turning into a mouse at midnight, my car was not a pumpkin when I found it again, and I came home with both shoes, thank you very much. That said, it would make a much cooler entry..

Well, I'm back in my little cottage from last year, and didn't end up missing much of the spring in the end. the jacaranda trees are out, the syringa is still holding on in places, and the birds are slowly turning into a stunning rainbow. There are some new migratory birds, and others just have their breeding plumage coming in for the season. In any case, I just love my bright blue kingfishers, yellow weavers, and red bishops.

With spring comes new things, and some of those new things have wagging tails. By moving up to the cottage, I seem to have inherited two dogs. One's a Jack Russell/Wirehair Terrier cross, about two months old, who's about the size of a guinea pig - yet manages to chase off Poncho, our big dog from down the hill. The other, well, he's the boyfriend. He's a pure Jack Russell, a stray who's obviously had a pretty tough life. His face is covered with scars and wounds, his whole body is broken, and he really needs to be taken to the vet. He's terrified of humans, but has certainly been raised by people - he listens to basic commands and just wants attention, but shakes like a leaf when you pet him. Vet tomorrow, this poor thing needs antibiotics at minimum. Funny that out of five dogs now on the farm, the one purebred is a mangy stray.

My aunt and uncle wanted to keep it simple when they got this place. Rather than a big South African farm with 15 dogs and 20 people, they wanted the basics: 1 cat, 3 dogs, 2 staff. Well, they're up to 3 cats, 5 dogs, 5 staff, and a crazy niece who won't seem to leave.

One of the flight instructors is staying in the main house down at the bottom of the hill for the summer. I was out on the porch with some friends yesterday afternoon, and he decided to come join us. In an airplane. He flew by maybe 20 feet off the ground, then pulled up, waving madly. He wasn't with a student, otherwise I'd have killed him. Bloody boys. Still. It was awesome.

I've been sitting outside watching the sun come up over the veldt. It was early - ten to six - but I could smell that it's going to be a hot day. The bird noises and little breezes and the smell of the dust and grass just complete the perfect picture of an African dawn.

How is it possible to miss a place before you leave?

I'm getting on a flight to London tonight. I'm not sure how long I'll be there, there are some things I need to sort out and some people I need to see. The problem is that as always, when I go to leave this place, it's like someone has tied my very soul to the hills here, and just the thought of not being here sends me into spasms of agony.

I slipped a disk in my lower back last week. Lise says it's my body making it impossible for me to leave. I tend to agree, especially as it had been getting better, and this morning, it's gotten much worse. I shall drug the bejeesus out of myself and try to pack next to nothing.

Catch you on the other side, Africa...

(note: this post is really for horse people only. Feel free to skip it if you're not as obsessed with the creatures as we are...)

I'm just stunned by how well Xander is going these days. The saddle I'm borrowing from my trainer certainly makes a difference, and also I've cut him from 2 cups of molasses in his food to a half. He's a lot calmer and less scatterbrained, but I'll just watch to make sure he doesn't drop weight.

But yes, this horses is on fire. I've been jumping him - small jumps, mind you, as I've become a total wimp - and he's so round and scopey that I can hardly cling to his back over a teeny little crossrail. On the flat, he comes round, stays round, and shows off. I don't need to even take the slightest feel of his mouth, he just balances himself, even if I drop the reins entirely.

Keep in mind that when I got this horse a year and a half ago, it was the ugliest creature I'd ever seen. The person who gave him to me told me "Well, he'll be shot tomorrow ifyou don't want him. BUT DON'T LET THAT EFFECT YOUR DECISION." So...I had a horse. Crooked legs, a bowed tendon, the flattest back I've ever seen, movement like a goddamn sewing machine, and about 2 hands shorter than I wanted...but such a sweet face. Now, I have a magnificent beast. He's grown up those 2 hands, out by about six inches in every direction, and he's completely unrecognizable. He's utterly devoted to me, I like to delude myself that he somehow knew the fate that awaited him in the Lion Park over the road. But no, he's just made of pure sugar and light. My ugly duckling has grown up, and come back to roost as a swan.

