HELLO! and Welcome to GTIZY!!

Our plans to travel back, or indeed on any long trip, are as you can imagine lengthy and complicated..

Firstly, for each country we will need a visa, and TIZY will need various papers too. Every time we fly we must prepare a flight plan and file it with the airports we are leaving and landing into. This is of course a very good idea, as they are then aware of when we should turn up, and if there is ever a chance that we don’t, they then know to come looking for us.

Well, that sounds easy doesn’t it? We wish it were!

The landing strips vary from large tarmac International airports to small dirt strips in the middle of pretty much nowhere. The entering and exit airport need to have customs so we can have the appropriate stamps in our pass-ports for the next country. Of course when landing anywhere one must then

sort out how you get to the next place to stay (will it be 4WD or a camel?) Hire car facilities are few and far between!

Apart from where to land there is also the knowledge that we will be flying over water..a lot of water, as well as round a lot of mountains. Weather is therefore a primary concern. There was a conversation with an experienced pilot in SA, when we were talking about someone that had got into difficulties over a mountain in bad weather. It was in the context of having a parachute attached inside the plane, which was an option when we were building TIZY and had decided not to install one. This pilot was apparently deciding whether or not to pull the parachute as the situation was getting very tricky. The experienced pilot we were talking to just said ‘You should never find yourself in that situation in the first place. What was he doing in bad weather flying over a mountain?’ Good point.

When flying over water the occupants of the plane must wear a life jacket, and carry a raft. We will also be wearing our immersion suits. ( Stylish no, practical yes)

As our longest flight over water is to be about 1,200 kilometers, taking about six hours, we shall definitely be doing and wearing, the lot.

The trickiest journey around mountainous regions on our trip back to the UK will be near Kilimanjaro which is 19,000ft. above sea level. We will be carrying oxygen, should we end up being high enough to need it! People often ask us how high we will fly, well, the answer is high enough to miss the mountain, unless the mountain is too high for our little plane, and then of course we go round it.

The main worry about flying around mountainous regions and deep gorges are the thermals that are created from them. Hopefully we won’t be wearing them, depending on how high we go (It gets colder the higher you are) This can make for a bumpy ride, and one of us needs to make sure to take (her) anti-sickness tablets.

Fish River is an area we intend to fly over in Namibia, and later following the Rift Valley as another part of the journey North, so fingers crossed for that lot!