“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.
“What did you break this time?” he sighed, already bracing for impact.
Then his eyes scanned the room—more out of muscle memory than concern—and landed on my Super Cub, sitting smugly in one corner of the hangar, pristine and polished like it was about to walk the red carpet and thank its propeller for believing in it. Not a bolt out of place, not a scratch to be seen. It practically glowed, like it had never known adversity, tragedy, or the sensation of plowing sideways through a meadow.
This, of course, stood in spectacular contrast to just a few weeks earlier, when the very same plane had been strewn across the hangar floor like a Home Depot had violently sneezed.
Kalli turned back to me slowly, eyebrows rising, the way you look at a man who once burned his kitchen down making pan cakes and is now requesting matches.
“What’s wrong? Need more yellow aviation tape?” he deadpanned.
I ignored his sarcasm and bounced on the balls of my feet with the twitchy enthusiasm of a Jack Russell on double espresso.
“I think I have to fly the Cub to Africa myself. Enrico’s out. What do you think? Can I do that?”
Kalli stared at me. No blinking. Possibly dissociating.
“I asked Nicole to come,” I added helpfully, as if this would somehow strengthen my case. “But she said no. Can’t imagine why—we’ve already flown, like, fifteen hours together over the potato fields! That’s practically international experience, right?”
What I didn’t mention—purely because it had slipped my mind in the throes of heroic fantasy—was that those fifteen hours were the only flying hours I’d accumulated since my pilot training. All of them spent circling lazy loops above German farmland while practicing landings until the local cows began flinching every time they heard an engine.
Also conveniently left out: when I crashed the plane a few days earlier, Nicole hadn’t been onboard—purely by luck and perhaps divine intervention. But surely that was a minor detail. I shrugged, brimming with delusion.
“Anyway, how hard can it be? I mean, it’s basically just a very long cross-country with… well, some sand. And camels. And airstrips made of corrugated karma. But come on—it’s mostly straight lines on the map!”
Kalli still stared at me like I’d just offered to launch myself into orbit using an ironing board and a leaf blower.
“Let me get this straight,” he finally said, very slowly, like he was talking to someone holding a grenade with the pin halfway out. “You seriously think you can fly that”—he gestured toward my plane—“across 5,000 miles of European airspace, over the Alps, across the Mediterranean, through North Africa where anti-aircraft guns are still considered a romantic gesture, and onward through deserts, sketchy fuel stations, and airfields that double as camel crossings—all the way to Kenya?”
I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “…Yes? Why not?”
He looked at me a moment longer, then muttered something under his breath that might’ve been a prayer or just a mechanical curse, and went back to the engine, clearly deciding that whatever was broken down there was less horrifying than the situation standing upright in front of him.
Now lets back up a bit, because as usual, I got ahead of myself. Before launching headfirst into the geopolitical inferno of flying solo to Africa, we still had to excavate the charred remains of my last airborne catastrophe—an incident which, in hindsight, made the Hindenburg look like a barbecue mishap.
Apparently, yellow aviation tape wasn’t quite enough to resurrect the Super Cub into a state that wouldn’t send the German version of the FAA into a seizure. It sat there in the hangar, slumped and sulking, with one wing cocked at a tragic angle, its tip missing entirely. The canvas hung in strips like war-torn curtains in a haunted asylum. Under the harsh buzz of the summer lights, it shimmered with the tired defiance of a party clown about to file for burnout. If planes had a union, mine would’ve been demanding hazard pay and emotional support rivets. It needed more than duct tape and optimism. It needed a metal witchcraft.
That landing… well. Without forcing you to scroll back to last week's flaming wreckage, let’s just say I tried to challenge the laws of aerodynamics with the confidence of someone jumping off a cliff holding a parachute made of Burger King paper bags and misplaced faith. I floated in slower than a dying weather balloon, hoping to one-up those smug Valdez STOL bush pilots. The only thing I outperformed was my own dignity. Turns out, watching 472 hours of YouTube landings does not, in fact, grant you a license to defy physics. Or common sense.
After limping home from Kalli’s hangar with a soul full of splinters, I did what any responsible pilot would do: I performed a full mental autopsy. And sure, my pride wanted to blame rogue crosswinds, malicious runway gravel, Moon in retrograde, or a vengeful sea gull loitering near the fence. But I just couldn’t. Blame, to me, feels as alien as tofu to a T-Rex.
Anyway, by the time I limped back home—emotionally bruised, physically intact, and spiritually concussed—I had it all figured out. Completely. Totally. Scientifically. The villain of this disaster? Speed. Or, to be more accurate, the complete and utter absence of it.
What I had accomplished, flying stupidly slow, was disrupt the airflow around my wings so catastrophically that lift didn’t just vanish—it quit the job, ghosted the tower, and moved to a cabin in the woods like a burned-out Amazon help desk rep. One moment I was flying; the next, I was plummeting like a dropped toaster. It wasn’t just bad—it was aerodynamically offensive.
