From Riches to Rags: An African Odyssey, Part XVIII / Tea Plantations and Turbulence: Delusion at the Edge of the Sky

“So, Arnie,” I began—voice calm, posture confident, eyes hidden behind aviators I didn’t deserve—with the deranged optimism of a pilot who had never once landed without (a) scratching something that made the insurance void, (b) filing a ‘misunderstanding’ report, or (c) forcing ground crew into early retirement.

The wind screamed across the ridge line like a missionary  preacher on bath salts. We stood in the middle of a tea plantation at 8,000 feet—give or take a few hundred emotional breakdowns—while I squinted at the strip of grass Arnie called a runway.

“This is it? It’s… beautiful,” I lied, neck craned like a flamingo in a wind tunnel, eyes twitching from altitude, dehydration, and whatever lingering fumes were still venting from the fuel drum I’d illegally labeled as “camping gear”.
“But I don’t really see what all the fuss is about landing here. This doesn’t look too hard at all—”

Arnie said nothing. He just stared.

“Little windy, isn’t it?” I added, as a gust nearly folded me backwards like a lawn chair in a tornado.

Still, no answer.  Only a gaze—blank, primal, unblinking. With the quiet, twitching horror of a man who had never met me, and now deeply wished he hadn’t, Arnie processed my presence like a traumatic head injury: slowly, with rising nausea and sudden flashes of divine betrayal.

You didn’t need a psychology degree—or even a functioning frontal lobe—to see that his soul had begun staging a quiet mutiny, clawing its way out through his tear ducts. His pupils whispered,

“Chris, what have you done?”

Because somewhere, deep in the regret-drenched folds of his brain, Arnie was calculating the exact series of mistakes that led him to this hellish tea-scented altitude, standing next to a delusional muzungu with a permanently raised eyebrow and a duct-taped airplane waiting to turn his hillside into a viral aviation obituary.

Possibly, he was also regretting the day Chris—the airborne masochist from Yellow Wings, spiritual heir to Icarus, and permanent Demi-God of all things with wings—handed me Arnie’s number like it was a pizza coupon and not the opening scene in a slow-motion aviation catastrophe.

But more likely? Arnie was already composing the email to his insurance agent.
Subject line:
“Incoming.”
Body:
“If this message sends, I’m probably already dead. The muzungu brought a taildragger and the kind of confidence normally reserved for drunk skydivers and yoga  influencers on Instagram. Please cancel all policies. And send whisky.”

Because at 8,000 feet above sea level, in a wind-blasted tea field surrounded by birds smarter than me and fences held together by superstition, Arnie had finally seen the truth:

He wasn’t hosting a pilot.

He was hosting an omen.

Naturally, I was completely oblivious to what Arnie might have been contemplating in that moment—standing on a wind-lashed, kidney-shaped patch of dried grass that could’ve been anything except an airstrip.
A failed cricket pitch?
A cursed livestock parade route?
An ancient Maasai warning symbol visible only from the air?
Sure.
But a runway? Not unless you were a mosquito with a death wish.

Arnie glanced at me. Not with the warmth of hospitality—no, this was the cold, internal calculation of a man placing bets with his own subconscious. Wagering not if I would crash, but how soon, how loud, and how many hectares of Limuru’s finest tea I would level in the process.

I imagine he was already mapping out the fallout radius—his strip, his sheep, the neighbouring goat farm, the actual village of Limuru—and wondering how many funerals you can legally host in a week before it qualifies as a national emergency. Maybe he was mentally drafting the headline for 'The Standard':

“Muzungu With Homemade Aircraft Accidentally Declares War on Limuru. Casualties: Morale, Tea Economy, Common Sense.”

And still—still!—he carried on with the grim composure of someone trained in crisis intervention for people with helmet-sized cognitive gaps.

“You see, Marcel,” he began, voice low and full of suppressed emergency,
“First, there’s the elevation—8,000 feet. Combine that with high ambient temperatures, and you’ve got density altitudes over 13,000 feet…”

He paused, like a teacher explaining gravity to a balloon. “You realize what that means, of course?”

