“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.”
I shifted uneasily in my seat like a man realising too late that the toilet paper was decorative. Enrico had a point—unfortunately, he always did. His expertise was real. Even though he had never actually flown a cross-continental route from Germany to Kenya in a glorified tent with wings, Enrico was a savant when it came to everything I instinctively avoided like contagious diseases: flight planning, METARs, NOTAMs, avoiding surface-to-air missile zones, and, of course, that aviation radio—where every transmission I blurted out resembled a rabid goose screaming its pizza order into the void, leaving air traffic control wondering if they’d accidentally tuned into a poultry-themed hostage situation.
Still, my internal calculator immediately did a quick panic sprint through the mounting expenses—border crossings, shady hotels, fuel, bribes, landing fees, smuggling barrels of avgas to remote strips in Sudan and Eritrea—revealed that this airborne vanity project had already gone full Titanic. The tab would easily soar past $20,000, and that wasn’t even factoring in the golden rule of all my plans: add 25% more cost for unforeseen disaster and double the timeline, or die trying. That kind of money could actually build something in Kenya. A base. A workshop. A life. You know, small things. Like not dying broke and delirious in a makeshift aircraft graveyard.
“I’ll think about it,” I muttered, while mentally checking every fire exit off this financial Hindenburg.
In hindsight, if I’d had that kind of money casually lying around in my sock drawer, I might have taken him up on the offer. Hell, flying across continents with my former instructor sounded like a hell of a story. But the mistake—my mistake—was thinking we’d forged some kind of bond. Not real friendship, sure, but at least the kind of camaraderie forged in the burning wreckage of misadventure. You know, two idiots laughing their way across the Sahara while dodging sandstorms and armed checkpoints.
But no. I was, of course, entirely and catastrophically wrong. So wrong, it echoed.
Kalli had warned me: “Pilots always have an angle.” I, in contrast, had grown up in martial arts. I’d been raised on notions like honour, integrity, fairness—and a deep, cellular-level loathing of injustice. These values weren’t just part of my worldview; they were encoded in my DNA alongside an allergy to spreadsheet math and a flair for poor decisions. That’s why I rejected Enrico’s offer. Not because he was wrong. Not even because it was expensive. But because it wasn’t right. It felt transactional. Dishonest. Like paying someone to come on your honeymoon.
Naturally, I did what any wide-eyed moron halfway through a self-funded breakdown would do: I sprinted directly to the only place that ever made sense—Kalli’s workshop. By now, I’d spent so much time there I had squatters’ rights and the coffee machine addressed me by name. I needed guidance. Or possibly a slap. Or both.
I charged in like a man who had just microwaved his passport, …arms flailing like an airport parking marshal trying to guide a Turkish Airlines 737 crewed by men who believed VOR was a type of yoghurt and had just mistaken the tower for a kebab stand.
“KALLI!” I howled, breathless and borderline feral.
“You will not believe what just happened! I talked to Enrico and he—”
“Let me guess,” Kalli said, without even looking up—his voice the emotional equivalent of an empty beer can rolling across a hangar floor.
“He’s not paying a cent. Just bringing his airborne encyclopaedia and expecting you to cover the rest?”
“YES! Exactly! How the hell did you know? Can you believe this?!”
Kalli slowly turned to me with the same expression you'd give a man who just tried to install a spark plug with a butter knife. There was no surprise on his face. No pity. Just the vague irritation of someone realising they’re going to have to sit through yet another re-run of “Marcel Makes a Life Decision.”
He genuinely looked like he was calculating whether hitting me with a torque wrench would knock some sense into me or just confirm what he already suspected—that I was past saving.
Kalli climbed out of the Cessna cockpit like a grizzled mechanic emerging from a particularly traumatic surgery. He didn’t speak right away—just pointed toward the stairs that led to his office perched above the hangar floor like a sniper’s nest overlooking a scrapyard. Below us, ordinary planes waited in line for their annual checkups while mine, glistening in the corner like a Hollywood starlet who took a wrong turn and ended up in a back-alley meth clinic, sat in unnerving silence.
“Time for a coffee break,” Kalli said, with the gravity of a nurse announcing terminal cancer. “Let’s talk. I have a plan.”
Now, when I say ‘I have a plan,’ people instinctively check the exits, fake heart attacks, or throw themselves into nearby drainage ditches. But when Kalli said it, I held my breath like a disciple awaiting prophecy.
Upstairs, he lit a cigarette, sipped his coffee, and with the calm of someone who'd already accepted that life is just a series of expensive disappointments, dropped the bomb.