I did a rapid mental debrief, sifting through the scattered trivia of my flight training. Terms like power curve, angle of attack, lift-to-drag ratio, and Jesus take the yoke buzzed faintly in my brain. I reached for what I remembered from Sparky’s sacred taildragger handbook—only to find that most of my actual flight schooling had apparently exited the building, possibly via emergency slide. Still, there was one conclusion even my smoke-filled brain could not ignore:
I was an idiot.
A freshly certified, YouTube-worshipping, overconfident idiot with the aeronautical instincts of a sock puppet. But—and here’s the plot twist—I had learned something. Not just academically, but bone-deep, ego-shattering, “tattooed on my brain” type of learning.
See, aviation is cruelly binary. There are only two backpacks every pilot carries: one full of luck, and one painfully empty, just waiting to be stuffed with hard-won experience. And you will empty one to fill the other—those are the rules, etched in carbon fibre and bad decisions. That day, I torched a good chunk of my luck stash—poured it straight into the furnace like jet fuel—but in return, I started loading the other one. Experience. Real, visceral, bone-deep understanding you can’t buy, borrow, or fake. That’s the deal. Every time you walk away from a wreckage of your own making, you better have something valuable clutched in your trembling hands—besides your shredded ego and a propeller that now doubles as modern art. I knew with the clarity of a man who had just introduced his undercarriage to the tarmac at terminal velocity: this mistake? I would never make it again. There were plenty of spectacular failures awaiting me on the horizon, sure. But crawling in too slow, behind the power curve like a sulking snail? That wasn’t going to be one of them.
That crash course—literally—birthed something useful. From that moment on, I developed a seat-of-the-pants feel for how an aircraft behaves when it starts whispering threats in turbulent air. A dark, twitchy intuition that kicks in a few seconds before disaster does. Like a sixth sense forged entirely from shame, band aid, and near-death reflection.
Now, I could feel the stall coming. Not intellectually. Not because of some polite gauge blinking on the panel. But in my bones. In my spine. Somewhere between a gut twinge and an impending-panic-sneeze. And, miracle of miracles, I could do something about it.
Which, in aviation—and life—is really all you can hope for.
The next morning, a silver lining showed up in disguise—possibly wearing a fake moustache and sunglasses, because even it wasn’t sure it wanted to be seen with me. Kalli—who had explicitly ordered me to stay the hell away from his shop for at least a week so he could recover from the psychological whiplash of my crash and the traumatic therapy he had to perform on what was left of my plane—called me.
“Marcel,” he said, in the flat tone of a man trying to decide if what he was about to say would summon joy or a plague, “your parts from CubCrafters have arrived. We can start prepping your plane next week—”
I never heard the rest. Because by then, I was already gone—out the door, into the car, breaking both land speed records and several local laws, arriving at Kalli’s hangar in a sonic boom of unfiltered enthusiasm. I walked in just as he was still holding the phone, mid-blink, wearing a face that screamed instant regret.
“Here I am,” I announced, beaming like an arsonist on pay-day with a gas can in one hand and a Zippo in the other, ready to roast marshmallows over the smouldering ruins of the county records office. “Where are the boxes?”
Kalli, blinking like a hostage in a toothpaste commercial, the ever-present cigarette dangling precariously from his lower lip, slowly pointed to two coffin-sized boxes stashed in the corner—ominously parked right next to my plane, which still looked like it had lost a bare-knuckle bar fight with the tarmac.
He didn’t say a word for a long time—but I could practically hear his soul sigh, like a man watching a toddler about to stick a fork into the power socket. Then, slowly, that familiar crooked grin crept across his face as his eyes took in the full spectacle of me—standing in the middle of his oil-stained hangar in an Armani suit, beaming like I’d just won the lottery and decided to invest it all in fireworks and regret.
“Marcel,” he said, grinning broadly and exhaling smoke like a disappointed Greek oracle, “are you sure you want to start ripping into those boxes in your designer clothes?”
He didn’t wait for my answer, because he knew it wouldn’t make sense.
“Perhaps,” he continued, in the patient tone one reserves for escapees from a mental institution, “and I know by now how hard this is for you—even waiting two hours is like mental waterboarding—but what if we first grab a coffee, maybe a cigarette or five, and talk through the different modification stages? After all, you’re taking this bird to Africa. You’ll need to learn how to fix her with nothing but chewing gum, tea bags, and cardboard.”
I stared at him in awe. This was his kingdom—an empire built from busted engines, salvaged bolts, and the ghosts of good decisions. And me? I was the idiot prince in polished shoes, armed with nothing but a shiny pilot license and a raging case of misplaced enthusiasm, ready to plunge into a Jumanji-level bush adventure… with absolutely zero clue what I was doing.
And yet—somehow—he took me seriously.
That was Kalli.
