The Pilots of the Caribbean

Driving, Me Crazy

Often, when one group of people ignore the rules of the road, it’s a catalyst for chaos. South Africa is a good example of this. So, in Haiti, where even basic traffic rules, like which side of the road to drive on, are treated as mere suggestions, it is astonishing that it all seems to work.

According to ITV, repairing all the potholes in England and Wales would cost £14 billion. If that were accurate, repairing all the potholes in Haiti would cost more than the UK’s gross domestic product. It isn’t a coincidence that almost everyone drives SUV’s. Going to the shops feels more like an expedition than an outing. And, because the city spreads up the side of a mountain, with hills radiating from it like fingers, there are only a few arteries from ‘downtown’ to ‘uptown’. The seven kilometer journey uptown to the supermarket in Pètionville can take over an hour.

Ironically, the worst section of road in the city is the kilometer or so outside the US Embassy in Tabarre. There, the potholes are reversed: little islands of tar sticking out of the dirt waiting to rip the sumps from the bold or the unwary. A constant pall of dust hangs over the embassy, fading the colours of the flag that hangs listlessly outside. It’s probably Haiti’s way of saying ‘thank you’ for interfering in their politics.

In a city with choked roads and knackered cars, the potholes slow everything down. Where there are potholes, accidents are slow, almost graceful affairs, but on the few smooth stretches of road, things often turn deadly. In our first two months, we saw two motorbike riders lying dead in the street; a newly dismembered Tap Tap appeared one morning. It still lies on its side on one corner as a memorial to those who were in it when everything went wrong.

Speed bumps calm things down in the suburbs, where the roads are generally in better condition. They aren’t the long, rolling speed bumps that SUVs sneer at as they cruise by at warp speed, but the short sharp ones that reach up and tear the guts out of the disrespectful.

Our daily commute to work is a good example of what it’s like to get around. There are two main routes, the shortest one is unremarkable, but during rush hour, nothing moves. So we often take the back route through Vivy Mitchell. It’s a bit of a roller coaster ride. It starts off innocuously enough along the back roads out of our gated suburb to the foot of Rue Vivy Mitchell. That’s where the cog engages and the car tilts up for the big climb. It rattles to the top, bouncing over the speed bumps and potholes. The next section is harmless: a sharp left turn, followed by a sharp right. Then the road plunges down, past a police checkpoint and on to the bottom where it swerves right and starts to climb again. When we plunge down the second drop, I brace for the loop.

About halfway we reach the flat lands, leave the roller coaster and board the bumper car. It’s easy to avoid the other cars on the straighter roads at the bottom of the hill; stray goats, dogs and cows are the main obstacles. But closer to the airport, where the road widens, the action picks up again. The roads there are heavily potholed and everyone seeks the path of least resistance: swerving back and forth like drunkards, veering from one side to the other, undertaking and over-braking, all in an effort to stay on the tar.

At first, we relied on Sanley, our driver, to get us around. But we wanted our independence and were determined to venture out on our own. It’s one thing to sit passively (if you don’t count the clenched teeth and white knuckles) while someone else negotiates the mayhem. It is a completely different tin of tuna to do the driving yourself.

We made an arrangement with Sanley to hire his car. It is a Ford double-cab and has seen better days. Half the indicators didn’t work, the windscreen wipers had no blades and the bodywork was held together with wire. We dubbed it The Beast.

The Beast standing out a bit at the Pètionville Club

We quickly learned that there are many intersections, but few stop streets. Nobody pays any attention to either. Most intersections need some extra caution, because it’s seldom obvious who has right of way. Even when it does seem evident, it’s always good to remember that assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups.

The busier intersections are more of a challenge. Traffic from four or more directions meets in the middle and grinds to a halt in a Gordian knot. One by one, the cars, taxis and trucks disentangle themselves from each other, working their way carefully through the snarl until they are free again. It requires just the right balance of passive aggression, and it wouldn’t work anywhere else in the world. But here, nobody gets stressed. When we first made it successfully through one of the big intersections, we both whooped, high-fived to celebrate.