“This is what I’ve done,” he said, smoke curling from his mouth like a noir villain. “I’ve made inquiries about shipping your flying circus to Kenya. One container, Hamburg to Nairobi. About six weeks travel time. Costs you €3,500—plus the usual bribes, blood oaths, and firstborn child you’ll need to pay at Kenyan customs. If you say the word, it leaves December 22nd. That gives us more than a month to yank the wings and build something that’ll keep the Cub from rolling around in there like a tortilla in a tumble dryer.”
I was stunned. Properly stunned. The kind of stunned usually reserved for people who’ve just walked into their own surprise funeral. I looked at him like he was the Second Coming of Christ—if Christ chain-smoked and devoured coffee.
How did he know all this? How could he possibly be ten steps ahead of the meltdown I hadn’t even fully admitted to myself yet?
And just as I opened my mouth to ask why he hadn’t warned me sooner, a dim, flickering bulb of memory lit up in my mind: oh right—he had. Repeatedly. Loudly. In several languages. Possibly while waving a torque wrench at my face like an angry medieval priest.
For the sake of avoiding a fatal crowbar-to-the-face situation, I elected to remain silent. Just nodded. Like the dumb, broke protagonist in a Kafkaesque aviation parody who had finally—finally—learned to shut the hell up and listen.
There was more, of course—there always is.
To be fair—to Enrico, who couldn’t have possibly anticipated the Olympic level of naivety I brought to the table—the idea of flying down to Kenya together wasn’t just financially idiotic, it was logistically doomed from the start. The trip would’ve drained my war chest completely—already drying up faster than a tourist carcass abandoned mid-safari.
And then there was the hospitality situation north of the equator. Sudan and Somalia weren’t just “complicated.” They were boiling, fermenting, and foaming over like a cursed chemistry experiment. Out of sheer ignorance, I would’ve cheerfully filed a flight plan through an active war zone without flinching, but Franz—my go-to aviation consigliere with Don Corleone-layer connections—casually reminded me that trying to haul barrels of avgas across the Sudanese desert might not be received with applause. More likely, it’d be met with RPGs, ransom notes, or just the sound of my airplane being recycled into a rebel camp coffee table. It might provoke a convoy of armed teenagers with no impulse control and a deep-seated hatred for white westerners.
So, yes—I would’ve loved to hop continents with Enrico like some emotionally stunted honeymoon duo, bonding over bush strips and emergency landings. But in the interest of staying alive, not having the Super Cub turned into scrap metal by a rocket-propelled teenage tantrum, and keeping Nicole’s sanity intact, the idea of shipping the plane in a container slowly started to grow on me. Like mould. On the soul.
Enrico would still come to Kenya a few months later, to fly with me and introduce me to the black art of bush flying—but that, dear reader, is another disaster entirely.
Back to Kalli...
“Are you sure you want to go flying again before we start taking the wings off and make her travel-ready?” Kalli asked, with the fragile optimism of a man quietly drafting his own obituary. I could see the flicker in his eyes—that mix of fear, resignation, and the thousand-yard stare of someone who had almost lost their hangar roof to one of my previous “low passes.” A manoeuvre I had, quite earnestly, declared a vital skill for buzzing elephants. You know—for conservation.
“Trust me,” I chirped, shoving the plane out of his hangar with the confidence of a man who had long ago outsourced adult supervision to a malfunctioning voicemail system. “I know what I’m doing.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” Kalli muttered, instinctively ducking like a man who’d once survived an ambush by angry Apaches and now flinched at the sound of galloping hooves—or in this case, the unmistakable death-rattle of a cold-starting Super Cub piloted by blind optimism and unresolved childhood trauma.
I climbed into the cockpit with the grace of a woolly mammoth in a Pakistani ballet performance, elbowing switches, violating aeronautical dignity, and radiating the professional calm of someone who checks battery charge by licking terminals and gauges flight-worthiness by consulting horoscopes and cloud formations. Even the laws of physics began nervously glancing at each other, whispering, “This wasn’t in the syllabus.”
“Did you go through the manuals?” Kalli asked, visibly clutching at whatever fragments of sanity he had left. “The new gadgets, the fuel pump, the—”
“Manuals,” I interrupted, index finger raised like I was about to deliver the Sermon on the Mount of Idiocy, “are for spineless quitters, e-bike riders with blinking helmets, and helicopter parents who strap knee pads onto toddlers for crawling on carpet. I’m a pilot. I improvise.”