I nodded.
So violently—neck snapping forward like a bobblehead in a car crash—that I nearly dislocated a spinal disc and rewrote my own cervical spine alignment. Of course, I didn’t understand a single syllable.

Inside, my brain was scribbling a frantic note to self:
“Google density altitude. Urgent. Life or death. Possibly already too late.”
The term did sound familiar—somewhere between “lift” and “don’t stall now you idiot” in the buried trauma of my flight school days. I was fairly certain we’d mentioned it once. Probably while everyone else was taking notes and I was trying to figure out if I could use my kneeboard to swat a wasp. As far as I knew, “density altitude” had something to do with heat, height, and the kind of math problems that only show up in the advanced chapters you pretend don’t exist. But both temperature and altitude had been gloriously absent from Northern Germany’s potato fields—where the highest elevation is a mildly annoyed cow and the only density you worry about is a lamp post. Still, I nodded like a seasoned aviator.

Outside, I was channeling the calm authority of a substitute physics teacher who just realised he walked into the wrong classroom but is too proud to admit it..

Arnie blinked slowly.

This was going to be the longest day of his life.

“Second,” he continued, with the vocal tone of someone reading a prison sentence from a fortune cookie, “as you can see, the runway is bent like a Soviet sickle. This could, of course, add some stress during takeoff and landing.”

I looked left, then right. Then back again.
Like a disoriented Beatles groupie waking up backstage in 1968 and wondering where Ringo went.
“Yeah,” I chirped—because chirping was my default setting in the face of imminent death.
“This looks... funny. I haven’t seen a curved runway before. It’s unusual, isn’t it? Why would you make such a thing?”

Arnie didn’t answer.
He just smiled. But not a warm, Midwestern grandpa smile. No. This was the kind of smile you get from a customs officer right before they tell you to “step into that room” while slowly putting on a latex glove.
The kind of smile that says, “I know something you don’t, and it's going to hurt.”

“Third,” Arnie went on, now gesturing like a mortician unveiling a new deluxe coffin model, “the runway itself has a bit of an amplitude to it.” Amplitude.
Not slope. Not bump.
Amplitude.

Like we were in a physics experiment that had somehow swallowed an entire aviation insurance claim.

“A what now?” I squinted, brain already buffering.

“You start there,” Arnie gestured north, toward a menacing wall of eucalyptus trees—each one standing like a funeral attendee waiting for the casket to arrive.

“then you roll down through that first dip…” His finger traced the terrain like a doom prophecy, “...and then up again. And—if all goes well—you should be airborne by the time the second dip becomes... a factor.”

A factor.

As in: “a factor” like gravity.
Or trees.
Or fire. He said it like a dentist warning you that the drill might tickle a bit—just before installing a flamethrower in your molars.

I blinked. Twice.
The airstrip—if one insisted on calling it that and not Satan’s Halfpipe—looked like it had been designed by a drunk rollercoaster engineer using a spork and an Etch-a-Sketch.

There was a dip so deep you could lose livestock in it.
And a curve so violent, it looked like God had sneezed mid-blueprint.
And trees. Always the trees. Lurking. Judging. Plotting.

“This looks... unusual,” I chirped, my tone betraying the mental glitching of a man halfway between denial and a full-blown aviator’s seizure. “Why would you... make a runway like this?”

Arnie didn’t answer.

He just grinned.

Not the reassuring grin of a man proud of his airstrip. No. It was the grin of someone who knows things. The kind of things that usually end in liability waivers and commemorative wreckage plaques.

And in that moment, standing on a tea-drenched hillside with gum trees looming like coffin salesmen, I understood one thing:

I was going to die.

And worse—I was probably going to die stupidly.

“Fourth,” Arnie deadpanned—index finger raised, posture forward, eyes gleaming like he was about to implant a GPS tracker in my eardrum just in case I didn’t survive the departure.

