The scene was spectacular and utterly beautiful. Just another day in paradise. I felt so thoroughly on top of the world that I almost began to be afraid of dying.
My friend James and I were sitting in my old Land Rover, watching a pride of lions feeding on a freshly killed wildebeest. The big males were stretched out no more than a few feet from the road, basking in the early morning sunlight. Each one of them had bellies the size of oil drums. Now it was the turn of the female hunters and juveniles to claim their share of the prey. Meanwhile, the red ball of fire had just barely cleared the horizon, chasing the last remnants of the frosty night away. I’ve always been a morning person, and the first warming rays of sunshine are my absolute favourite.
We parked only a few meters away, neither of us wanting to spoil the magic of the moment by speaking or taking photos. We just sat there and watched.
I could almost hear a special drawer in my mental memory cabinet silently slide open, carefully filing away this precious display of nature under the category “Intensely Spectacular.”
James and I could have sat there until the end of time, gazing in admiration, but we actually had a chore to attend to. Reluctantly, we left the feeding lions behind and continued our journey to the airstrip where my trusty little plane was parked in a homemade open hangar.
The day’s errand was to get airborne and embark on a patrol flight over the Naboisho Conservancy. James was to be my cameraman.
In the absence of my wife, he had taken over her job of documenting our charity work.
An opening excerpt from What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Chronicles of Chaos and Courage remains available here. The full book can be ordered here.
🛩️ “The Sky Opened. So Did My Credit Line.”🔥
Welcome to freedom, the invoice will follow shortly.
Some mornings seduce you so thoroughly, you forget you're in a flying tin can held together by paint, pathological delusion, and unpaid fuel bills the size of a small country’s education budget.
This was one of those mornings.
Below us: the Maasai Mara at sunrise, unfolding like God’s personal screensaver—if God freelanced as a bush pilot with untreated ADHD.
A dawn patrol over the Naboisho Conservancy in 5Y-WRB, Kenya’s most duct-taped entry into aviation history, somehow still airborne despite a maintenance schedule best described as “theoretical.”
James sat in the back seat, camera rolling—elephants casting long shadows across the grasslands like ancient punctuation from a forgotten war poem.
It felt like flying through the opening credits of the life I always thought I wanted: cinematic, noble, completely unsustainable.
For one blissfully idiotic moment, I forgot that everything I’d built was hemorrhaging cash, purpose, and structural integrity like a flaming Land Rover full of good intentions.
No one tells you that chasing your dream requires optimism bordering on psychosis, overdrafts high enough to fund a space program, and a pain tolerance for bureaucratic colonoscopies so invasive they make medieval torture look like a spa day with scented candles.
And while Bali-based life coaches were busy harvesting their inner child in matching linen pants, I was 200 feet above the African savannah, sniffing elephant dung and raw destiny through the space where the split doors used to be—now just a gaping hole, because we’d left the doors on the ground for a “better view”—in my self-built coffin with wings.
But for this moment, I wasn’t broke. I was home.
I wasn’t hunted by paperwork.
I wasn’t even worried.
Because this—this absurd, airborne hallucination of liberty—was the dream.
This is what delusional freedom looks like before the paperwork hits.
🔥Pre-Flight Procedures: Tie Down Your Sanity, We’re Going Up. 🔥
This is James—camp manager by title, madman by choice.
Like everyone I dragged into these 200-foot goat-dodging patrols, he got hooked fast. No hot-air balloon or Nairobi charter can match the pure, unfiltered lunacy of skimming the Mara so low your auntie would scream and yank the laundry off the line.
🐘 Technically, we were here to protect them. 🐘
But from up there in 5Y-WRB, Kenya’s most optimistic aircraft, I’m pretty sure the elephants thought we were just another flying demon sent by the gods of noise and confusion.
Every patrol flight was a gamble—on engine reliability, on fuel availability, and on whether or not a matriarch would charge because she mistook our Cub for a flying hyena with boundary issues.
They didn’t know we were watching for poachers.
They just knew something yellow buzzed in, rattled their ears, and vanished like a bureaucrat after budget approval.
The exact moment this giraffe reconsidered all of its life choices.
Caught mid-morning in the psychological blast radius of my low-flying Super Cub, this unsuspecting giraffe entered a full existential freeze.
Not out of fear—but pure, undiluted disbelief.
It probably stood there for the next three hours, traumatised like a vegan at a Wyoming BBQ, wondering if giraffe therapy was covered under whatever cosmic insurance policy handles wildlife PTSD.
Somewhere between the piston slap of a duct-taped engine and the sharp sting of leaking AVGAS, it seemed to realise:
“I am no longer the tallest thing out here.
And that thing shouldn’t be flying.”
🧨 THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN SCREAMING: Altitude Optional. Therapy Unavailable.
Somewhere over the Mara River, slicing just above the canopy in a Super Cub held together by self-doubt, zip ties, and unresolved trauma, I realised something:
This… this was not a flight.
It was an airborne divorce from common sense, disguised as a conservation mission.
Low-level bush flying at dawn—where one wrong bump turns your elephant-saving crusade into a flaming safari feature on Netflix’s When Conservation Goes Wrong.
The Super Cub rattled like a dying blender full of wasps and righteous purpose.
Below me, the river twisted through the forest like a brown snake of bad decisions, crocodiles lurking in the shadows, waiting to autograph the wreckage if I miscalculated by a metre.
But up here, with the door off, my knee halfway outside the aircraft, and the smell of burning avgas in my nostrils, something dangerous happened:
I felt alive.
Not “write-a-poem-about-gratitude” alive.
No—this was ‘cursed by your ancestors but doing it anyway’ alive.
This was clarity at 50 knots.
This was hope, stupidity, adrenaline, and unpaid bills stitched together with blind optimism and aviation-grade denial, roaring over the treetops like a one-man declaration of war against mediocrity.
This is where dreams take off.
There was no autopilot.
No insurance.
No plan B.
Just a battered yellow aircraft, a dangerously inspired muzungu with delusions of grandeur, and a sky full of unanswered questions.
And still—this was home.
Because even madness has its altitude.
And mine was… tree level.
📘 “If you're enjoying this disaster… wait until you read the whole book.”🔥