He opened his mouth to say something deeply wise or at least legally important, but he never got the chance—because I had already cranked the engine without bothering to shout the customary “CLEAR,” promptly blasting him halfway into the next dimension and almost into the ditch behind the hangar.
“Oops—sorry, Kalli!” I yelled cheerfully, as the prop wash obliterated what was left of his dignity and tool cabinet.
And just like that, I was off—taxiing toward the runway like a half-baked kamikaze with nothing but optimism, loose bolts, and a vague idea of physics to hold the plane together. The skies had been warned. They just didn’t know it yet.
Fifteen minutes later I was already back in Kalli’s hangar, smelling like a man who’d confused a fuel truck with a mobile swimming pool and decided to cannonball in. The air around me was so saturated with gasoline fumes that Kalli nearly swallowed his cigarette whole in a panic—desperately trying to avoid becoming the human spark that would vaporise Northern Germany in a fireball visible from space.
Apparently, the fuel lines were leaking—a crucial detail I might’ve noticed if I had bothered to do a proper walk-around before hopping into the cockpit like an overconfident squirrel on espresso. But no, I had skipped the pre-flight check with the casual arrogance of someone who thinks rules are for people who don’t have a death wish.
So there I was, already lined up, throttle hand twitching with anticipation, proudly ignoring every red flag like a toddler handed a blowtorch. The stench hit me first—an olfactory sucker punch of high-octane despair. I glanced down to see what could only be described as a small oil state forming beneath the plane.
It was one of those rare moments where the faint whisper of adulthood managed to outshout my usual death-wish instincts. I grudgingly taxied back, defeated not by fear, but by the logistical nightmare of exploding before even leaving the ground. Kalli, half-relieved I hadn’t slammed into his hangar in a flaming cartwheel of lunacy, approached me slowly—like a man walking into Chernobyl with nothing but flip-flops, a suspicious rash, and a vague sense of hope. The look on his face was equal parts “thank God you’re alive” and “what have you done now?”
“I believe something is wrong, Kalli,” I announced, trying to sound less like a clueless halfwit drenched in fumes and more like a seasoned pilot who’d just cracked a complex aviation enigma. “It smells like fuel in here... can you quickly fix this so I can get going again?”
Kalli turned toward me slowly—like a man who had just discovered a live grenade in his lunchbox and was trying to decide whether to defuse it or just eat around it. He said nothing. He didn’t have to. His expression alone could’ve triggered a mandatory evacuation. Then, in a voice flat enough to steamroll a small village, he finally muttered:
“Yes, you could say that. Now get out of the cockpit. Immediately. And for the love of every flammable molecule in a fifty-mile radius—do not light a cigarette. This place smells like the Exxon Valdez took a leak in your fuel tanks. If we don’t drain these tanks fast, the EPA’s going to carpet bomb this airport and list it as a Class-A extinction event.”
Naturally, I hesitated—because denial is a beautiful thing. Somewhere between the fumes and my delusions of competence, I still believed this could be solved with a roll of duct tape, a firm handshake, and a slightly more optimistic attitude. My dream of perfecting short takeoffs and landings remained intact—like a toddler insisting the burnt spaghetti is still edible.
“No,” Kalli continued, now moving with the frantic calm of someone prepping for an airstrike. “We’re not patching this. We’re taking the wings off.”
I blinked. “The wings?”
He didn’t flinch. “Yes. The wings. We’re draining every drop of fuel and inspecting every inch before this plane turns into an airborne barbecue pit. It’s easier and safer.”
Safe. Easy. Disgusting words. I opened my mouth to protest, because if I had any guiding philosophy in life, it was that nothing worthwhile ever started with ‘let’s be safe and reasonable.’ But Kalli was already shifting into command mode, steamrolling over both my ego and my deeply flawed logic.
“Listen, Marcel,” he began, with the calm menace of a teacher explaining to a particularly dim student why licking electrical outlets was frowned upon, “I don’t have time to babysit you all day. We take it apart now, while I still have time. You want to fly? Go find someone in the Kenyan aviation jungle who’s crazy enough to help you practice later. Right now, we make this death trap roadworthy.”
And with that, he rolled out an empty 50-gallon fuel drum like a medieval executioner preparing the scaffold. He positioned it under one wing, pointed grimly at the drain valve like Moses parting the Red Sea—and, already lighting a cigarette, turned on his heel and walked away.
