|
Patrick collected us at 6:45 am in his magnificent
new Grand Cherokee Jeep. At the airport we had some coffee and a sandwich and then started to pack our trikes. I went to the main terminal buildings to file a flight plan with Patrick's friend. We were sent all over
the place because the president was about to fly in, so security was tight and the guards wouldn't let us pass through certain areas also, for a few hours all flights were cancelled. At one point Olivier and I
swapped roles I took over the preparation of the aircraft while he tried to get the paperwork completed. Landing and navigation fees were $105 each! In between all this we were interviewed by the local TV news
team, all the time being surrounded by at least 20 to 30 onlookers.
At about 11am we were ready to go. We taxied behind a
'FOLLOW ME' car to the holding point of runway 26 only to be told by the ATC to do a 180 and return to the terminal building. Olivier (again his being French speaking made life easier) went off to the briefing
office. He returned after 45 minutes to inform me that the guys in the briefing room had been very nice and informed him of all the procedures at the airport and just wanted to be sure that we had the correct
frequencies and routing.
We took off and headed across the peninsula towards
the coast and the south. At the coast we climbed up to 4,500ft where we found a tailwind. We stayed there for the whole flight always remaining about 1 to 2 km over the ocean away from the coast. After about 2
hours we had low cloud under us, but continued, a little worried about not being able to see the ground.
The flight was just over 4 hours we passed over
Benguela and noticed hundreds of people running towards the airport. Oh yes, it looked like we were going to do the crowd thing again
. but we were lucky there was a fence which kept the crowds away from us.
Again there was someone to meet us. We parked in the
fireman's hangar and I went off to the local market to buy a spare fuel can. If we could, we wanted to try to get all the way to the Cunene and Namibia the next day, so we would need extra fuel. The extra fuel
Olivier would carry on his newly named trike 'the Camel'!
Later we were treated to dinner and then were offered
a bed in a local paraglider's apartment.
|