On one occasion, we had to cross a line of cars that was bumper to bumper in the opposite direction. We settled in for a long wait, but a taxi in the queue reversed to try to let us through. There still wasn’t space to turn. We couldn’t reverse because the traffic behind us was equally backed up. Then the guy on the motorbike behind us made space and signalled for us to reverse. We made the turn, squeezed through the line of cars and were on our way: synergy amongst the chaos.

One-way streets are not always signposted and it is not uncommon to meet someone coming down the wrong way. In our case, we managed to go the wrong way a couple of times and met cars coming the right way. There was little more fuss than a quick flash of lights to let us know that we had cocked up.

Our first foray out of town was to one of the beaches north of the city. We had passed the airport and were almost out of town when a policeman pulled us over. He was very smartly dressed and extremely polite. The conversation went something like this (in French and a little Creole):

‘Bonjour.’ He said, smiling.

‘Bonjour. Koman ou ye?’ Nicky had already learned some Creole.

He smiled, came straight to the point. ‘I’m okay, but I’d be much better if I had as much money as you have.’

My heart sank, but I kept smiling.

‘Too bad,’ Nicky said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To the beach.’ I pointed to the others who had seen us being pulled over and had stopped a little way ahead. ‘With our friends.’

‘Have a nice day,’ he said. And that was it. He could have fined us for an almost endless number of things, but The Beast doesn’t exactly exude wealth. We’ve come to love the car because it allows us to blend in.

The open drains are deadly for the unwary.

After almost four months, driving here has become normal. The open drains, the Mack trucks that hog the road, the fact that nobody indicates all add to the challenge. They are just part of the daily commute.

Coffee in China Cups

By the end of October, we had settled in to our normal schedule, flying three days a week to Cap Haïtien and Santo Domingo, with the occasional medevac thrown in to keep things interesting.

The UN wanted us to fly to the southwest, but the runway in Les Cayes is a smidgen too short, which only left Jérémie as a possibility. Its runway is long enough, but size isn’t always everything, as we would soon find out. The UN asked Nicky and I to go and inspect the airfield. We couldn’t fly there in our aircraft until we’d done the inspection, so we hitched a ride in a Bangladesh Air Force Mi17 helicopter that was headed in that direction.

Boarding UNO-122 for the flight to Jérémie

The Mi17 is not a pretty beast; not many helicopters are, especially Russian ones. But it is built like a brick shithouse and it gets the job done. UNO-122 is a people carrier, but has a military swagger and carries extra fuel in drop tanks that look disturbingly like bombs. We boarded with eight others bound for the UN Helipad at Les Cayes.

After a thorough briefing from the flight sergeant, the engines began to whine and the big fan above us stirred, bringing some relief from the humidity inside. When the doors were closed, the breeze was shut out. Beads of sweat slid down our faces. Small fans (rubber blades – no guards) were suspended inches above our heads. The sergeant flicked them on; the droplets dried to dampness. The helicopter shook, big blades beating the air into submission. We lifted off from the UN apron.

The helicopter flew south over Vivy Mitchel before turning west over the city and down the coast towards Grand Goâve. The downtown area of Port-au-Prince still bore the scars of the 2010 earthquake that struck seven years ago today. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption lay in ruins, kept as a monument to the disaster. Nearby an open lot marked the spot where the National Palace once stood.

Shantytowns spilled down to the water’s edge, hugging the tributaries and channels that carry the city’s refuse and sewage down to the sea. The press of humanity thinned as we moved further away from the capital and the coastline exchanged effluence for affluence. Properties grew in size until some had their own swimming pools and jetties. The transparency of the water was inversely proportional to our distance from the city, and by the time we reached the swimming pools, the sea was Caribbean clear, and reefs began to appear.

Before long, the helicopter dipped inland to cross the mountainous peninsula that is the south-western part of Haiti. A roofless house might have been the first sign of hurricane damage. But a closer look revealed a tree growing inside. About a quarter of the houses were unfinished: grey shells awaiting more blocks, cement, or enough money for a roof.

An uprooted tree lay in front of the terminal.

Only when we approached Les Cayes did we see the unmistakeable swathe of destruction from Hurricane Matthew. Palm trees, accustomed to the constant trade winds, lay scattered like matchsticks. The shacks that were still standing were mostly roofless; bright blue plastic sheeting provided shelter for a lucky few. Some of the bigger houses had already been repaired, their corrugated iron roofs glinting in the sun as we began our descent.