“See this little bump right where you come out of the first slope?”

I squinted, hard. The kind of squint you do when someone points at a mirage in a heatwave and swears it's the Louvre.

“No… where?”
My voice cracked like it was auditioning for puberty. Part confusion, part creeping existential terror. My tongue tried to file for asylum with the EU.

Arnie leaned in closer—gleeful now, like a TSA agent who just found your “randomly selected” jar of peanut butter.

“Over there,” he said, his finger dancing between vague dirt smudges, “on the left is the track we used to come here. On the right, you see the open hangar…”

“Oh.” I nodded like a hostage agreeing to terms. My sunglasses nearly flew off from sheer retinal strain. Still no clue what the hell I was looking at.

I scanned the area like I was playing ‘Where’s Waldo: Kenyan Death Edition.’
No track. No hangar. No helpful arrows.
Just grass, confusion, and the gnawing sense that I’d already died and was watching this scene from an out-of-body perspective.

Arnie, meanwhile, took my blank stare as a sign of understanding. Classic mistake. He watched my soul evaporate like brake fluid on a hot carburettor.

And then he beamed.
Not the nice kind.
No. This was the kind of bright look worn by divorce lawyers who’ve just spotted a trust fund, or loan sharks who’ve found your forwarding address.

“Down that hill on the left,” he continued—almost gleeful now—“comes wind gusts so severe they can blow you clean off the runway and into that big tree on the right. Just there. Further down.”

I turned my head.
Tree confirmed. A stoic, ancient monster of a tree that had likely witnessed the deaths of better pilots and was still hungry. The entire setup was now beginning to feel less like a runway and more like an elaborate ambush staged by gravity, vegetation, and meteorology.

But Arnie wasn’t done. Oh no. Not even close.
At this point, he was shifting from concerned airstrip host to unlicensed trauma facilitator with a PhD in Psychological Erosion. His eyes sharpened. His voice dropped into that ominous, sermon-like register usually reserved for priests announcing the end times—or German mechanics breaking the news that your Land Rover needs “a complete—Messiah grade—resurrection.”

“Now,” he began, leaning in like he was about to surgically install a memory chip into my frontal cortex, “let’s just imagine… you somehow survived all that.”

His tone made it clear: You won’t.
But let’s pretend.

“You don’t fall off the side when you turn the plane around for departure—congrats. You manage not to break a gear leg on the bump, avoid high-speed lawnmower suicide on the first dip, and survive the wind shear gusts trying to fling you into that tree over there like a low-budget Bollywood stunt.”

He paused. Theatrically. Like a magician mid-trick.
Except instead of pulling a dove from a hat, he was watching my soul leak out through my ears like hot radiator fluid.

I nodded slowly, the kind of slow that usually precedes either cardiac arrest or irreversible moral compromise.

“Ja…” I croaked, lips dry, brain flickering like an old Window’s boot screen, “let us imagine that… then… what?”

The silence stretched.
And then came the answer—delivered with the kind of biblical calm usually reserved for death sentences or rejection emails from the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt:

“Well…” Arnie exhaled, arms spreading, “Now comes obstacle number five.”

He grinned.
Not a happy grin. Not a we’ve-made-it grin.
No, this was the sinister little upturn of lips you’d see on a Bond villain unveiling the torture rack.

“This,” he said, voice low, eyes gleaming like a man about to let you test-fly your own funeral, “is where things can get… a little hairy.”

“You’ve probably noticed,” he added, now slipping into his favourite genre—casual psychological warfare—“that there’s only one way to land here.”

I had not. But I nodded anyway, the way people do when they’ve stopped absorbing information and are just praying for an earthquake.

“Since you took off downhill,” he continued, with the matter-of-fact gravity of a man dictating his own will, “you’ll need to land uphill. On a steep incline.”
He paused, clearly savouring my visible mental implosion.

