Flying in Africa, Cessna-Style
This mystic continent has long fascinated pilot-writers -- Beryl Markham, St.-Exupery and now Scott Griffin.
As a pilot, I'm a sucker for airplane books. Not the escapist spy novels people read on commercial flights, but books about real flying -- in lightplanes. Here's one that non-pilots fascinated by Africa should take a look at: My Heart Is Africa, by Scott Griffin. (It's available at Amazon for $11.53.)
Griffin is a Canadian businessman and philanthropist (he founded the remarkably generous Griffin Poetry Prize) who in 1996 jumped into his four-seat Cessna 180 and popped across the Atlantic, then all the way down to Kenya to help the famous Flying Doctors Service get its finances in order. With the outa-my-way attitude of so many self-made businesspeople and entrepreneurs, the challenges of flying a single-engine lightplane around some of the wildest territory on the planet didn't faze him a bit.
His wife, the well-known Toronto jewelry designer Krystyne Griffin, was up to the task as well. She joined her husband in Nairobi and shared such adventures as...
...sneaking across the Kenyan border into Tanzania and landing on a grassy patch for a picnic in a game reserve. Unfortunately, Tanzanian park rangers caught the Griffins and turned them over to the thuggish police, who for awhile looked unlikely ever to release the couple.
Crashing his Cessna not once but twice -- first landing on a too-soft beach and pretzeling the propeller, then thoroughly messing up a takeoff attempt with a replacement prop. The Griffins had been rescued by a Kenyan army helicopter that, moments after dropping them at a jungle lodge, was shot down by Turkana rebels, killing everybody aboard.
Homeward bound after two years in Africa, Griffin flew a hugely dangerous route across West Africa, the Sahara and the Atlas Mountains to Morocco, sometimes not knowing where or how he would find gasoline -- a dicey adventure in which Krystyne declined to participate.
Nor did she share in the evening when a lovely young African woman came into Scott's room and dropped her dress in hopes of persuading him to fly her to Canada. (It didn't work.)
Long evenings in Nairobi drinking Tusker beer with bored NGO types trying to make sense of Kenya's corruption, winged weekend safaris, a fascinating flight across South Africa from Johannesburg to Cape Town and then up over Namibia's De Beers blood-diamond mines ("Stay above 1,500 feet or you'll be shot down," the Griffins were ordered)...My Heart Is Africa is an adventure that only a pilot could have but that the rest of us can read.
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Thanks for the recommendation Stephen. West with the Night is one of my favorite books. Can't wait to read this one. : 0)
Posted by: lorib | July 31, 2007 at 09:14 AM