Three weeks later, the container arrived—
a 40-foot steel coffin, rolling into Kalli’s hangar on a frozen northern German morning in late 2011 like it had just been deported from a failed Cold War mission. I nearly drove straight into it. Face first. The thing sat there on its trailer like a monolith of dark foreboding, welcoming the shredded remnants of a bush plane and my overblown ambitions. The doors were already flung wide open—inviting in the poor, pity-soaked carcass of my dismembered aircraft.
By now, I had developed a disturbingly intimate understanding of that plane’s anatomy. I knew its frame better than the contents of my own closet—which, for the record, once produced a jar of expired marmalade and a pair of trousers from 1997.
So… that’s saying something.
Kalli had succeeded—through sheer repetition, sarcastic mentoring, and the occasional threat of spontaneous combustion—in shoving the basics of bush-plane maintenance into my skull.
Fuel leaks? Spark plugs that looked like they’d been yanked from a Soviet lawnmower? Oil thick enough to pave roads? Yeah—I could handle that now. Barely.
I was proud. Deluded, but proud. These were my first real steps toward becoming a rugged outdoor survival specialist—the kind of smug lunatic who could patch an oil line with a shoelace and still have time to lecture others on “bush efficiency” before their coffee even brewed.
Of course, I was still light-years away from being anything remotely resembling a competent bush pilot. I had fifteen hours of flight time and one crash to my name—so, statistically speaking, I was doing worse than most wildlife.
But I was confident. Which is always the first ingredient in a really solid disaster. Kalli, ever the enabler of chaos, had told me I could cram whatever I wanted into the container—short of a fully operational Shell station. I took that to heart.
I arrived with enough gear to confuse an entire customs department: tools, spare parts, a mountain of obscure aviation nonsense, and enough cargo to make the average prepper feel underprepared. Kalli watched in silence, his face a frozen mask of regret and calculation, clearly torn between asking if I planned to start a dealership in Nairobi or build a private airport staffed exclusively by baboons. He said nothing.
Just stared.
The kind of stare that quietly screamed:
“This is why I drink.”
Together we loaded the plane into the container—wedging it in like an ill-fitting pair of underpants three sizes too small. No screaming, no swearing—just Kalli radiating his usual unnerving calm. He had planned for everything. Every bolt, every brace, every potential failure had been predicted and pre-packed with the precision of a man who could probably land a glider on a moving train in a hurricane.
And then there was me—an agent of chaos in aviator sunglasses, still absolutely convinced I could solve any crisis with enthusiasm, duct tape, and a motivational quote.
Disaster? Never saw it coming.
Trouble? Ignored it like a bad horoscope.
Bad weather? Pfft. That's what windshield wipers are for. I was the human equivalent of that idiot who refuses to evacuate during a volcanic eruption because “it’ll probably miss me.”
Kalli, in contrast, had already calculated the eruption’s speed, bought fireproof boots, and packed marshmallows—just in case.
That day would be our last working together on my plane. He had done his part. I had three weeks left to prepare for the most miscalculated journey of my life. We didn’t talk much after closing the container. But that moment—wedged between grease, gasoline, and an industrial-sized mistake—remains one of my favourite memories. A rare pause in the chaos.
Two men. One plane.
And enough red flags to wallpaper the entire African continent.
Africa, January 2012
Kenya—Welcome to a place where you are absolutely nobody.
Nicole and I landed in Nairobi on January 13th, 2012. I was practically levitating with enthusiasm, grinning like a child who had just found out Santa Claus was real and owned an airstrip. I had arrived with plans. Big ones. Revolutionary ones. Earth-shattering, elephant-saving, charity-redefining plans.
Armed with a slightly used Super Cub and the mental clarity of an over-zealous cult leader, I was going to chase poachers across the Sahara like a medieval plague strapped to a lawnmower engine. My plane and I were to become the airborne inquisition—smiting anything that dared twitch in the general direction of ivory. A few notches more fanatical and I would’ve started hunting piano players for “tickling the ivory.”
The point is: I was motivated. Deliriously so. I touched down at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport like a prophet descending from the sky—utterly convinced I was about to change the world using nothing but moral outrage, second-hand aviation, and the vague sense that I was doing something important.
Nicole, for her part, looked... mildly entertained. Which, in her case, was the emotional equivalent of setting off fireworks. She had that diplomatic half-smile women wear when they’re two minutes away from ordering a mojito and pretending this isn’t their life. There was a subtle tension in the air—nothing dramatic, just the soft psychic ping that she’d have preferred a beach, a book, and a five-star breakfast buffet instead of being dragged into the opening credits of a war documentary narrated by Werner Herzog.