One of the many reasons I adored him, aside from his saint-like patience and his unnatural ability to extract miracles from aluminium wreckage, was his glorious disdain for pilots. Not hatred. Not even mockery. Just a quiet, ever-present suspicion that most of us were dangerously overpaid, hopelessly overconfident, and deeply convinced we were God’s gift to both women and airspace.
That’s why he liked me—I was the rare exception: under-qualified, undercooked, and fully aware of it. I didn’t pretend to be anything more than a reckless imbecile with good taste in watches and terrible taste in conclusions.
He saw that, and yet he took me under his wing. Gently. Reluctantly. Possibly out of pity.
Another thing I loved? The way he listened to other pilots. That subtle, almost imperceptible squint that said “I hear you, but I’ve also heard chickens make more sense.” You could tell, if you knew him well enough: he treated most pilot talk like distant artillery fire—concerning, sure, but nothing to drop your sandwich over.
Kalli didn’t need to say what he thought of people. He had mastered the art of the eyebrow—a single twitch could reduce an entire airshow’s worth of bravado to dust.
And here I was, his latest project. A walking aviation liability in an Italian suit, about to go full MacGyver in the bush.
He sighed again and I knew he was already regretting everything.
“So, what about this double fuel line from each wing that Enrico suggested?” I asked, trying to sound like I belonged in a conversation that involved tools, engineering, or basic logic.
Kalli and I were sitting in his hangar office, a space so thick with cigarette smoke and caffeinated desperation it could’ve been declared a chemical weapons facility by the EPA. If a health inspector had wandered in, they’d have evacuated the neighbourhood and bulldozed the building into a sealed bunker.
“Nonsense,” Kalli barked, jabbing a nicotine-stained finger at Enrico’s crude schematic. “Unless you’re flying an F-16—and you’re not—this is about as useful as a Rolex on a corpse. I’ve been fixing planes for thirty years. Fuel lines don’t fail. Idiot pilots run out of gas. That’s it.”
“Excellent!” I grinned, already mentally reallocating the thousand bucks I’d just saved to something more sensible, like an espresso machine for the bush. “Okay, how about a secondary antenna for redundancy?” I added with faux confidence, as if I even knew where the primary one was.
Kalli paused and eyed me like I’d asked him to install a jacuzzi in the cockpit.
“Rubbish,” he growled. “Start adding redundancy for everything and your plane’s going to weigh more than a Diplodocus. What else does Captain Enrico have on this wish list?”
I handed him the crumpled sketch, which he studied with the grim patience of a parent reviewing their kid’s Christmas list full of nonsense like “flamethrower,” “spaceship,” and “working lightsaber.”
Without breaking eye contact, he flicked the paper over his shoulder straight into the trash with the accuracy of a sniper.
“Here’s what we’re actually going to do,” he muttered, sparking up another cigarette like it was a coping mechanism, “Tomorrow, eight a.m., we start gutting your plane. You’ll do most of it. I’ll supervise—mainly to make sure you don’t accidentally set the building on fire or remove something critical, like the wings.”
Slowly, I nodded—the kind of slow, deliberate nod I’d seen in a movie and hoped would pass as a halfway adult response to Kalli’s proposal. Inside, however, I was already frantically scrolling through a mental inventory of my designer wardrobe, trying to figure out what to wear the next day that said “ready for aircraft disassembly” but also “not homeless.”
I was just about to stumble blindly out of Kalli’s smoke-filled office, trying not to walk face-first into a wall thanks to the visibility levels of a 1930s coal mine, when his voice cut through the haze like a rusty saw blade:
“Wait. How’s your trip planning coming along? Any progress beyond your two brilliant options—flying solo to Africa with the experience level of a houseplant, or bringing Enrico along as your airborne life coach?”
I hesitated. Shifted awkwardly like a dog trying to hide a stolen bratwurst.
“Well… I did reach out to a guy named Franz who apparently knows a thing or two about flying across North Africa. That’s… basically all I know so far. And no, I haven’t asked Enrico yet if he plans on paying for a single litre of fuel.”
Kalli turned and gave me a look—the kind usually reserved for people who bring emotional support ferrets to tax audits. He didn’t say anything for a long second. Just stared. Calculating. He was clearly debating whether to hit me with a wrench or just let natural selection finish the job. But instead, he exhaled smoke and sighed.
“You need to start clarifying this now,” he said, tone flat as a condemned runway. “Before this whole circus gets away from you. I don’t want you stepping into more disasters than absolutely necessary—which, in your case, is already far too many.”
Then he fixed his gaze on me—cold, clear, unflinching. Like a surgeon about to remove a tumour without anaesthesia.
“Listen carefully, Marcel: aviators always have an angle. Always. I see them come through here day in, day out. There is no sacred brotherhood in aviation, no noble fraternity of sky-warriors holding hands and singing Kumbaya above the clouds. That’s a myth they sell in flight schools and hangar bars. At the end of the day, pilots do what they do for themselves. And if you forget that, this trip will chew you up and spit your Rolex into the ocean before you even reach Sicily.”
