I can’t believe we’re in Sao Tome after more than 18 hours of flying.
There couldn’t be a more perfect place to put down after this first flight – big smiles all round, no request to see a passport or even a crew card, not a single stamp or form (literally, not one – we were just told that since we said we say we’re in transit, we can just go through as we want!). A South African who works at the airport (a sort of a dilapidated strip of tar with an old tower, some ageing fire trucks and a bunch of abandoned, rotting aircraft) directed us to a nearby hotel right on the sea which we could easily walk to with all our stuff. It’s such a great feeling to arrive at a place with no bookings, no plans and no commitments. Notwithstanding that we’re in an aeroplane, I feel like a student backpacker again – save for Oshkosh, we don’t have a single visa, a single hotel booking (or even a hotel name) and, despite a load of offers on our website, we haven’t yet had a moment to contact a single person at any of our stops to ask for help or accommodation.
Sao Tome was described to me as a sort of “lost paradise”.; and I can see why – it’s a small island with thick forest and high mountains.
The weather is balmy, there’re lots of beaches, palm trees everywhere and a mixture of decaying colonial splendour and quite typical third world poverty. Seems like there’s little or no crime though, we haven’t been hustled by a single person and although poor, I don’t feel any sense of crushing poverty, anger or frustration. Mike and I walked for 2 hours into the night last night, to town and back, and we were greeted with nothing but warm “bom dias” and “muito obrigados”.
It’s Monday morning now and this evening we fly to Conakry, Guinea.
Weather looks OK out the window, but I suppose a slightly better view than that would be worthwhile (Tim, we’ll call in about 2 hours).
We’re going to try fit in a short scenic flight around the island in the morning and leave at about 17h00 (local = UTC time) this eve. No avgas on the island, however, (and not even any unleaded mogas, so the engine’s going to get a taste of 97 leaded mogas!), so filling up’s going to be a mission. Someone called Alareo says he has a friend with a pick-up who’ll help us though.
I can’t end off without saying something about the flight the night before last – What an emotional roller-coaster – just far and gone the most out there thing I’ve ever done. The round canopy reflects all in-cockpit light back, so you feel like you’re sitting in a fishbowl (it was the first time this plane has ever flown after dark – over Botswana or Angola, just the odd veld fire, and quite honestly, if the instruments had failed (our trusty, but very new MGL Voyager – thanks Rainier and Nicol), we’d have gone in literally within seconds, not minutes apart from a dusk flight at Springs, which raised the ire of the club safety officer!). There was absolutely no moon and no outside visibility at all, just 10 hours of non stop IFR flight overnight.
There’re just about no lights. There can’t be a more perfect person in the world to do a trip like this with than Mike, though, and all in all it just turned into an incredibly exciting, though terrifying experience. Thank God I got my IF rating last Tuesday, because Botswana required us to change to IF in order to cross their country, and that’s the way we did the rest of the flight! Seeing the island after 18 hours in the air, and the last 6 over the sea, was just awesome.
Thanks to all who’ve helped us and thanks for the incredible messages of support. Next report from Conakry, Guinea, on the assumption that we can find internet there! We’re routing around the coast, so the entire 15 hours we’ll be over the sea. Oh yes, and a big thanks to Avmap – our Avmap GPS really saved our hides last night. We didn’t think we’d need it (in theory it’s a back up) – but it turned out to be absolutely critical for the IFR reporting. What a great interface – so simple and effective. We had to learn from first principles, cause we hadn’t had the chance to turn it on before we left, but we learnt in 30 seconds and we would have been lost without it.
AdiosJames