The helipad wore bruises from the blow. An uprooted tree lay in front of the terminal, while others leaned at precarious angles, all pointing north, accusingly in the direction the culprit had fled.

We touched down gently, the huge blades stilled and the whining engine silenced; one of the crew soaked two towels in ice water and took them forward for the pilots. And a few minutes later, while we were chatting to the commander on the landing pad, the engineer brought us coffee, served in china cups from a silver tray. First Class service. The best we could manage on our aircraft was a flask of tepid water and a peanut butter sandwich. We were going to have to up our game.

After the coffee break, we lifted off from Les Cayes and headed north-east, where the mountains were lowest and the clouds thinnest. The countryside there had succumbed to the tempest; denuded fields were strewn with broken trees, sheets of corrugated iron and a littering of treasured possessions.

Houses with blue plastic sheeting near Jérémie

Jérémie had fared no better than Les Cayes. From the air, the runway looked promising. On closer inspection its limitations were numerous. There was a settlement on one side of the runway and a small UN outpost on the other. The UN was providing potable water to the local people, who were forced to cross the runway to collect it. As a result, the runway was a local highway. There were no fences to separate landing airplanes from the stray goats, dogs, cattle, motorbikes and pedestrians that roamed freely. The few UN soldiers positioned to protect the helicopter landing pad had long since given up trying to stem the flow of traffic across the runway.

The surface wasn’t promising either. While some areas were firm and smooth, others were rough and stony and in places where water had pooled, the mud was as slick as goose shit.

Nicky and I prodded and poked and took pictures, but with each

Jérémie’s runway with mud as slick as goose shit

passing minute we became more convinced that it wasn’t a runway we could use. Some fixed wing aircraft were landing there, but most of them were designed for the rougher conditions, with bigger tyres and stronger undercarriage. Although we both agreed that we could theoretically land and take off from Jérémie, the chances of an incident were too high to warrant the risk.

Back in Port-au-Prince, we wrote the report for the UN reluctantly, knowing that we had ruled out what might have been one of our more interesting destinations.

The Day of the Dead

Inspired by the James Bond movie Sceptre, Mexico City recently tipped a sombrero to Hollywood by holding a Day of the Dead parade for the first time. The Mexican parade, while spectacular, is all Disney, a tourist temptation. The real thing happens in a cemetery.

Nowhere is the fusion of Christian tradition and local culture more symbiotic than in Haiti where, according to legend, Haitians are 60% Catholic, 39% Protestant and 100% voodoo. Haitians traditionally celebrate the Day of the Dead much like anywhere else, by visiting their family tombs, offering gifts to the departed and remembering those that they have lost. But voodoo adds spice to the soup.

On the 1^st November, a public holiday in Haiti, the people of downtown Port-au-Prince descend on the single square kilometre of housing estate built for the dead, not far from the football stadium.

Stallholders and hawkers clog the road between the stadium and the cemetery, taking advantage of the crowds. A tinny voice blares from loudspeakers on top of a pickup truck, vainly competing for attention amongst a cacophony of konpa music that blasts from every stall. Closer to the cemetery a bass beat from speakers near the entrance shakes the ground and drives air from the lungs of the revellers. The crowd roars, encouraging a half-dressed woman onstage, who is gyrating hypnotically to the music, thrusting herself at the crowds and rolling her possessed eyes until only the whites stare blankly out.

People jostle across the bridge that crosses the river of garbage into the cemetery itself. White-clad mourners move quietly to their family tombs, the only island of calm amidst a sea of drunken revellers. Rum flows; people shout, spill, stagger and canon about on random trajectories. A line of crones sit on a low wall eating from tin bowls, their faces smeared with the lumpy beige gruel that drips to the ground at their feet. Further along, a knot of gawkers surround a small ceremony targeted more at the watchers than the dead.

Two human skulls lie haphazard atop a pile of bones littered with burning candles and offerings of coffee, food and rum.

The tombs that fill the cemetery are as grand as the relatives of the departed could afford; offering them, in death, a house that they might only have dreamed of in life. The coffins are not buried, but are placed in crypts built into the tombs, secured by locked steel doors. The locks are no match for the grave robbers, who raid the coffins for whatever lies within: trinkets for the thieves or perhaps bones for the voodoo priests.