Always give a horse a second chance..

My license is up for renewal. We have to renew it every year, and fly a flight test with a designated examiner. This is fine, I figured it'd just be a formality or something.

Until my DE called last night at 9pm (on a saturday?!) to discuss my test. Listen, this guy is cool, I chose to fly with him because we had so much fun with my van rating. But still. I asked him what I should prepare, he emailed me the dreaded list of 40 questions that made me suffer so badly last October for my initial instrument rating test. Suddenly, I'm back there, staring down the DE, glint in his eye, asking me about circling minima and missed approach procedures - ICAO versus South Africa. The worst is that I have to fly it out of Rand, an airport across town that I don't know, that intimidates the bejeesus out of me. If you fly a slightly wide approach, you interfere with Johannesburg International approach path, and lose your license.

I think this week will be all about the flight sim.

PS: What DE calls at 9 on a Saturday? Damn lucky I wasn't out drinking or something, because that would just be awesome. "Duuuuude, you're like the coolest DE ever! No, realllllly, I mean it! Like, I can't wait to fly with you! Can we do the dingo-5 approach inverted or something?"

PPS: HA HA HA. His email to me with the questions had this at the bottom:

Begin forwarded message:

From: Scary DE <hisname@yahoo.com>
Date: 31 July 2007 4:19:53 PM SAST
To: hisname@yahoo.com
Subject: ATPL Q+A

Q+A

Be a better Heartthrob. Get better relationship answers from someone who knows.
Yahoo! Answers - Check it out.

While I was away, someone had borrowed my car and the passenger side window got smashed. This was a bit of a pain, I figured I'd just kind of fix it somehow, no big deal, I'll get to it, but ended up driving around for the last week with no window. I learned...

- Putting plastic over it does not help when you're at a T junction trying to make a right turn. Invisible cars still hurt when they hit you, or so I presume.

- It gets bloody cold in this country still, and sometimes, having the blessed first rains is rather a pain in the ass.

- Street vendors love it when you can't roll up your window.

- Getting stuck in traffic sucks. It's worse when hundreds of bees (African Satanic Mass Murderer Bees, no doubt) swarms your car. Especially when you're terrified of bees. And can't roll your window up.

I got new glass today. Wow, you sometimes really don't know what you're missing until you lose it.

I went to go ride today and ended up jostling through the veldt, all right...in the back of the bakkie...looking for our stolen saddles. Last time we had a theft, the horses found the goods under a tree where they'd been hidden, but no joy this time.

No flipping fair! I go away for months, the second I get back, my saddle gets stolen? Xander is sound, top condition, eager to work and I've paid for months of schooling so I don't come back to a wild beast - and now this?!

I do think crime is on the rise here, and I blame the recession. I mean, it's South Africa, of course there's crime, but things like car radios, my car's wheels, and saddles have exhibited a lot more wanderlust than usual these days. At least we're okay and the horses aren't hurt, right?

In other news, I've gotten word that yet another of my former colleagues and lodgemates is down with Malaria. Basically, every 2 weeks, another one gets it. I am keeping an eye on myself, but so far so good. I have the pills that cures this strain pretty quickly, but still - Malaria is Malaria. I'm not paranoid about it, I'm just keeping those damn pills in my handbag...

In better news, spring flowers on the veldt are just so damn lovely. In the course of looking for the saddles, I had a while of wandering aimlessly around, and to be honest, despite my sad mission, I was loving it!

When I first moved to Joburg, the syringa trees were in bloom. I was hit by the absolutely overwhelming smell of this light purple flowering tree, a smell like a cross between lilac and jasmine filled the air. At times, it was so thick I could hardly breathe, like being for too long in a Yankee Candle store in the states, only it smelled flipping divine, instead of like a bad mix of gingerbread and lavender and whatever the hell 'home sweet home' is supposed to smell like.

When I got my commercial license, the syringa were in bloom. I remember stepping out of that plane, exhausted, breathing deeply, thinking that the spring was celebrating for me.