I said nothing. I had nothing left. My remaining brain cells were already halfway back to Nairobi, hitchhiking toward the nearest bar.

“If you screw up the flare,” Arnie continued, now fully in his element, “you’re going to embed yourself into the Limuru soil like a lawn dart on judgment day.”
I blinked. He did not.

“Yes,” I muttered, sounding like a man reading his own obituary.

“And you better come in low and slow,” he added. “Watch your speed. And your altitude. And the sheep.”
“The sheep?”
“Yeah. Local herders use this strip for grazing. You don’t want to pancake one of their animals. They get... emotional.”
My Adam’s apple tried to desert its post.

“Word of advice,” Arnie said, in a voice so flat it could iron trousers. He pointed to the towering gumtrees at the top of the runway—green, silent, and entirely unsympathetic.

“If you mess up your approach, we’ll be scraping your remains out of those trees with a machete and a bucket. You’re not going to out-climb them.”

I swallowed a second time, this time with audible effort.
“There’s not enough power in your plane to escape once you’ve committed.”

He stared at me now, eyes narrowed, like a physics professor who knows you’ve cheated on the test but is letting you hang yourself with equations.

That’s when I smiled. But not the kind of smile normal humans smile when they feel reassured.
No. This was the unhinged, Muppet-grade grin of a man who’d clearly skipped every adult milestone and instead spent his formative years in a puppet-operated flight simulator running on espresso and hallucinations.

Not because I understood Arnie’s warning.
Not because I accepted its implications.
And definitely not because I had processed the part about dying in a gumtree at high velocity.

No. I smiled because something deep inside me—something fossilised and arrogant and probably French—whispered:

“This will not apply to you.
You are the exception. You are special.
You are chosen.
Also… horsepower.”

So I crossed my arms—like a toddler mimicking confidence at a war tribunal—and unleashed the kind of statement that should legally require a helmet, a spiritual waiver, and a next-of-kin notification form:

“Not to worry, Arnie. My Cub’s got 180 horsepower.
She’ll out-climb anything from ghetto to gumtree. Besides, I’ve learned a lot from Paul Claus.”

“Paul Claus?” Arnie turned, squinting at me like I was a radioactive desk plant that had just declared war on logic.

“Yes,” I beamed, like a human marshmallow trying to survive a house fire.
“You know... that legendary bush pilot from Alaska. Over 28,000 hours. Flies barefoot. Looks like a Viking in sandals.”

Arnie tilted his head.
“You know Paul Claus?” he asked, his voice dropping into the reverent whisper normally reserved for popes, war heroes, and men who hand-fly DHC-2 Beavers through God’s armpit without spilling their coffee.

I shuffled, suddenly aware that I was wearing emotional flip-flops on the runway of credibility.

“Well,” I said, channeling the shame of a teenager caught pretending to understand Nietzsche, “not personally…
I mean, I kind of know him.
Like spiritually.
I’ve watched all his YouTube videos. Twice.
Some of them in slow motion.”

What followed wasn’t silence.
It was the complete collapse of sound itself.
A vacuum.
A pause so pure and unfiltered it could have preserved fruit.
A moment so violently empty it caused three sheep to stop chewing in the distance and stare in synchronised disappointment.

Arnie didn’t blink.
Didn’t move.
Didn’t even register a heartbeat.
He just watched me—like a therapist realising too late that this patient wasn’t there to talk… he was there to confess to taxidermy crimes.

“Is that all?” I chirped—bouncing on the balls of my feet with the twitchy enthusiasm of a Border Collie on double espresso and a head injury.
I grinned like I’d just solved world peace using duct tape and a napkin.
“That doesn’t sound too hard! I thought everybody said this airstrip was a challenge.”

There was a pause.
Not from Arnie.
From God.

Somewhere above, the aviation gods collectively looked down, checked the logbook of my life, and quietly began pre-filling an incident report.