An abandoned coffin in the Grand Cimetiére

Broken locks, doors smashed from their hinges suggest that the dead have little rest. Many of the desecrated crypts are empty; others are strewn with rubble and garbage. Inside one of them, a coffin bears scars from a crowbar, a corner bent down for easier access. Nearby another coffin lies open, lined with yellowing lace. There is no trace of the former resident. An overgrown patch is littered with rib bones and vertebrae. A tibia (or is it a fibula?) protrudes from the detritus. A few meters away lie a bundle of pin stripe rags; bones spill from the bundle, a suit than can no longer contain its owner. One crypt still bears token remains of the previous occupant; a small scapula hints at a younger victim. And all around the revellers keep revelling, staggering about, swilling rum and pulling on joints: dancing, swirling, laughing, shouting and singing.

Back at the bridge, a group of drinkers dribbles offerings of rum onto the sticky ground and chugs the rest. The dark rum flows like blood into the gutters. A man walks by, gnawing on a chicken bone, turning something ordinary into the macabre.

Naked woman dancing and rubbing chillies into her genitals in the Grand Cimetiére

The beat from the band outside the cemetery swells to a heart-stopping crescendo. The woman is more naked now than clothed. Her black dress hangs from her shoulders and her breasts, unfettered, sway to the music. Her pants are around her knees as she rubs fresh chillies onto her genitals proving to any doubters that the spirits really do possess her and she feels no pain.

It’s nice to have a parade. But if you want a raw and real Day of the Dead, Haiti’s the place to be.

The Motorbike, The Jeep and The Bitch Who Tried To Kill Us

With Matthew gone, it was time for us to get on with the business of living and working in Haiti. The company had provided us with a car and a driver to get to and from work, but also to take us to the shops or out for dinner in the evening. We like Sanley, the driver, quite a lot as it happens, but we don’t necessarily want him with us every time we go out for dinner; and having him wait around while we do our shopping just doesn’t feel right. There are also two other people sharing the house who need to get to the airport at different times, so the car isn’t always available.

Before we arrived in Haiti, we had researched the possibility of buying a motorbike so that we could have our independence. We were looking for an old BMW or Honda but couldn’t find anything for sale. In the meantime, we learned that one of the crew that was leaving had hired a motorbike, so we took it over when we arrived. More than 90% of the motorbikes in Haiti are Chinese and they are all pretty much the same: 125cc road bikes. This one was no different.

I took the bike out for a spin straight away; it worked pretty much like any other, except, instead of one-down-four-up, it was down-down-down… It also came with a sound system that pumped out Haitian konpa music, complete with a remote control. The only thing that it didn’t come with was a helmet.

You can buy anything in Haiti, as long as you know where to find it. But even Sanley, our resourceful driver, struggled to find a helmet that would fit my head, which is on the extra size of large. Unfortunately, and unusually, all the helmets in the shop were too big for Nicky.

We were longing to get out and start exploring, but a few things gave us pause: the state of the roads, the traffic and the driving. Imagine for a moment, every driver on the road as a Jo’burg taxi driver, without inhibitions. Then Ian, the swimming coach at the Pétionville Club, heard that we were planning to get around on a motorbike. He told us that it was far too dangerous, that we should reconsider, and that if we fell off, we would probably get bubonic plague from the road rash. So, we decided to limit our first, helmetless, trip to a nearby gym, about three kilometres away. The trip went well, for me; but when we hit the first speed bump, Nicky discovered that the rear suspension was set to unyielding.

A couple of days later, emboldened by our first adventure, we decided to go the local supermarket, just over a kilometre away and outside the gated suburb where we live. As a precaution, we parked the bike inside the gates so that we wouldn’t have to negotiate the twenty meters of bedlam known as Route des Frères between the gate and the entrance to the shop.

It was on the way back that things went wrong. We were only a few hundred meters from the house. Nicky was on the back, clinging on to the shopping. I was navigating between the potholes, not looking far ahead, when Nicky screamed. A red Jeep shot through the intersection without hesitating, and was right in front of us. I jinked left in the hope that the driver had seen us and would stop, but she hadn’t and she didn’t. I laid the bike down instinctively, not wanting to tee the Jeep. We slid a short way before crunching into it, just behind the front wheel.

