📰 THE VANITY WALL 🥃
— Or What’s Left After the Glory Fled and the Budget Collapsed.
This isn't a shrine.
It's a graveyard of illusions, propped up by press clippings, aerial near-misses, and half-smiling photos taken five minutes before everything went sideways. Every line of praise you’ll read here was earned the hard way—between bribe negotiations, bureaucratic ambushes, and the final twitch of a dying elephant that should’ve lived.
Each article, photo, and eyewitness quote is a burnt offering from a life lived at 100 feet AGL—with broken radios, poisoned elephants, and journalists who never quite knew what they signed up for.
Some called it conservation.
Others called it suicidal.
I just called it Thursday.
Journalists came.
Some stayed in the backseat.
Some puked in the backseat.
A few tried to write happy endings. We never spoke again.
This wall is a cinematic freeze-frame of what happens when idealism meets logistics, when wildlife conservation is done with no trust fund, no backup, and no plan B. Just a Cub, a camera, and an absolutely deranged refusal to quit.
If that sounds noble, you’re not paying attention.
🔥 This is not the polished legacy.
⚰️ This is the aftermath that still has teeth.
Marcel Romdane
Bush Pilot. Chaos Archivist. Founder of Campfire Syndicate LLC. Professional Arsonist of Delusion.
Marcel Romdane is what happens when a midlife crisis gets a pilot’s license, a typewriter, and absolutely no adult supervision.
A former financially secure entrepreneur turned wildlife-wrangling bush pilot, Romdane is the founder of Campfire Syndicate LLC and the twisted mind behind the BeeCoin Rebellion —a weaponized honey operation masquerading as conservation.
His life now oscillates somewhere between Hemingway fever dreams and bureaucratic hostage negotiations, with pit stops in goat-infested airstrips and moral collapse.
His books and projects—What Could Possibly Go Wrong? and From Riches to Rags: An African Odyssey—have been described as “memoirs by Molotov”: explosive, darkly hilarious, and soaked in jet fuel. His prose blends aviation chaos, philosophical booby traps, and the kind of brutal honesty that makes therapists consider early retirement.
When he’s not crash-landing dreams in Kenya or battling regulatory demons, he’s accompanied by Nicole (wife, CFO, designated pilot of sanity), and Drax, a Labrador with the emotional range of a sock and the ethics of a vacuum cleaner. Also starring: Kalli, the chain-smoking German grease oracle who somehow still answers his calls from the afterlife.
Together, they operate at the intersection of aeronautics, absurdity, and annihilation, documenting every disastrous flight, elephant funeral, and entrepreneurial nosedive in cinematic detail.
Romdane doesn’t tell stories. He straps them to a Super Cub and nose-dives them into your frontal lobe.
Welcome to the Syndicate.
Bring fireproof gloves.
Tusk, Sweat, and Propellers: How One Muzungu Hijacked a Norwegian Magazine
Exhibit 4: When Reiselyst Magazine tried to profile a heroic wildlife pilot and accidentally documented an airborne mental breakdown instead.
Marcel Romdane, Super Cub 5Y-WRB, and a burning desire to confuse Norwegian journalists with equal parts elephant trauma and aviation despair. The result? Tusk, sweat, and a full-page detour through bureaucratic hell. Published 2013. No survivors.
Reiselyst Magazine, Norway, 2013 – Before the rotors of rebellion fully ignited, a yellow Super Cub and a dangerously caffeinated pilot appeared in this Scandinavian travel rag.
Caught mid-mission between elephant funerals, diplomatic disaster, and financial combustion, Romdane was profiled here as the man who thought he could fix Africa with duct tape, aviation fuel, and a battered Nikon.
The journalists were polite. The mission wasn’t.
God help the elephants.
When Media Met Madness: Capital FM’s Wild Ride Over Elephant Territory
In March 2013, Capital FM Kenya sent journalist Susan Wong into the backseat of 5Y-WRB—a Piper Super Cub with more personality than structural integrity.
Front seat: Marcel Romdane, camera in hand, heart half-shattered, documenting the brutal collapse of Toto, a poisoned 15-year-old elephant. What the article captured was a gentle call to action. What it couldn’t: the metallic stench of adrenaline at 100 feet AGL, the sound of rotors slicing over poacher territory, or the quiet devastation that comes from being too late to save something already dying.
No budget. No backup. Just one journalist, one Cub, and a species on the brink.
Backseat Baptism by Cubfire.
Capital FM’s Susan Wong climbs into 5Y-WRB for a “scenic patrol” and ends up 100 feet above a dying elephant, a bankrupt pilot, and a wildlife war zone that smelled like sweat, gasoline, and moral panic.
No first-class service. Just altitude and agony.
The Journalist, the Jungle, and the Yellow Cub: March 2013.