And that’s when I knew.
Delusional or not.
Somewhere deep inside—
In that place where reality doesn’t live, but occasionally stops by to drop off a dead raccoon named Accountability—

This was going to be the perfect airstrip for me.

As normal as a funeral staged at cruise power.
As normal as trying to out-climb a eucalyptus forest with nothing but caffeine-fuelled arrogance and a motivational quote duct-taped to the yoke.

I had officially transcended into the final evolutionary form of poor judgment:
The Embodiment of a Bad Decision With Wings.

My aircraft didn't need lift.
It needed an exorcism.

And I?
I needed a helmet.
And a lawyer. Possibly two.

I climbed back into my ancient, groaning Land Rover—the mechanical equivalent of a death rattle on wheels—and turned the ignition with the suicidal optimism of a man who believed carburettors run on hope.

Arnie, still frozen in place—possibly concussed, probably traumatised, spiritually retired—called after me with the trembling curiosity of someone examining a ticking suitcase:

“So… how many hours do you have under your belt?”

“FIFTY!”
I cheerfully shouted out of the moving Land Rover, waving with both hands like a man who had absolutely no business waving while driving, or flying, or breathing unsupervised.

“FIFTY THOUSAND HOURS?!”
Even over the scream of my British rust coffin, I could feel the awe vibrating through his voice—vibrating through the tea leaves. Through the gumtrees. Through the local livestock.

“No! Just fifty! Five-zero!”
I yelled back, but the Land Rover was already rattling so violently the sound waves filed for divorce.

He never heard my answer.
He just stood there—a lone silhouette of regret—between the tea leaves, the gumtrees, and the burnt grass of his runway…

Watching me disappear in a cloud of diesel, hubcaps, and catastrophic self-belief.

And in that moment Limuru learned a terrible truth:

A man with 50 hours and 180 horsepower is far more dangerous than a man with 50,000 hours and a conscience.

“Good morning, Arnie!” I bellowed into the phone like a Labrador discovering cocaine. I was grinning—no, radiating—the unhinged joy of an arsonist on payday, clutching a jerry can in one hand and a box of matches in the other, ready to turn logic into vapour.

If dopamine could scream, it would sound like this call.

“I’ve been thinking…”
If Arnie had known me even slightly better, this single sentence should have triggered an immediate evacuation protocol:
drop the phone, pack a single suitcase, and sprint directly to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
Destination: anywhere.
Iceland.
Madagascar.
A monastery in Bhutan.
Witness protection in Bolivia.
It didn’t matter.
What mattered was distance.
Preferably several thousand nautical miles between him and whatever idea my brain had just vomited out.

But Arnie did not know me well.
And so, tragically, he stayed on the line.

I heard the faintest tremor through the receiver—like a wildebeest sensing a distant thunderclap of doom—and, naturally, ignored it like all the other red flags in my life.

“If you don’t mind,” I continued, with the deranged confidence of a toddler holding an open Swiss Army knife, “I’d like to swing by the airstrip today. Take some notes. Maybe a few drawings. Or pictures. You know—document the layout, obstacles, potential crash zones…”

I said it like I was prepping for a routine maintenance check.
Not, as was more accurate, mimicking a scene I once saw in a low-budget Navy SEAL movie involving night-vision goggles, whispered code names, and highly illegal drone footage.

By this point, my mental aircraft had fully detached from the fuselage of reality and was spinning somewhere over Fantasy Canyon—flaps jammed, fuel low, and copiloted by a gremlin that looked suspiciously like Hunter S. Thompson in a Matatu. So I kept going—amped up like a game show host on mushrooms announcing the bonus round:

“And I’d also check if there’s some kind of escape route in case I mess up a landing.
Something that doesn’t have me end up in a hospital bed. Or a coffin…”

I trailed off, hoping—idiotically, delusionally, spectacularly—that this sounded like the careful, adult thinking of a responsible pilot.

It absolutely did not.

It sounded like a man calling his own future accident report hotline.

