ABSTRACT
I had a great leave, and now I’m back. Let me tell you about my adventures since leaving Heathrow. We stopped at Zaire and most of the people got off, so while we were on the ground I walked up to first class and stole all the magazines and newspapers including the French ones to give to the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) doctors back in Kuito. I knew that would earn me some brownie points with them. The plane was nearly empty after Zaire so I had four seats to myself and got a couple of hours kip. Tuesday we got a message asking us to call Kuito urgently so we were all shitting ourselves thinking there had been an accident. Fortunately Ski hadn’t blown himself up, but he had malaria, so I had to get
into Kuito as quickly as possible. The flight the next morning was meant to be at 6 a.m. Our car is broken at the moment so I had to go up to the airport on the motorbike with the computer over one shoulder, the camera over the other, the cold bag between my legs on the fuel tank, and a sixty-pound rucksack on my back. What a nightmare! Still, where there is a will there is a way. When I got to the airport the pilots weren’t there so I had to wait for an hour for them to show, and then they announced the flight to Kuito wasn’t until noon.