But I didn’t notice. Of course I didn’t. Because I had read somewhere—probably on a motivational calendar—that revolutions are never staged from silk linen. That real change comes from darkness, pain, and suffering.
Which, in hindsight, is hilarious.
Because I knew absolutely nothing about darkness, pain, or suffering.
I had the emotional range of a lawn sprinkler and the survival instinct of a sock puppet. But oh, how life was about to educate me. I was about to major in suffering. Full scholarship. Field research. Live ammo. A PhD in Pain, with a minor in “What the hell have I done?”
And the last thing ringing in my ears—still echoing with the bombastic echo of hubris—was a line I had dropped on my tax accountant during our final business meeting before I left.
He was a pencil-necked Porsche dweller, the kind of man who believed Breitling watches were a substitute for personality. When he asked, bewildered, why on earth I’d throw away my life to go save elephants in Africa—a species, he noted, that “no one really needs unless you run a zoo”—I gave him The Speech. The kind of speech that required dramatic finger-pointing and self-righteous vocal projection.
“Because I don’t want to end up like you.”
That got his attention. He blinked like I’d hit him with a fish. So naturally, I continued—never let confusion get in the way of a good monologue.
“Look at you. All you care about is money. You shuffle meaningless tax papers around like they’re sacred scrolls. You’ve been divorced twice, you’ve got no actual skills outside of wielding your Montblanc like it’s Excalibur, and you break into a cold sweat if your phone battery hits 10%. Me? I want to fly. I want to shoot. I want to survive. I want to get to a place where I don’t die just because my iPhone needs an update.”
In retrospect, this might have hit a nerve.
He stared at me with a mixture of disbelief and silent, murderous insult. To this day, I don’t know why he took it personally—but he did. That meeting was the last time I ever saw him. No goodbye email. No passive-aggressive invoice. Just vanished. Possibly into therapy.
But I didn’t care. I was too busy basking in my own righteous glow, unaware that I was standing on the edge of a volcano, holding a sparkler, and yelling,
“Let’s fix Africa!”
But I digress. We cleared the Nairobi airport only after surviving the ritual gauntlet of post-colonial chaos masquerading as arrivals procedure.
The first trial: disembarking—which in Kenya works like a reverse stampede where everyone attempts to leave the aircraft at the same time, as though the plane were on fire and the only exit led to salvation, free land, and a goat.
Pushing, elbowing, and passive-aggressively shoulder-checking your way down the aisle, you’re sandwiched between someone’s armpit and a screaming infant that may or may not be summoning a minor demon. It’s a scene straight from Dante’s “Circles of Hell: The Carry-On Edition.”
Then came Immigration, which looked less like a government checkpoint and more like an over-glorified lottery kiosk run by underpaid funeral attendees. Behind scratched acrylic windows sat officials moving at the speed of postal workers on a hunger strike, stamping visas with the enthusiasm of people who knew the printer ran out of toner three days ago but didn’t care anymore.
One officer was clearly watching a soap opera on his Nokia from 2002. Another was asleep with his eyes open, hand loosely draped over a stack of passports he might get to before retirement. The only thing moving quickly was the growing queue of increasingly sweaty foreigners who were beginning to understand what eternity feels like.
Once your passport was returned (possibly yours, possibly someone else’s), you were spat out into the next circle of bureaucratic hell: baggage claim:
This is where Kenya’s true entrepreneurial spirit emerged from the shadows—feral, shameless, and beautifully choreographed.
The luggage carousel resembled a post-apocalyptic marketplace—a swirling vortex of mismatched bags, unclaimed plastic-wrapped mysteries, and human scavengers circling with intent.
This is where the local entrepreneurs emerged—armed with ancient scams honed to wicked perfection. Their business models came in two flavours:
Option A: Snatch anything remotely Gucci-shaped from the belt, then hover somewhere in the shadows like a morally ambiguous mongoose. Once the tourists panic and report their bags as lost, swoop in with a miraculous “recovery” story and offer to return it for a small token of appreciation. This entire enterprise, naturally, operates with the full spiritual blessing—and occasional financial participation—of airport police, who have long since learned that enforcing rules is bad for business.
Option B: Grab someone’s bag mid-spin and immediately pose as their long-lost butler from the Royal Household of Nonsense. “Please, Bwana! I take this for you!” they exclaim, already halfway to a waiting taxi driven by their cousin, who moonlights either as a shaman or as a real estate agent for land that doesn’t technically exist. Refusing this help triggers either high-pitched moral outrage or elaborate sob stories involving nine starving children, three blind goats, and an orphanage that just burned down this morning. Coincidentally, also run by a cousin.