Kalli was right, of course. Painfully, prophetically right. The decade of flying that followed proved it with the brutal consistency of a vending machine. It didn’t matter where I went—Germany, Vancouver Island, the Yukon in a floatplane, or somewhere over the sun-scorched savannahs of Kenya, dodging elephants and egos in equal measure. From Texas to Tanzania, Wyoming to Botswana, it was always the same.
On the surface, aviation had the vibe of a quirky, lovable cult. Everyone wore shirts with wings, exchanged wind speed gossip like old grannies on a church bench, and spoke in sacred riddles involving carburettors and crosswinds. But underneath? It was a knife fight in a phone booth.
You’d think you were joining the Fellowship of the Wings—some airborne band of brothers soaring nobly through the skies, bonded by oil stains and adrenaline. But no. What you got was a smoke-and-mirrors marketplace of strategic handshakes, calculated eye contact, and more hidden agendas than a UN summit.
They’d pat you on the back with one hand and empty your fuel tank with the other. Meanwhile, there I was—naïve and socially generous like a Labrador at a wedding—just excited to meet new people, swap flying stories, and maybe share a tip about oil pressure or prop pitch. I didn’t scheme. I didn’t plot. If I needed help, I asked for it. I didn’t network like a politician trying to land a cabinet position. I genuinely thought that aviation was full of kindred spirits and not cold-eyed loners calculating risk-to-benefit ratios in their heads while pretending to compliment your aircraft.
You see, I believe I’ve mentioned this before—but in case you missed it between the crash landings and cries for aviation tape—there’s a minor flaw in my otherwise very advanced personality:
I possess all the street smarts of a man who reads self-help quotes from fortune cookies—and takes them as strategic life advice. Sniffing out hidden agendas, navigating the twisty labyrinth of human motives, and recognising that practically everyone—with rare exception—has some kind of angle, is a concept so foreign to me, it might as well be spoken in dolphin clicks. Expecting me to approach relationships with the kind of strategic cynicism required to function in adult society is a laughable waste of time. You’d get better results teaching a Neanderthal to appreciate the subtle drama of a bingo night at the local retirement home. At least he'd understand that yelling “BINGO!” gets you something.
Naturally, I missed the obvious.
When Enrico, with his Navy flair and sun-warmed smile, casually proposed to fly my Super Cub with me to Kenya, I thought he meant it like a friend. You know, one of those ride-or-die types from inspirational travel films, where two intrepid souls split the costs, share the adventure, and cheer each other on while dodging certain death and gastrointestinal parasites. I imagined us co-piloting our way across 5,000 miles of raw, untamed airspace in my tiny bush plane—built more for leaping over termite mounds than crossing continents—laughing in the face of adversity while eating questionable dried meat out of ziplock bags.
But of course, I was wrong. Woefully, pathetically, almost adorably wrong.
Turns out, Enrico wasn’t signing up for adventure. He was signing up for instructorship. A supervisory role. A clipboard-and-whistle situation. While I had envisioned a noble partnership of equals, Enrico saw an opportunity to sit front-row in a 50-hour flying classroom—me being the classroom—and dish out instructional time while I footed the bill for everything.
I’d be providing the plane, the fuel, the food, the landing permits, the mechanical breakdowns, the inevitable bribes (which in Africa are as common as potholes and slightly more expensive), and quite possibly my last will and testament. Meanwhile, he’d show up fresher than a gelato on an Italian summer’s day, ready to critique my landings and sip his espresso while I negotiated with border officials and tribal militias.
Anyway, the next morning I arrived with Nicole in tow, proudly wearing my oldest designer jeans and a pair of running sneakers I’d excavated from the back of my closet like some rare anthropological find. I probably looked like I was headed to a cinema screening of “The Mechanic” rather than preparing to become one. But what could I do? I didn’t own old stuff—let alone clothes fit for actual work.
Kalli gave my outfit the kind of look usually reserved for people who show up to funerals in swimsuits or try to board planes with live poultry. He sighed audibly—then without a word, turned and led us into the hangar.
There it was. My poor Super Cub, already positioned dead-centre like a patient on a surgical table, awaiting some medieval procedure.
“Here. Knives and scissors. Take the canvas off the wings,” Kalli said, handing over a collection of sharp tools that felt less like shop instruments and more like props from a Halloween slasher reboot.
I blinked. “Is this… really necessary?” I was already sweating. The idea of cutting through square meters of canvas and paint—especially on the good wing—was causing me an actual stress reaction.
“No, of course not,” Kalli replied cheerfully, “You can always try extracting the ancient fuel tanks through the inspection ports with a set of tweezers. Or—you follow the plan.”
Laughing, he walked away, leaving Nicole and me standing there like two actors in a Tarantino flick who just realised the blood was real.
“I made it easy for you kids!” he shouted from across the hangar, already waist-deep in a Cessna engine compartment. “I drew lines where you need to cut. For the love of God—don’t deviate from them.”
