Romdane Travel Tales

“Kalli!!” I bellowed into my phone like a man trying to hail a submarine from a mountaintop—because somewhere deep in the imploding jungle of my logic, I’d decided that volume was a valid substitute for poor network reception.

“I am going to soar over the open savannahs of the Maasai Mara like a flaming cartwheel of revenge with a Lycoming engine on fire. Marcel Romdane is my name, pilot from Germany,” I declared—arms flaring with the righteous fury of a televangelist high on jet fuel, dripping in purpose, delusion, and enough bravado to start a small war with a spork.

“Good morning! I am Marcel Romdane and I’m a pilot,” I announced with the delusional confidence of a man who thought credentials still mattered outside of Western Europe. I expected reverence. I expected a hush to fall over the room. Maybe a discreet radio call to alert the Minister of Aviation that a Great White Hope had arrived to elevate East African skies with German precision and Teutonic excellence. Instead, I got Jonathan...

“No Marcel, I’ll bring my expertise to the table, and you foot the bill,” Enrico said flatly, his eyes locking onto mine with the detached precision of a surgeon about to amputate your financial future. “After all,” he continued, like someone about to sell you your own kidneys, “you’ll get 50 hours of quality flight training under all sorts of arduous conditions. Most people would sell an organ—or at least a moderately beloved family member—for that.”

“Kalli!” I burst into his hangar like a deranged landlady who just found out you’ve been keeping goats in the kitchen. “Kalli, I need your help!” He emerged from beneath an oily engine block, his arms elbow-deep in mechanical grease, giving me the same exhausted expression you’d give a toddler who just ran in crying that he’d set the house cat on fire—again.

“Kalli!!” I bellowed into the hangar like a man casually requesting tea after detonating a hand grenade in the living room. Kalli, blissfully unaware of the incoming catastrophe, was wedged under the cowling of a Cessna 172, elbow-deep in what I could only assume was mechanical witchcraft involving the nose wheel. He looked up, squinting like a mole dragged into daylight.“Do you have some yellow duct tape by any chance?” I asked, as if that were a standard request in a facility dedicated to keeping planes airborne and not held together by stationery supplies.

“BILL!!” I screamed, my lungs operating well outside warranty, the sound slicing through the cockpit noise like a mayday call from a pilot who just realised he’s been flying the manual for a toaster. “Let’s do another round! I need to learn this! NOW!!” We were ripping down the runway at fifty miles an hour—on one wheel. One. The tail was kicked skyward like it had been possessed by the Lucifer himself. The right wing was flirting with the asphalt, nearly peeling it off like a cheese slicer on a bad day. I was having the time of my tumultuous, ill-advised life—blasting down the runway on one wheel in a flying deck chair from hell, utterly unaware this level of airborne lunacy was even legal, and fully convinced we were auditioning for the airshow spin-off of Jackass: Aviation Edition.

“What do you mean by, ‘Honey, I just bought an airplane’?” Nicole stared at me like I had just sprouted a third eye and offered to fly us both to Hell in a homemade hot air balloon. Her expression landed somewhere between cardiac arrest and righteous homicide. If I’d told her I was Elvis reincarnated with a side gig in necromancy, it might have gone over easier. Up until that moment, she had been clinging—desperately, delusionally—to the idea that this whole “Africa situation” was just a passing phase. A midlife tantrum. A chaotic mirage that would vanish like a suspicious wire transfer in a Nigerian inbox. But now? Now she realised, with the chilling finality of a guillotine blade, that this wasn’t a phase.

“Enrico,” I mumbled like a love-struck, deranged Othello revival crashing into a midlife aviation crisis, “you can’t be serious. This thing—granted, it has a certain deranged charm—can’t possibly fly. And even if it does, how could it fit a pilot, let alone a passenger? It’s minuscule. It looks like the unlucky offspring of a kite and a lawn chair after one too many drinks at an ultralight convention. If IKEA built planes, this is what they’d send you—flat-packed with two screws missing and a manual written in Swedish sarcasm.”

“Tell me again, please, Marcel—how this is even remotely a sound plan. Seriously—walk me through the logic, step by step—because I must’ve missed the part where you got kicked in the head by a zebra.”  Shlomi’s voice, sharp as a lawyer’s letter and twice as judgmental, crackled through the line with the crisp authority of someone who had actually survived Africa—unlike me, who was about to treat it like a casual DIY project. I could practically hear his eyebrows folding into origami swans of disbelief.

“Listen, Marcel!” Shlomi took a deep breath, the kind a man takes before delivering news so devastating it might as well come with a condolence letter. I braced for impact, already wondering if it was too late to fake a medical emergency or hurl myself out of a conveniently placed window. “You see, don’t let this rub you the wrong way, but… you are useless.”