Capital FM’s Susan Wong strapped into the backseat of 5Y-WRB, watching from 100 feet as the chaos unfolded—one poisoned elephant, one unfunded patrol, and one lunatic pilot with a camera, a purpose, and no insurance policy.
The PR campaign? Nonexistent. The budget? Also nonexistent. But the airspace was ours, and the only thing more terrifying than the poachers below was trusting your life to a man whose confidence was inversely proportional to his fuel gauge.
This is what conservation actually looks like: bumpy, broke, and airborne.
In March 2013, Susan Wong of Capital FM strapped herself into the backseat of a yellow deathtrap called 5Y-WRB.
What she expected: a scenic wildlife tour.
What she got: a low-level aerial assault on her digestive system and front-row trauma to elephant tragedy.
The mission? Patrol the skies. Document the dying. Try not to crash.
What Capital FM published: a hopeful tale of purpose and passion.
What they couldn’t print: the smell of leaking fuel, unpaid maintenance bills, and a pilot running on coffee, delusion, and fumes of moral conviction.
No grant money. No rich sponsor. Just Romdane, a camera, and 1,000 litres of aviation-grade idealism per month.
If you still think conservation is about warm hugs and slow-motion baby elephants—please reread that last sentence.
🐘✈️ This is Fly4Elephants.
🧨 This is the crash course in chaos they didn’t air on National Geographic.
“Pre-Flight Check,” they said. “Safety First,” they begged.
Meanwhile, I was already halfway to the runway, coffee in hand, trusting the hangar gods and whatever duct tape held this bird together.
This rare moment of responsibility was purely performative—a dramatic showcase for journalist Susan Wong, who bravely volunteered as backseat ballast while I pretended to inspect the Super Cub like I hadn’t already declared, “Bad weather’s for cowards. That’s what windshield wipers are for.” 🥃
Photo taken in March 2013, minutes before liftoff over the Maasai Mara on another unpaid, uninsured elephant patrol flight with Fly4Elephants. No parachute. No briefing. Just one idiot with a camera, a half-tanked plane, and an obsession with saving elephants via low-altitude chaos.
KCAA still hasn’t forgiven me. 🧨⚰️
“The Day They Let the Muzungu Speak.”
Before the algorithms. Before the merch drops. Before the aviation paperwork tried to murder him in cold blood—there was this. A German madman in a yellow Cub, torching his comfort zone at 500 feet above elephant country.
No sponsors. No salary. Just a secondhand plane, a borrowed mission, and a dangerously inflated sense of purpose.
Printed in Kenya’s County Weekly, back when people still read newspapers—and Marcel Romdane still thought saving the world could be done with altitude and a Facebook post.
This wasn’t a PR stunt. It was a broadcast from the edge of burnout.
📍Location: Maasai Mara, Kenya, 2013.
🧨Objective: Aerial conservation or midair breakdown—whichever came first.
"When the world turned its back, the Cub took off."
🦅 The Flying Chaos of Compassion 🐘
From bush airstrips to poisoned wounds, this 2013 Ndege News feature by Fransje van Riel captured the absurdly cinematic and soul-shattering chaos of Marcel Romdane’s airborne conservation efforts. With his beloved yellow Super Cub (5Y-WRB), a leather jacket full of delusions, and a head full of idealism, Romdane launched Fly4Elephants—a dangerously underfunded, emotionally overloaded attempt to patrol the skies of Naboisho Conservancy and save Kenya’s jumbos from ivory-fuelled tragedy.
What started as a Top Gun fantasy nosedived into real blood, late-night sedation runs, and grief-laced field rescues.
These moments—photographed alongside Maasai communities, wounded bulls, and the dying giants who somehow knew who was trying to help—remain etched into the wings of his yellow Cub and the gut of every sleepless night since.
📍 Shot over Naboisho Conservancy, Kenya
🛩️ Plane: Piper Super Cub 5Y-WRB
🐘 Mission: Surveillance, truth, and the occasional mental breakdown
Bericht, erschienen in der "Dream Machines", über unsere Reise mit der Fatboy von New York nach Los Angeles 2016. Text: Nicole Romdane
Der brennende Bericht von Antje Walther über unser gescheitertes, größenwahnsinniges Elefanten-Abenteuer wurde feige hinter einer Bezahlschranke eingesperrt — wahrscheinlich aus Angst, dass Leser anfangen könnten, Fragen zu stellen.
Darum haben wir den Artikel „ELEFANTEN-RETTUNG AUS DER LUFT“ aus dem Juli 2013 einfach abfotografiert und auf unsere Eitelkeitswand genagelt — direkt zwischen einem geplatzten NGO-Traum, einem Riss im Propeller und einem unbezahlten Steuerbescheid.
Warnung: Kann Spuren von Idealismus, Größenwahn und realem Wahnsinn enthalten.
Viel Spaß beim Lesen – oder beim Weinen. Beides ist okay.