And with that, he vanished—leaving us alone with a pair of knives, a doomed airplane, and the creeping realisation that we had officially passed the point of no return.
The next few weeks saw Nicole and me attacking the plane with the wild-eyed energy of a plantation worker during a fruit-picking speed trial. Within days, the Cub looked like a tornado had rage-quit halfway through Kalli’s hangar, leaving behind a wasteland of unrecognisable parts scattered across the concrete like a redneck garage sale. Everything was dismantled—wings, instruments, dignity. My hundred-thousand-dollar flying machine now resembled either a WWII crash site or a failed IKEA prototype for time travel. It could’ve been a laundry machine. A grain thresher. Possibly a Pontiac from the Eisenhower era. Anything but an aircraft.
Kalli, somehow still whistling like the overly cheerful narrator of a low-budget survival documentary for people with a death wish, would glide past every now and then—hands in pockets, grinning like he wasn’t supervising the slow, brutal murder of an aircraft.
Each visit followed the same routine:
a) He'd poke a wing rib with a screwdriver to see if it still existed.
b) Check if Nicole and I were still alive or had fatally impaled ourselves with a torque wrench.
c) Survey the growing chaos on the floor like a game show host inspecting contestants' failed DIY projects.
I was barely holding it together. Existential dread had settled in like hangar dust. This thing had once flown. Now it couldn’t even pass as modern sculpture. That’s when Kalli, casually lighting another cigarette like a man who’d seen too many dreams catch fire, dropped the lifeline.
“Listen, Marcel,” he said, voice lowering an octave into something that sounded suspiciously like wisdom. “Let me give you the only advice standing between you and a padded cell: Every day, you show up and fix one thing. Doesn’t matter how small. Screw a bolt. Patch a corner. Stick a goddamn sticker on. Just put something back. And for the love of my blood pressure—don’t look at the whole mess. Don’t look at the mountain. Just keep moving the damn rocks.”
I stared at him, face locked in that peculiar expression of someone trying not to cry in public. He smiled, clapped me on the back like a priest who knows the exorcism’s gonna take a while, and walked away.
But I listened. And somewhere between the cigarette smoke, despair, and canvas fumes—I got it.
And not only did I get it. Against all odds—and in direct violation of my personal tradition of ignoring any advice not printed on a beer label—I actually took it to heart. What Kalli said made sense. To me. Which, frankly, should’ve been the first red flag.
But it stuck. Like duct tape on a cracked wing strut or emotional trauma on a Catholic schoolboy.
I learned, on some dark, greasy, semi-conscious visceral level, that this wasn’t just aviation maintenance wisdom—it was existential triage. A philosophy carved out of rust and grit. From that day on, I started applying Kalli’s gospel to everything: life, chaos, emotional debris, even taxes.
One step at a time.
Don’t look up. Don’t look at the whole catastrophe. Just fix one little thing. Then the next. And then the next. And eventually—either the mountain’s gone, or you’ve built a surprisingly functional shrine to your own stubborn survival out of its rubble.
Which, in hindsight, is the closest I’ve ever come to enlightenment without catching fire or accidentally joining a cult.
Two months later, on a crisp day in September 2011, Nicole and I stepped into Kalli’s hangar and froze. Because for the first time… there was nothing left to do.
The Super Cub was done. The wings were back on and now proudly flaunted extended-range tanks like a steroid-fuelled bodybuilder. The plane squatted on heavy-duty landing gear with oversized tires, steel safety cables, and brakes strong enough to stop a container vessel. Slung underneath was a monstrous belly pod with an auxiliary tank so big, I could’ve flown halfway to Middle Earth without refuelling. The cockpit? Surgical-grade clean. Modern. Efficient. It looked like something NASA might’ve designed if they’d been funded by Enrico. And then the cherry on top: zebra-striped alcantara seats. Yes—zebra. The cockpit interior now screamed “safari chic meets nursing home luxury.” The back seat, once an orthopaedic war crime, now cradled your spine like a marshmallow therapist whispering affirmations.
It was glorious.
And it was mine.
With the plane finally ready to fly and looking like it had rolled straight out of a National Geographic fever dream it was officially time for me to get my act together and start pretending I had a plan for Kenya. Everything had gone disturbingly well up to this point—pilot training, taildragger endorsement, Kalli’s impromptu “fix-it-yourself-or-die” bush mechanic boot camp, and of course, the cosmic fluke of a Super Cub materialising in his hangar like a divine prank from the Aviation Gods. Clearly, the universe was high on something and had decided I should be next in line for the spiritual sucker punch known as “purpose.”
After all, I was about to abandon my business back home—entrusting it to my business partner, a woman whose reliability would soon rank somewhere between a wet paper straw and a malfunctioning Russian elevator—and hurl myself headfirst into the testosterone-drenched fever swamp of wildlife conservation, charity bureaucracy, and trigger-happy Somali poachers who considered anything non-lethal in their line of sight an insult to their Kalashnikovs.