Try to decline politely, and you’re instantly cast as the colonial villain from a Bollywood drama: the soulless foreigner who hates humanity and probably kicks puppies for fun.
And this? This was just the arrival.
Welcome to Kenya.
Where the safari starts before you even reach the parking lot and reaches its crescendo somewhere between a three-wheeled minibus overtaking a lorry on a blind corner and a guy on a moped carrying six chickens, a fridge, and the concept of death on his back.
Lucky for us, Shlomi had dispatched his personal driver—a man who doubled as a bodyguard and looked like he'd bench-pressed a zebra for breakfast. He navigated the arrival zone like a seasoned riot officer, elbowing away the human mosquito cloud of “taxi! taxi! boss!” hawkers and predatory luggage porters offering “help” in the same tone you’d expect from a mafia enforcer demanding protection money.
Our path was a war zone of fake cab drivers, dented Toyotas held together by hope, and vans that looked like they’d been hijacked from a post-apocalyptic film set. The driver, bless his combat-grade patience, body-checked two touts and hip-thrusted another into a curb before calmly opening the door to a dented but meticulously maintained Land Cruiser.
“Here,” he explained, dead serious, as we climbed into a Land Cruiser that looked like it had served tours in Fallujah, “you need a car that is high, strong, and has a bumper big enough to flatten a hippo. The bigger the vehicle, the quicker and less dead you get through Nairobi traffic.”
I nodded solemnly, pretending I understood. Truth be told, I had all the street-savvy of a confused flamingo. Apart from a few joyrides on Shlomi’s motorcycles (which mostly involved clinging on for dear life and screaming like a tourist on a banana boat), I had never actually driven in Nairobi’s traffic. Especially not traffic where the rules of the road were more of a nostalgic suggestion than a functioning reality.
See, most safari tourists are blissfully shielded from this chaos. Upon arrival, they’re immediately scooped up by a khaki-clad fixer with a clipboard and shepherded into a safari vehicle, specially engineered to provide maximum “authentic experience” while avoiding any actual danger or discomfort. Think: padded adventure. A placebo version of wilderness with minibar access.
They’ll be whisked off to a five-star lodge for a sunset cocktail, all without the faintest whiff of diesel fumes or moral ambiguity. The next morning, they're shuttled to Wilson Airport, and from there flown into the parks—leaving behind the actual Kenya like you’d leave behind a sweaty jumpsuit after skydiving into a luxury buffet.
And that, my friends, is the core difference between a tourist and a traveller. Same species. Vastly different lifeforms. Like the difference between an astrologer and an astronaut.
One writes about stars in a magazine while sipping chamomile tea. The other straps themselves to a missile and prays their teeth don’t rattle out on re-entry.
A tourist collects photos—snapshots to paste into albums and show to coworkers between meetings they pretend to care about. They see the surface. The curated version. Every trip looks vaguely like the last—just insert new coordinates, same tan, same T-shirt.
A traveller, though? A traveller bleeds into the place. They get dust in their shoes, parasites in their gut, and a lifetime of stories seared onto their cortex. They don’t need many photos—because the moment they close their eyes, the memories burn in technicolour. Even the ones they wish they could forget.
And that—that raw, reckless, real experience—I craved. I had once been that kind of traveller. But comfort, that sly seducer in silk sheets and predictable breakfast buffets, had stolen a decade of me.
This was my return.
To discomfort.
To diesel.
To delirium.
To life.
And Nairobi, bless its unpredictable, homicidal traffic heart, was more than ready to slap the stupid out of me and welcome me back.
As expected, the ride from the airport was a full-blown sensory napalm strike—the kind of automotive mayhem you don’t drive through, you survive.
The highway morphed into a tarmac battlefield within minutes. Lorries, hilariously overloaded with what looked like the contents of a collapsing IKEA warehouse, teetered and groaned before predictably keeling over mid-lane. Traffic would then come to a grinding, apocalyptic halt—prompting drivers to improvise detours through someone’s garden, across a chicken coop, or straight over a sleeping goat. This is where the Land Cruiser shone, part tank, part biblical plague—it bulldozed its way through Nairobi like Moses with a V8 engine. We thundered over potholes so deep they could have swallowed a Tesla and spat it out in China.