“Yes, ok, please do whatever you want and come by,” Arnie muttered into the phone, his voice the sonic equivalent of someone realising—too late—that they’d just accepted a dinner invitation from an arsonist. It was barely 8 a.m., and from the hollow undertones in his response, he was either still in bed, emotionally hungover, or trapped in the first stage of a spiritual hostage crisis. One hand likely fumbling for his glasses, the other subconsciously reaching for a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels and a church pamphlet on exorcisms.

“Splendid!” I declared, radiating the manic conviction of a man who’d just snorted expired Prozac off a check-ride syllabus.

“I’m already standing on the threshold, photographing your gum trees.”

I said it like that was a normal sentence. As if photographing arboreal aviation hazards before breakfast was a standard procedure in the FAA safety manual—right between “check oil pressure” and “do not impersonate Maverick on final approach.”

I chuckled. Fully possessed now by the deranged ghost of Unlicensed Airstrip Reconnaissance, a spectral entity last seen crash-landing a gyrocopter into a vegan fondue festival during a NATO peace summit. The haunting had begun.

Silence. Then—click.
The line went dead.
Which I took, obviously, as divine approval.

When you're operating at my level of delusion, dial tones are for the weak. Dead lines aren’t warnings—they’re a celestial green light. The gods of bush flying had spoken, and apparently they wanted photographic evidence. And a sacrifice.

So I obeyed. With the meticulous optimism of a chemistry student seconds before blowing up the lab, I began documenting everything in sight like a deranged location scout for a documentary called Airstrips That Kill.
The gum trees.
The grass.
The hangar—leaning slightly, like it had seen too much and was quietly filing for retirement.
A close-up of the Monster Tree, which I now declared—based on absolutely no data—to be not a threat at all because I’d clearly be airborne, heroic, and miles away by the time I got there.
180 horsepower, baby. Myth meets thrust.

I spun in circles, snapping shots with the jittery glee of a teenage drone pilot high on Mountain Dew and unresolved childhood dreams.

Then I positioned myself precisely at the sacred wind vortex, where Arnie had once whispered, “they come down like a slap from God’s left hand.”
I squinted at the tree line.
Adjusted my imaginary headset.
Whispered “cleared for insanity,” and kept taking pictures like I was about to file a classified airstrike report to some shadowy department of the FAA that doesn’t officially exist.

Then I asked myself:
What would Paul Claus do?
What would Captain Pete Mitchell say?
And most importantly—
What would a Navy SEAL do in this moment?

I didn’t know. But I was about to find out.
Possibly by accident.
Definitely by force.

After an hour of what I generously labelled “reconnaissance”—read: nervously taxiing up and down Arnie’s airstrip l like a lost goat in a military parade, occasionally stopping to sniff tea leaves with the academic focus of a botanist on recreational narcotics—I remained fully committed to the illusion of competence. The kind of misplaced swagger only found in men who once watched a TED Talk on ‘strategic thinking’ while buttering toast, and now believed they could outfly death with nothing but intuition and a good attitude.

That’s when Arnie showed up.
Possibly to check if I had actually come.
Probably hoping I had left already.
Most likely to decide whether to sabotage the airstrip now or wait until after my fiery burial.

“This is going to be no problem!” I chirped, wearing the deranged optimism of a man moments from becoming a cautionary tale in a Cessna safety briefing. I said it like I was announcing a new recipe, not the opening chapter of an airborne court case involving property damage, livestock fatalities, and a missing left wing.

Arnie stared.
Said nothing.
Perhaps it was still too early in the morning.
Perhaps he was mentally drafting his obituary.
Perhaps he was simply trying to decide whether to intervene or let natural selection do its work.

“I think I’ve figured it out,” I said, with the breezy self-assurance of someone recommending a brunch spot and not the opening sequence of an aviation disaster documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman.

Arnie turned slowly.

“Figured out what?” Arnie finally whispered—not like a man intrigued, but like a soldier who’d just heard the first click of a landmine.

