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At ten minutes after midnight I woke up in a very dozy
state, to find it was pouring with rain and that I (still fully clothed) and my sleeping bag were wet. Water was pouring all over my trike but in my drugged sleepy state I didn't care.
Olivier wished me happy birthday – 46 today – I said
a birthday wish to my father in my mind (same birthday, just a few years difference) and sat with Olivier on the one wheel of the 707 and watched the rain. I felt so exhausted that I decided to continue sleeping
even with water dripping on me.
It stopped raining intermittently and as the hours
passed I woke up more easily – always awakened by the airport police driving up to us or walking up to us to ask us if we were OK. Twice in the night I screamed at them to leave us alone, which they then did.
At 7 am we were packed and almost ready to go. Almost
everything in my trike was wet. A security official asked me if I had something for him, today? To which I said a very firm no!
I filed a new flight plan and paid the parking fees.
I was asked again at least three times if I had something for the person I was dealing with, but now handled them easily with a quick "big fat negative, over!!!"
Every minute while working around the trikes or
walking to the airport buildings I was hammered with questions by so many people, the most common question was "when are you going to fly?" I took to answering "one hour!" and whenever I saw someone looked about to
open his or her mouth they already had the answer without even presenting the question. The questions just kept coming relentlessly. Olivier and I kept walking away to catch our breath.
Eventually we were airborne and on our way safely
with full tanks and reasonable weather. My radio had got some water in it and wasn't working so I followed Olivier. There were a lot of clouds about and rain here and there, but no huge threatening storms in our
way.
We were just passing over a large river when my
engine suddenly started to vibrate slightly. I had a huge surge of adrenaline and my heart leapt into my throat. I scanned the Flydat for changes in the running conditions. The RPM came down a bit and then settled,
the exhaust gas temperatures all climbed above 800 degrees C but then everything settled there. It was the same symptoms that I had in Mauritania and Benin with the one ignition failure. My anxiety level went up a
few degrees too.
After an hour my radio started working again and we
chatted over our chat frequency about our relief at getting out of Nigeria with our sanity and only missing a little money.
On the border with Cameroon there was a large
prohibited airspace. I remember that the Nigerian consul in Rabat that Olivier had had a shouting match with, had mentioned that Nigeria and Cameroon had a border conflict and I guessed that the prohibited area was
as a result of the conflict. I asked Olivier if he knew if Cameroon had any jet fighters and he screamed with laughter over the radio. The fighters they had were all broken or crashed. We moved out over the sea to
the edge of the airspace and continued down the coast. After an hour we passed another smaller prohibited air space. Here I could clearly see large oil and fuel reservoirs, so we stayed about 2 km away from the air
space. If we had known that they wanted to shoot us down, and also what lay ahead of us for the next two days, we would have stayed 10 km away.
We landed safely at Douala International Airport and
after parking were surrounded once again by officials, police, military and onlookers. This time the people were quieter and didn't crowd us as much. Also, Cameroon was a French colony, so very few people speak
English. Again Olivier came to the rescue and handled everything on the diplomatic and administrative side. We paid our fees, cleared immigration, filed a flight plan and because we hadn't eaten since the previous
morning headed for the casual restaurant. A man tried to be our agent, but Olivier grabbed him firmly on the arm and told him that we were not in Nigeria and he better leave us alone – which he did in an awful
hurry.
We took off for Tiko, a small airfield to the north
where a Canadian pilot, that we had met when passing through Wabush in Canada, had said he operates crop sprayers from. He was not there but the locals at the airfield said we could stay the night. At about 4 pm a
white crop sprayer pilot arrived and chatted to us. We were about to head off to the local hotel when an army officer arrived and walked around our trikes while talking on a radio. He then told us that we had to go
with him 'to clear a matter up.' Of course we were not interested in his problems and told him that we would not go with him, that we had been hassled enough in Nigeria and that if his chief wanted to see us he
would find us in the hotel. His eyes bulged a bit and he started to yak away like a madman over the radio.
We were just finishing our beers at the hotel and
Olivier and I had just mentioned to each other that it would be great to get a good nights sleep when soldiers burst through the doors of the bar and surrounded us. The two men we were with moved back out of the
line of fire and Olivier and I looked at each other – I am sure I had a slight look of panic in my eyes. Looking at the two soldiers opposite me I guessed that if they opened fire and I just ducked they would
probably shoot each other.
The officer in charge screamed at us, telling us that
we had better speak to him properly in future and in the same breath said that we had flown into prohibited airspace and that we had nearly been shot down. Yes, we would go with them to see the Colonel. We went back
to the airfield first to get our papers. There was some lightning nearby, so we quickly removed the wings in case we were detained for a while.
On the drive to the Colonel's house we passed a naked
corpse on the side of the road. The man had clearly been dead for a few days; his body distorted and completely bloated, his tongue and genitals protruding grotesquely from his shiny black skin.
The Colonel asked us (Olivier in French) a few
questions and then disappeared with our passports. We went to a bar nearby with five soldiers and had a beer while waiting for the Colonel. The situation didn't seem serious enough for us to be handcuffed even
though Olivier at one stage offered his wrists for handcuffing, to my complete horror.
After about an hour and a half the Colonel arrived
and told us we could go, and at the same time told us that we had come within a hairs-breath of being shot down. I wondered if anti-aircraft guns had been trained on us the whole time as we passed by the oil
reservoirs and what sort of confusion reined behind the scenes as the soldiers fell over each other to find the trigger - some of the radicals suggested they shoot us, but no one wanting to make a firm decision in
case it's a mistake and he is next on the 'shoot him' list.
We were both exhausted and went to sleep as soon as
we were back at the airfield.
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