Every ten meters, there was a new absurdity. A stranded Matatu belching smoke and existential crises. A donkey, tied to a shopping cart, trying to make a U-turn. One roundabout featured an impromptu cattle grazing session courtesy of a lone Maasai warrior who’d clearly decided the drought had gone on long enough and this dusty clump of government landscaping would do just fine. He stood there stoically, ignoring the sea of honking metal and human rage circling him like some ancient bovine-themed Stonehenge while his cows unloaded enough dung to fertilise a mid-sized Texan cornfield.
Twice, we spotted traffic cops loitering on the roadside, armed with nothing but bad intentions and clipboards of doom. They perked up at the sight of our spotless Land Cruiser, assuming we were overfunded, under-informed tourists—aka walking ATMs with bad judgment.
“They’re trying to scam us,” our driver muttered, without breaking a sweat. “They wave, you wave. You smile. Play stupid. Muzungu style. They can’t chase us—they don’t have a patrol car. And even if they do, it’s either broken, in use by their cousin for boda boda gigs, or out of fuel. They won’t report the plate. Either they can’t read it—or they’re not even official. This is just freelance policing. Smile, wave, drive on.”
So I did.
Like a gleeful idiot waving at a parade of burning dumpsters, I leaned out and gave my best “Hi, officer!” grin—while the Land Cruiser roared past the scam zone like a diplomatic convoy fleeing an outbreak of common sense.
One hour in Kenya and I had already learned more about survival than an entire season of National Geographic: Polite Travel Tips for the Culturally Sensitive Backpacker.
Forget documentaries.
Forget travel blogs.
You haven’t lived until you’ve waved at a corrupt cop while swerving around cow shit on a roundabout, dodging a disintegrating bus, and wondering if the goat strapped to the back of a motorbike is judging your life choices.
“So, you actually came. I can’t believe it. I knew you were unhinged, but I didn’t realise you were certifiably batshit with extra sprinkles!” Shlomi barked, standing in his estate’s gravel parking lot, arms crossed and face already halfway into disbelief. His shorts—cut off at a length last fashionable in the Jurassic era—exposed two pale legs so spindly they looked like he’d won them in a poker game with a stork and instantly regretted it.
“You see,” he went on, squinting at me like I was a radioactive eggplant, “I was half expecting you’d send some tragic last-minute cancellation. You know—‘Sorry bro, had to postpone the whole Kenya-dream because of business… terminal cancer… alien abduction… or maybe I just sneezed and threw my back out.’” He gestured wildly. “But no. Not you. You’re here. Physically present. With that psychotic twinkle in your eye and a plane somewhere in a shipping container being juggled by underpaid dockworkers on ketamine. Marcel, I give you credit—you’re mad, but at least you’re consistently mad. So tell me, what’s the plan? What’s the genius strategy behind this flaming circus of ambition?”
I blinked at him, my brain audibly buffering.
“Well…” I began, stretching the word like I was about to deliver a TED Talk on accidental arson, “I don’t really have a plan. I guess the plan sort of stopped at ‘become a pilot,’ then ‘buy a plane,’ and then somehow get it here. Which I sort of did—if you ignore the part where it’s currently disassembled and boxed up like Swedish furniture. So yeah... I’ll think of something. Tomorrow, maybe. Probably.”
I smiled. A confident, deranged kind of smile. The kind that says “I have no clue what I’m doing, but I’ve already bought the t-shirt and set the map on fire.”
Shlomi stared at me.
Not with anger. Not with pity.
But with that blank, exhausted expression people reserve for wildlife documentaries—when the gazelle clearly knows the lion is coming but just keeps nibbling grass like it’s none of its business.
“Alright then,” Shlomi muttered, guiding us through his sprawling yard to the guesthouse nestled between a goldfish pond and an unnecessarily dramatic tree. “Make yourselves comfortable. The staff already brought your luggage in. Marie—the kitchen maid—starts making coffee and breakfast around six. Don’t worry about the tortoises when you step outside. They tend to roam the property at night. Just don’t trip over one and sue me.”
He opened the door, his eyes now glued to our luggage pile like a customs officer about to cry.
“Tell me,” he said slowly, “did you fly in on a private cargo jet? Or just hijack the hold and evict a hundred economy passengers mid-air? Because unless Turkish Airlines is now offering livestock-tier freight upgrades, I don’t understand how this circus made it on board.”
“Well,” I replied, already slipping into that charmingly defensive tone people use when caught stealing towels from a hotel, “I had to bring my camera gear. What’s the point of being a wildlife photographer without the actual…wildlife-photographing part? That stuff alone clocks in at 30 kilos. This is why I always fly business.”