There was just one minor problem: I had absolutely no f*ing clue** what I was doing.
No plan. No job. No contacts. Just a faded, dog-eared newspaper article featuring some sanctimonious tree-hugger sobbing into a journalist’s notepad about the ivory apocalypse in Kenya, and how they desperately needed pilots and planes. It was the kind of plea designed to pull at the heartstrings of emotionally unstable idealists—so naturally, I printed it, laminated it, and made it my North Star.
What could possibly go wrong?
And sure, I had Shlomi—my best friend in Nairobi, whose qualifications for “guide to not dying in East Africa” were sketchy at best, but who at least knew where to get good falafel and how to bribe a cop without ending up in a gulag. He might be able to point me in the right direction or, at the very least, prevent me from getting shot in the face within the first 48 hours.
So, in a move best described as “strategic delusion,”—and to soundproof my ludicrous intentions—Nicole and I flew to Kenya in October 2011 under the noble guise of field reconnaissance. What it actually was: a two-week safari, thinly disguised as research, to see whether there were still elephants left to save—or whether I’d just sold my soul, my business, and my bank account to star in an unpaid, wildlife-themed version of Jackass: Nairobi Drift.
Kenya, October 2011
It could have been a wake-up call. A moment of stark, blinding clarity. The kind of soul-crushing conversation that makes a sane person turn around, cancel the whole operation, and go back to their comfortable life, tail between legs and dignity barely intact. But no. Naturally, it had the exact opposite effect. Like any good red flag in my life, I took it as divine encouragement. The lunacy had begun to harden into purpose.
“Why would you want to save elephants?” asked the self-appointed German aristocrat, blinking at me as though I’d just confessed to wanting to marry one.
“Nobody wants to save elephants around here. They’re a bloody nuisance. Destroy the crops, ruin everything. There are far too many of them, and you can’t even shoot the damn things legally. So what’s the point?”
He sipped his gin with the smug precision of a man who once colonised something by accident and never quite got over it.
“Unless you run your own NGO, of course,” he added with a conspiratorial smirk. “Then there’s a lot of money to be made. Nothing pays better than the sobbing hearts of guilt-ridden Westerners who will wire you half their pension just to see you bottle-feed a baby elephant and post it on Facebook. Hell, if you do it right, you can live like a sultan and call it humanitarian work.”
Nicole and I sat there on Harro von Trumpenau’s grotesquely oversized veranda, trying to keep our eyeballs from rolling straight off the deck and into the abyss. Equal parts nausea and fascination. On one hand, we were deeply offended by the coloniser cosplay and casual sociopathy. On the other, well… the man had seen things. Ugly things. Useful things. And unlike many delusional do-gooders, he didn’t even pretend to care.
He laid it all out—raw, rancid, and depressingly accurate.
Charity, according to von Trumpenau, was less about saving the world and more about monetising misery. A system that simultaneously gave gap-year saviours a sense of divine purpose and the elite a tax-deductible lifestyle upgrade.
And unfortunately, I knew he wasn’t entirely wrong.
Years earlier, I’d seen the underbelly myself. I'd visited an orphanage in Nairobi’s largest ghetto—Kibera—a hopeless, soul-scraping place where hope showed up in flip-flops and somehow kept smiling. The director was a genuine saint in a war zone of grifters, trying to raise disabled children rescued from literal trash heaps. She wasn’t in it for the likes or the funding galas. She was just there. Every day. Doing the impossible with nothing.
And yet even she couldn’t stop the parasites.
At the time, I’d asked where all the donated supplies were—those that had supposedly been shipped from Europe in crates marked “URGENT HUMANITARIAN AID.” Her answer: rotting in a customs warehouse, held hostage by officials demanding bribes. What finally made it through? About 10–15% of the total aid, on a good day. The rest vanished somewhere between the loading dock and someone's cousin’s backyard shop.
That was the day I realised that “saving the world” was less about passion and more about percentages. The margin between idealism and embezzlement.
And yet here I was, not running, not giving up, but somehow even more determined—if that’s what we’re calling it—to join the circus. Armed with a burning passion, a bush plane, a questionable moral compass, and the burning conviction that I could still make a dent in the madness before the madness made a dent in me.
Harro was German. Or ex-German. The kind of man who probably filled out a “Renounce Citizenship” form in cursive and expected a parade. I would’ve bet my last pension payout that the “von” in his last name wasn’t a birthright but a self-appointed upgrade—like slapping a gold crown on a garden gnome and calling it royal lineage. The name Harro von Trumpenau reeked of fabricated grandeur, as if he were descended from Marcus Aurelius on one side and Alexander the Great on the other, when in reality, the closest his ancestors had likely come to nobility was coughing up coal dust in a German mine shaft.
He’d been recommended to me by my German contact, Franz—an entrepreneur with fingers in more pies than a continental buffet. Franz was one of those deeply connected shadows you only hear about in overheard conversations at expat bars or leaked CIA memos. He had the kind of contacts that made border patrol officers sweat: Egyptian customs officials, military generals in Sudan, Somalia and Djibouti, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of Kenya’s aviation armpit. So when Franz said, “Talk to Harro,” I listened.