I pointed to the edge of the strip with all the confidence of someone who had absolutely no business pointing at anything.

“The escape route, of course.” I said it like this was a normal thing for pilots to declare, and not a red flag the size of a circus tent.

“All I need to do is dive into that charming little ravine right before the gum trees—you see it?—then with a bit of finesse (of which I currently possess roughly zero), I’ll hop the ridge, glide over that farmer’s hut like a majestic, slightly confused eagle, and circle back in for another go.”

Then, for reasons unknown to science, I puffed out my chest. Like a man who had just read one internet forum post and now fancied himself Master of the Tea Fields, Commander of Short Strips, Lord of Terrible Ideas.

Arnie didn’t move.
Not blinking.
Not breathing.
Not thinking.
Just staring, like a man silently begging whichever god was on duty to end his shift early.

“I don’t think anyone has ever tried that,” Arnie muttered, mostly to himself—his tone that of a man calculating insurance premiums in real time while watching a toddler juggle sushi knives. “But it doesn’t sound like a great idea to attempt a steep turn… uphill… near stall speed… with no power margin and a death wish duct-taped to your forehead.”

“Worry not, Arnie,” I replied, with the casual confidence of a man selecting vinaigrette—rather than casually announcing an experimental low-altitude aerobatic stunt involving livestock, eucalyptus trees, and gravity’s final invoice. “I’ve done far worse in my life."

This was technically true. In the same way that lighting yourself on fire before base-jumping into an active volcano technically qualifies as “worse.” Somewhere between my last functional brain cell and the carbonised remains of a once-healthy self-preservation instinct, I made a mental note:
Google urgently.
‘Super Cub stall characteristics in steep turns.’
‘The power curve explained—preferably without flames.’
‘Rising terrain and dumb pilot tricks.’
And perhaps most importantly:
‘How to install a James Bond ejector seat in a bush plane — For Dummies, With Delusions.’

Flashback to Germany

The phrase ( “I’ve done far worse in my life.")  tickled something deep in my synapses—ah yes, Germany. Home. Sanity. And my tragically enabling home airport, where I’d once spent entire afternoons simulating Alaskan STOL competitions like a budget Maverick with a GoPro, a God complex, and the aeronautical self-preservation instincts of a Japanese Kamikaze pilot low on Sake.

I had binge‑watched enough short takeoff footage to risk retinal detachment and irreversible swagger damage. Then, freshly indoctrinated by YouTube bush gods, I had marched onto the field like a discount test pilot on parole and had declared a charmingly neglected auxiliary strip—part grass, part cracked tarmac, all delusion—my personal audition stage for Darwin’s aviation awards.

The strip itself had been only slightly more forgiving than a grumpy Eastern Bloc interrogator. Even seasoned pilots had approached it with trembling respect. I, however—with a majestic total of ten hours in the air and the ego of a third‑world dictator in a flight suit—had felt it was the perfect place to forge my legend.

To “optimise” training, I had decided traffic patterns were bourgeois nonsense.
Climbing to 1,000 feet? Laughable. That had been fuel better spent impressing sheep and violating airflow regulations. I had kept it at 500—because in Africa, I’d be flying barely higher than termite mounds anyway, and altitude had clearly been for cowards with a will to live.

Then came my Masterpiece of idiocy. I had slowed the aircraft to 25 knots—roughly the speed of a shopping cart—and had reassured myself with the sacred gospel of the self‑deluded:
“Ehh. The airspeed indicator’s probably just tired. It’s more of a vibe thing anyway. Like yoga or yield signs.”

And then—ah yes, the climax.

Just as I had flared, mentally cueing up a TED Talk titled “Precision Landings for the Emotionally Unstable,” the wind didn’t shift.
It didn’t ease.
It had resigned.

Gone.
Like a disgruntled County Office clerk at 4:59pm on a Friday who’s already halfway through their Chardonnay and tax‑evasion paperwork.

