I woke at first light. Several rangers were already up. One poured me coffee, a strong brew, and it woke me right up. I tried to get out the kinks from sleeping on a small hard cot. I thanked the fellows for my personal guided tour of the park. I was pretty sure that I had seen a part of the park that most tourists wouldn’t see, sitting right in the middle of a herd of wild elephants.
There was not a hint of wind in the early morning air as I warmed up the engine oil. Once the oil was warmed up I pulled out onto the grass strip, waved back to the Rangers who were standing around and applied power. It was bumpy takeoff but the plane was built to take it. I lifted off early to get off the bumps and let the plane build up speed, then pulled back on the stick and started climbing. I had already put in the coordinates for Mombassa. It was only 228 miles from Marsabit over the eastern plains of Kenya.
I stayed about a hundred feet over the plains. When I was learning to fly, my instructor called this hunting for coyotes. We’d go out over the grasslands and fly low looking for coyotes, then chasing them when we found them. This time, I was hunting elands, zebras, gazelles and occasionally lions. I would come pounding in that big engine roaring and the animals would run away. Of course they couldn’t outrun the Mustang so they’d veer right or left at the last second. It was better than any Wild Kingdom I’d ever seen.
As I neared the coast, the terrain started to turn green, probably close to the ocean, this area got rain when the rest of the interior wouldn’t. I climbed up a little and turned on the Mode C. Then I contacted Mombassa airport and asked for landing. They brought me in from the northeast. My flight book said the airport had two runways and I expected to land on the smaller, but as I got close, I could see the second runway had been abandoned and deteriorated. So I landed on the two mile long main runway turning, off at the first taxiway 90% of that runway unused.
Moi International is a big airport, but it also connects to all the small airports in Kenya, so it has a mix of heavies and small planes. I pulled into the transit area and asked for fuel.
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Copyright Rod O'Steele © 2009