Buy a donkey. Seriously. If you are in South Africa sooner or later you will have to give in to peer pressure and get one. Well this is what I thought as everyone keeps telling me to buy one. It was only today when chatting to some Afrikaans women in a bar that they told me that this is Afrikaans for “Thank you.”. Well Buy a donkey for clearing that one up.

For the last few days I have been staying in an airplane hanger. I have decided to camp out at the airfield in order to finish up my hours, I figure if I am here enough then there may be a bit more urgency with the instructors. So yesterday I turned up. I am not alone at the airfield, there is a 17 year guy called Rolf getting his ppl as well. I have taken it upon myself to get him into as much trouble as possible.
Yesterday I suggested we go out for a beer in the evening, I had been to lunch at “Tzaneen country lodge” the day before and remembered it had a bar and wasn’t too far from the airfield. Well that is what I thought but at the time I was driving. Having dropped Hens’ car at the garage to be serviced I was Carless. But I figured we could walk. This turned into a mission as we decided to cut across the airfield by jumping over a barbed wire fence in the dark. Rolf sprang over it in no time being the sprightly 17 year old of the group. I took it upon myself to wedge my gonads onto the barbed wire and just dangle there with this mixture of pain and disbelief at my unfortunate predicament. Once the testicles were freed (with much laughing from my companion) we proceeded to walk the 2 miles to the lodge. By the time we got there I didn’t just need a beer I needed a stretcher. I did not find a stretcher but I did find a barman called (as his name badge proudly displayed) “Sack”, a drunk learly old bastard called Moses (who was concerned that I had not taken a wife at the old age of 28 and consequently attempted to marry me off to every female in the bar) and 2 Afrikaans girls who educated me ( with encouragement from moses of course) into the marriage procedure in South Africa: Apparently you need provide the father of your conquest with a suitable “bulla” – this is a kind of dowry except it involves supplying the father with 100 cows. Now I may be slightly naive in these matters but what if your fiancé’s father lives in a 2 bedroom high rise flat in Johannesburg? How would you get them in the lift? Perhaps he would settle for a goldfish? Anyway this was a mute point as Moses by this point in the evening had indulged in a few and offered me one of his daughters with out the obligatory 100 cows. I declined his kind offer and told him to go buy a donkey.

My hanging around seems to be paying off as I also flew my first solo flip today. I would like to say this went smoothly but I would be lying. I was slightly nervous at the prospect of killing myself with no instructor to jump in and save me (not that he has had to yet but you never know). My nerves got the better of me during my Preflight checks, I missed out a sequence – not a major one I forgot to set the trimmer to neutral (which would make pulling backl on the stick trickier on take off.) but annoying none the less. Things got really tricky when I had lined up on the runway for take off. So there I was alone in the cockpit, I finished my checks and let out a gulp as I hit the throttle to take off. Now I blame my instructor (naturally) for not warning me that with out the extra weight of him in the plane the handling characteristics would be completely different. Where as the plane would normally steadily roll up to about 50 Knots and then you would pull back on the stick (or rotation as it technically known) to climb, the missing weight turned the throttle into a rocket booster. Before I knew it I had hit 65knots and the plane was bouncing half lifting off the tarmac on its own. Slightly alarmed that I had over shot the rotation point I pulled back on the stick and the plane launched in to the air like a shot. I had climbed to 2000ft in record time which also caught me off guard messing up my entire set up in the circuit. The speed was a lot faster than usual too, but that was just fun. It was at 2000ft that it suddenly dawned on me that I was up there all alone and responsible for my own safety. I let out a big grin and then I managed to pull it back until the landing. As the plane was lighter it did not descend as quick as I’m used too, it also made my inputs on the controls a lot more pronounced. As I neared the runway threshold I was still very high so I switched to full flaps and swooped in at a ridiculous angle of decent. This would make chuck Yeager proud. (He is a famous American stunt pilot Ma…). As I pulled in to the apron Grant and Dicky the flight school owner were there to greet me. I had this huge grin on my face that just beamed I’m happy to be alive and I was happy – 2 months of learning to get to this milestone.

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