That’s how Nicole and I ended up at an obscure little airport on the edge of Nairobi, awkwardly sipping drinks on Harro’s grotesquely colonial terrace, while our host monologued about elephants being crop-destroying vermin and the noble art of cashing in on charity.
The airport was called “Orly”—a name suspiciously borrowed from its French counterpart, likely to make it sound more international and less like a glorified dirt strip. It was laid out like one of those puffed up golf course communities, only here, instead of manicured greens and rich men pretending to exercise, there were rows of hangars and half-built houses, each trying to look like it hadn’t been constructed out of leftover aid shipment crates.
It was new. Kind of. But not polished—and knowing what passes for “finished” in many African infrastructure projects, it never would be. It had that unmistakable scent of something slapped together just well enough to pass an inspection from someone who’d already been paid not to care. That “perpetually under construction” stench—half concrete dust, half quiet despair—that clung to every corrugated roof and paint-chipped hangar like the ghost of a budget that never fully arrived.
It would never shed that lingering aroma of bureaucratic rot: the kind that seeps into cement when half the project funds vanish into “consulting fees” and offshore accounts, leaving the whole place smelling faintly like a cleaned-up war crime. Not fresh, not forgotten—just sterilised enough for the next batch of suckers to move in and pretend they didn’t notice the bloodstains under the tiles.
Orly, allegedly designed to relieve Nairobi’s chronically congested Wilson Airport, had all the energy of a failed coup: grand intentions, zero follow-through, and just enough leftover chaos to keep people pretending it might still work. The hangars stood in eerie silence, half-assembled like someone lost interest halfway through a Lego set. If you squinted, it looked like a proper airport. If you didn’t, it looked like the kind of place where aircraft without logbooks and pilots without pasts came to quietly exist off the grid.
Still—fascinating. In the same way plane crashes are fascinating: macabre, magnetic, and always one misstep away from fire.
Harro—who had allegedly “founded” this half-baked utopia of aviation misfits—strutted around the place like he owned not just the runway but the very laws of gravity. His drink was always full, his shirt always unbuttoned one button too far, his ego vacuum-sealed in colonial arrogance and delusion. He wasn’t just a walking stereotype—he was the limited edition, gold-plated collector’s item.
And yet, despite the overwhelming stench of imperial nostalgia and mismanaged ambition, there was something almost refreshing about him. He didn’t pretend to care. He didn’t pretend to save anything. He didn’t even pretend to be ethical.
Which, ironically, made him the most honest bastard I’d met so far.
So I listened. Because in this world—where saints were scammers, heroes had side hustles, and every good cause had a dark underbelly—sometimes the devil had the best maps.
Only a few years later, Harro would meet his end in the most poetic way possible for a man whose ethics were as foggy as his flight planning: by flying straight through a cloud and into the side of a mountain. Face first. Instant karma with topographical assistance.
It was tragic, of course—mostly for the two unsuspecting passengers he dragged into the afterlife with him. They had signed up for a scenic flight, not a guided tour to the afterworld led by a man whose moral compass spun like a broken altimeter. Harro, ever the philosopher of hypocrisy, had spent his days sermonising about ethics and responsibility, all while casually sidestepping both like potholes in the Nairobi Expressway.
His downfall wasn't surprising. What was surprising was that it took so long.
But then again, flying in Africa plays by a different rulebook entirely—one that's half unwritten, half bloodstained, and occasionally eaten by termites. Compared to the rest of the aviation world—with the possible exception of India, where gravity and logic also appear to be suggestions—African bush flying is less about safety regulations and more about divine negotiation.
And as I would soon find out firsthand, when the gods of terrain, weather, and wildly optimistic maintenance logs collide, you’d better pray your name’s not on the manifest.
We thanked Harro for his delightfully soul-corroding TED Talk on the tangled cesspit of charity, corruption, and casually monetised misery—plus the handy tip on where to take the Super Cub so it wouldn’t immediately combust or shed a wing mid-climb like a startled chicken.
With that, we left our cheerfully nihilistic host reclining on his sun-blasted terrace like a relic of imperial afterthought—shirt unbuttoned to somewhere around his navel, marinating in a cocktail of expired aristocracy and lukewarm gin. He watched us go, smugly surveying his half-finished empire of rusted corrugated roofing and dreams that had been mugged in broad daylight by reality.
Still, I’ll give the man this: beneath the crust of colonial cosplay and used-car-dealer ethics was one glimmer of actual utility—the AMREF Flying Doctors’ hangar at Wilson Airport. Reputable by African standards, which meant that if your plane exploded, it would at least do so with professional dignity. Maybe even a press release.