On the ferry flight across Europe, the syringa were in bloom, and I thought of it as such a comforting omen.

When I got to Zambia, there they were, clogging my senses with the madness of memory and making me think that hey, maybe this will work out.

And now, here in Joburg, the syringa are in bloom. I came back from Maun on a tipoff from a friend that a job may await me here, and who knows. I need to get to the UK soon, but I'm here for a bit doing my renewal (whimpering noises) and medical (screaming in terror noises) and sort out a few things. The goddamn syringa liing the dirt road home is teasing me, reminding me of happier days, of new opportunities and new beginnings. I just wonder what this next one will be..

** note: syringa is another name for lilac. I'm not referring to lilacs, but the distinct trees we know as syringa here - quite different. They're really Melia azedarach, or chinaberry, or white cedar trees. They're an invasive alien, but damn, they smell bloody brilliant.

I got word within hours of posting my last that things were looking up in Maun. Knowing aviation as I do, I made arrangements to get my ass here the next day. What's the point in moping around Lusaka over denied dreams?

Maun, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a town at the edge of the Okavango. As the 30-odd safari camps cannot be accessed by road or boat (well, not in under 15 hours) the sky is abuzz with Cessna 206s taking everything from tourists to food to mail to engine parts out to remote airstrips. The place is awash with pilots, of course, most of them 23 years old and having a splendid time flying and partying. I was here looking for work in Febuary or so. Normally, you just show up, wave your license, they give you your 206 and off you go. The recession, however, put paid to that and I didn't find anything, other than a few swims in the river and some lovely new friends.

It's funny being back here, in the same camp with the same awful breakfast and the same smells and sounds. Farm animals go where they please, to the point that I went out for dinner last night with some pilots in the strip mall, and in the parking lot were three tired looking horses and two sleeping donkeys.

But the flying is awesome, there's no other word for it. I managed to bag staff rates on a charter from Livingstone, the pilot and I had a blast. She took us low down the river, game viewing along the caprivi strip. Now, that's some serious elephant. Yow! I think we saw 500. I also managed to see two Zebra shagging, which totally made my day. We dropped off her other pax at Vumbura, a camp deep in the delta, and she let me fly back to Maun. I seriously needed that after the shock of losing my job in Zambia.

I don't know what will happen here, but I have to give it a shot.

Fuck red tape. Excuse my language. And Fuck the Zambian DCA.

The new law was put into place last week. We need 1000 hours in command in order to get our licenses validated. So, no job. After all of this training, and moving, and settling in, and and and...

sigh. No, I don't know my next move. We shall see. I'll be here for a few days at least.

I'm still studying rather than flying, but got to go down to the valley with Herman, another pilot here. We dropped down over the escarpment (which goes up to 4400 feet) into the valley, which is at about 1200 feet. Herman descended us over the Zambezi, and turned back over the strip to do a low pass. Sure enough, a herd of impala scattered as he came down the strip. We then did a teardrop back onto final approach. I could see massive pods of hippo lazing on the banks and elephants in the river. On short final, a big elephant (clearly annoyed with us) started shaking his head in warning. Don't worry, we weren't going to land on you!

As we were about to touch down, that same herd of impala ran out across the runway again. There were too many of them, so Herman (wisely!) applied full power and up we went. We cleared them safely, but note, they didn't move off the runway as we zoomed ten feet over their heads! Our second attempt was more sucessful, we stopped well short of the few that were still staring at us from the middle of the runway.

We had to wait for passengers, and lucky us, we were told we could wait in the lodge. A boat was waiting to take us the ten minutes down the Zambezi. Hippo, elephant, and crocodiles are everywhere in the valley. I've seen some amazing game viewing in the past few years, but it's just a menagerie there - and so untouched. So few other people. I was absolutely wowed.

A tour of the beautiful Mvuu lodge and a diet coke later, we were back to the airstrip (no game this time!) and off into the setting sun.

Oh wait, right, that's the carrot that I'm running for...!