I smiled. Too confidently. “You know me, I travel light. But I also had to bring my pilot gear, flight jackets, outdoor wear, hats, boots—different ones for different disasters—and, just FYI, the container holding my plane is stuffed to the rafters too.”
Shlomi said nothing while Nicole and I poked around the guesthouse, trying to make ourselves comfortable. His expression now resembled that of someone observing a European idiot armed with a laminated license and a martyr complex the size of the Congo Basin—equal parts awe, dread, and deep philosophical regret that humanity ever invented air travel. Nicole, on the other hand, carried that vacant smile of someone privately mourning the life choices that led her here—clearly longing to be anywhere else that didn’t involve barking dogs, jet lag, or a front-row seat to my midlife crisis, now unfolding in surround sound and poor lighting.
“Good night, my friend,” I chirped, physically shoving Shlomi out of his own guesthouse like a deranged Airbnb guest with boundary issues. I had no interest in fielding more questions—especially not the kind that might lead to reflection, accountability, or basic adult thought.
“See you in the morning—with a brilliant new plan to save every last elephant! I’ve already got a lite concept cooking. Oh, by the way, is there a decent shopping mall around? I need to pick up a few essentials... and also a Land Rover. If you hear about anyone selling one, let me know.”
Shlomi stood frozen in the doorway like a forgotten museum artefact caught in a hailstorm—weathered, stunned, and visibly computing whether he was still dreaming, having a stroke, or witnessing the birth of a new mental illness. His eyes carried that slow, disbelieving head tilt reserved for people who cowlick themselves into refrigerators just to see if the light really goes off—equal parts fascination, mild horror, and the quiet despair of someone suddenly questioning what kind of childhood trauma breeds that level of commitment.
I, meanwhile, radiated the serene conviction of someone who had absolutely no clue what continent they were on but had already decided they were going to fix it before breakfast.
I was utterly convinced that tomorrow would be a marvellous day.
Why wouldn’t it be?
I had a secret plan.
Well, my version of a plan.
A “close-your-eyes-and-just-wing-it” plan.
The kind of plan you hatch in your head while brushing your teeth and ignore all day like a ticking bomb in the basement.
Step one: Casually stroll into whatever sun-bleached aviation authority existed here—probably operating out of a shipping container behind a goat market—and convert my European pilot license into something vaguely legal. Shouldn’t take more than an hour.
After all, I had flown here. That had to count for something, right?
Step two: Charm one of the thousands of NGOs I assumed were holding daily prayer vigils for a white guy with a moustache and a used bush plane. I’d offer them my unmatched services as a freelance aerial saint, and they’d burst into grateful tears and hand me the keys to the savannah. Should be sorted before lunch.
Then, obviously, I’d find a hangar and lease a private airstrip. I imagined I could just ring up some rural farmer who’d chuckle warmly and say, “Of course, kind Muzungu, take my land, runway’s already paved, comes with fuel drums and a free giraffe.”
One phone call. Tops.
Next, I’d sort out fuel logistics for a plane that hadn’t even cleared customs yet, secure regular maintenance in a place where “qualified mechanic” meant someone who owned pliers and hadn’t cried that day—and, as a cherry on top, swing by and buy a Land Rover.
Because in my deluded little western mind, Kenya was just like Europe… but with zebras.
I didn’t see what all the fuss was about planning.
I’d drafted this entire flawless roadmap in the span of twelve minutes between unpacking my underwear and crawling into bed, all while still talking to Shlomi, who hadn’t moved from the doorway except to blink like a man watching someone juggle grenades next to a fireworks factory.
If all went well, we’d even squeeze in some shopping.
You know, “to get into the spirit.”
What spirit? The spirit of complete, unmitigated delusion, apparently.
I drifted off to sleep fully convinced that I was ready.
Ready to bend Africa to my will.
Ready to navigate a country I didn’t understand, in a system I didn’t research, with expectations forged in a parallel universe powered by espresso and YouTube documentaries.
If I’d had even the faintest premonition of what was actually coming—
Of the bureaucratic black hole, the fiscal haemorrhage, the procedural molasses, the existential sandpapering, the spiralling collapse of all logic and dignity—
I would’ve eaten my passport, set the guesthouse on fire using mosquito spray and denial, and sprinted to the airport wearing nothing but shame and flip-flops.
But I didn’t.
So I didn’t.
Marcel Romdane
Sleeping like a newborn on NyQuil, armed with blind optimism, a camera, and a mental roadmap scribbled in crayon.
Ready to fix Africa before brunch.
Kalli--bless his kind heart--and me. Off you go to Africa, yellow little bush plane...!
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