***
“You’re still sure you want to do this?” Shlomi asked, lounging in his Nairobi garden like some mildly concerned game show host with an Israeli passport. He stared at me with a cocktail of curiosity, pity, and the subtle facial tension of someone trying to determine whether their best friend was about to find spiritual fulfilment—or die in a bush plane fireball.
“Oh yeah, I do,” I said, with the defensive conviction of someone who’s lost the plot but refuses to return the map.
“Listen, Shlomi,” I continued, “I’m sick of sitting in an office talking about money like it means something. I’m sick of nodding through small talk at the golf course like it doesn’t make me want to sand-wedge my own frontal lobe. I’m sick of aimlessly shopping on weekends just to distract myself from the creeping realisation that I’ve accidentally built a padded cell out of cashmere and espresso machines.”
He blinked once. Possibly a muscle spasm. Could’ve been an aneurysm.
“This isn’t the life I signed up for. It’s very… comfortable—and that’s exactly the problem. Comfort is a padded coffin lined with organic Egyptian cotton. Nothing interesting happens in the comfort zone. It’s like living in a nicely upholstered coma. No chaos. No adrenaline. It’s a beige purgatory with WiFi and despicable green smoothies. Just a gentle slide into tax-deductible irrelevance.”
Still no reaction. He hadn’t even twitched. Was he breathing? Was he blinking at all? Had he entered a catatonic state? Should I check for a pulse?
“I can’t even tell you if it’s really the elephants I want to save,” I confessed, arms flailing like a motivational speaker having a nervous breakdown mid-seminar, “or just myself from yet another existential nosedive. But isn’t that what we all do? Fly to some collapsing ecosystem to rescue something with a pulse so we can ignore the smouldering dumpster fire of our own purpose-starved existence? I mean, why not go full white saviour if it means I might find a reason to wake up that doesn’t involve spreadsheets and group chats?”
Now I was fully off the leash, detached entirely from reality.
“I just want to feel alive again. Not in the essential-oils-and-yoga kind of way. I want the violent slap of being. The kind of alive that involves potential death by rhino, bureaucratic collapse, or spontaneous combustion due to aviation-grade idiocy. The kind of alive that smells like burning rubber, bad decisions, and a total breakdown of risk assessment protocols.”
Shlomi hadn’t moved. His face had that ‘Windows blue screen’ look of someone buffering in real time. I suspected either internal panic—or that he was silently writing me out of his will.
“But the truth is,” I added, now whispering like someone sharing state secrets with a houseplant, “the best times of my life were the ones I should have regretted. Broke and sunburned in Mexico, pawning my passport just to eat. Doing slave-wage labour in some godforsaken Aussie mining town while praying not to end up as kangaroo chow. Stripping half-naked on a Venice Beach fashion stage for a detergent commercial that aired only once at 3:27 a.m. during an infomercial block. It was horrible. It was humiliating. It was glorious.”
Shlomi blinked again. A slow, careful blink. Possibly Morse code for Why, God, why?
But I wasn’t done.
“The point is—I think—I just want to feel alive again. I want to get back to being, not just having,” I concluded, arms wide like a cult leader addressing an empty parking lot. “Not in a wellness-retreat, avocado-toast kind of way. But in the ‘oh god, I might actually die doing this’ kind of way. The kind of alive that smells like jet fuel, bad decisions, and a complete collapse of life insurance eligibility.”
Shlomi’s facial expression—until now as lively as a corpse at a tax seminar—finally twitched back to life. He looked at me with the grim understanding of someone watching a friend enthusiastically hug a live grenade. With the finality of a car bomb and the loyalty of a man who knew this train had no brakes, he exhaled and said,
“Well… that was quite the speech. Let’s see how this apocalyptic endeavour plays out. I’ll grab the popcorn and do what I can to help. Just say the word—I’m in. No matter how idiotic this turns out.
But don’t ask me to fly with you before you’ve logged more hours than a ceiling fan. You’ve got what, fifteen? That’s not a license—it’s a death wish laminated in optimism. At this point, you’re more qualified to hijack a shopping cart than pilot a Super Cub across hostile airspace.”
And just like that, I had officially entered the arena of doom—a one-way ticket punched straight into the jaws of glorious disaster. One step closer to the most exhilarating rollercoaster ride of my life so far, forged in chaos, hubris, and the soft whooshing sound of plans spontaneously combusting. I was no longer a man with a plan. I was a high-speed existential meatball hurling toward the spinning blades of African reality—with a cargo hold full of delusions, minimal flight hours, and just enough gall to mistake this for destiny.
But that, dear reader, is a tale for next week—when my laughably planned, romance-fuelled cross-African aviation epic is—thanks to the ever-helpful Kalli—unceremoniously downgraded to a safe, slow, sweaty container ride through the logistical intestines of East Africa.
Marcel Romdane,
signing off while roasting marshmallows of madness over the roaring bonfire of a midlife crisis wrapped in aviation fuel and wrapped tighter in denial than a customs-sealed corpse.
Words can't describe the pain.... Kalli "the Great", fountain of eternal patience....
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