Suddenly, I had been ten feet above the runway, floating like a helium balloon filled with poor decisions and unresolved parental issues. The ground had looked up at me, bored and mildly offended, and said:
“Oh. You again.”

Then—WHAM.

Not a gentle touchdown. Not even a rude arrival.

No.

The right wing had slammed into the Earth like it had been personally insulted by Newton and was now trying to pick a bar fight with gravity. It hadn’t just touched the grass. It had assaulted it. Tip first. Like a disgraced Soviet gymnast hurling a kettlebell into the mat after being disqualified for drinking vodka mid-cartwheel. It had been a full-force mic drop from the angry gods of aerodynamic incompetence. From there, chaos had unspooled in slow-motion hell:

We had bounced.

Wing. Tire. Wing again.

Each strike had felt like a divine slap from the Department of Physics, each rebound a fresh violation of the Geneva Convention for Airspeed Indicators. I, in response, had stomped the rudders like I had been exorcising runway demons—panic-flailing in a style that had resembled epileptic Morse code performed by a caffeinated ballet dancer in steel-toed boots.

And yet—somehow—by divine sarcasm, unholy reflexes, or sheer embarrassment at dying in front of livestock, I had managed to avoid:

• a ground loop,
• a nose-over,
• and a one-way funeral flight to Valhalla.

We had slid to a halt. Not on the runway—God no. That would have implied competence.
No, we had come to rest somewhere nearby. Approximately 40 feet sideways, in a meadow scented with wildflowers, humiliation, and the ghost of Amelia Earhart performing a slow-motion facepalm.

No sheep had been harmed, miraculously—though I remain convinced at least three seagulls had filed trauma claims citing “emotional distress” and “unwarranted exposure to amateur aviation.”

And there I had sat. Alone in the cockpit. Possibly concussed.
Definitely vibrating.
Dignity bleeding out through the seat cushions.

And you know what?

I had felt proud.
Yes.
Proud.

No logical reason. No applause. No trophy.

Just me—sweating regret, leaking hubris, and deeply convinced I had just become a pilot.

A terrible one.
But still—a pilot.

The result?
Bent wing.
Failed short landing.
Ego duct‑taped to optimism.
Evel Knievel on ketamine. Good times.

Back to the Limuru airstrip...

With all the misplaced confidence of a teenager in a jetpack—and roughly the same understanding of physics—I swaggered off toward my Land Rover, which lay parked beneath the gum trees like a rusting prophecy of doom: an oil‑leaking, tyre‑deflating, biohazardous monument to bad ideas on wheels. A four‑wheeled obituary for common sense. Built Ford Tough, then colonised by British engineering.

Arnie just stood there. Frozen.
Not out of politeness—but because he’d just experienced the raw, spiritual nausea of knowing he might be the last living witness to a Category 5 disaster still masquerading as a flight plan.

His pupils dilated like he'd seen the ghost of aviation logic rise from the grave, take one look at me, shake its head in silent despair, and crawl straight back into the coffin—locking it from the inside.

My instructor to the Rescue

As so often before, just when I was about to end up in a flaming cartwheel of doom—spinning tail-first into a spectacular debris field of bad judgment and questionable altitude—my guardian angels decided to intervene.

Plural.
Because let’s be honest: no single celestial entity would willingly sign up for the Sisyphean madness of babysitting my life full-time. At this stage, I’m fairly certain they’ve formed a union. There’s a burnout prevention plan. Maybe even a hotline. They work in shifts now—one covers landings, one handles immigration paperwork, and a third just sits in the break room chain-smoking and whispering “Not again...” every time my name flashes across the Divine Catastrophe Dashboard.

This time, salvation arrived in the form of a deceptively polite email from Germany.
Enrico.
My former instructor.
My ice-cold co-pilot of logic and Lufthansa-grade precision.
He had an idea…

And me?

Marcel Romdane—still euphoric, still delusional, still not dead—
signing off with one wing bent, a Land Rover leaking despair, and just enough hope to cause another incident.