I was okay, thought that we’d got away with it. I killed the screaming bike, got up. Nicky was sitting in the road behind me, hunched over, holding on to her foot.

‘Are you alright?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘My foot.’

I checked her over to make sure there weren’t any other obvious injuries; all seemed okay, but there was no mistaking the claret leaking from her foot.

By then, the Bitch That Tried to Kill Us had noted our presence and offered excuses, then assistance. I asked her to take Nicky back to our house, so that we could deal with her injuries there. It was a bit of a squeeze as there were four children and a nanny in the car. Fortunately, none of the children looked up from their cell phones for long enough to be traumatised by the sight of the blood.

Back at the house, the Bitch That Tried to Kill Us dropped Nicky off and gave us her telephone number and fifty dollars. Fifty dollars? WTF?

When Nicky finally let me had a closer look at her foot. She had a nasty open wound on her toe that looked like it had some gravel in it. A delve with the tweezers revealed that the ‘gravel’ was the end of a vein and it was about then that I decided that the limit of my medical skills had been exceeded; that, and the distinct possibility that the toe was fractured.

With the help of an Argentinian officer we had befriended, (yes, he does know that Nicky is English, but doesn’t hold it against her) Nicky was admitted to the Argentinian Hospital casualty department. Not taking any chances, she told them that she was South African, which was a first.

X-rays showed that there was no fracture, but the wound was very deep and could not be sutured. That meant a loose dressing and no flying for a few days. Fortunately, flight operations were still in the recovery phase from Hurricane Matthew and there was no flying for us to do.

Nicky’s toe has recovered, but the motorbike never went out again. We decided that quite apart from the risk to us, our ability to work here relies on us both being healthy. Just as well. Since then, we have seen two dead motorbike riders lying in the road. Sometimes in the face of all good advice, one has to learn the hard way.

Hurricane Matthew

Matthew turned out to be the most powerful storm to hit Haiti for a generation; but it left Port-au-Prince relatively unscathed. The communities of Haiti’s south-western peninsula weren’t so lucky. While people in Florida were preparing for the worst by boarding up their premises and making plans to retreat to hurricane shelters, the residents of Les Cayes and Jérémie had little choice but to brace themselves for the onslaught, and hope for the best. Matthew crashed through their lives, left them homeless, destroyed their crops and killed their livestock.

In Port-au-Prince, the airport was closed as a precaution. With our aircraft safely tucked away in the hangar, we were left to watch helplessly from the fringes. Matthew drenched us with torrential rain but only ruffled the leaves in our garden, leaving the trees firmly rooted. It took another day after the storm had passed for the airport to open, and still there was little for us to do.

Because we were new to the UN mission in Haiti, we were required to do a familiarisation flight. So while a US Navy aircraft carrier steamed into the bay and disgorged relief supplies from a steady stream of helicopters, we went on a flight to Cap Haïtien in the north and Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. It was an unusually clear day. The hurricane had mopped up all the atmospheric detritus revealing that the province to the north, Artibonite, was relatively unscathed. And, although there was some flooding around Cap Haïtien, it also seemed to have escaped the worst.

It was only the following day that Nicky and I finally joined the response effort. We still couldn’t land anywhere in the hardest-hit south-west, as the only runways that were long enough for us to use were waterlogged and had been inundated with helicopters from the UN, the US Coast Guard and Navy and a myriad of other agencies.

We were tasked to fly a Civil Defence team to the north and, from there, along the coast back to Port-au-Prince to assess the coastal damage from the hurricane. A flight like that is a dream come true for most pilots. With much of our time normally spent trying to keep the blue side up while not spilling the passenger’s gin and tonics, this was an opportunity to fly low over the sea while hugging the coastline and exploring all the coves and inlets.

Once airborne out of Port-au-Prince, we climbed to nine thousand feet to clear the mountains of the interior on our way to Fort Liberté on Haiti’s north-eastern corner. When we were over the ridge, we started a shallow descent past the imposing Citadelle Laferrière, which squats on top of a tall peak, with a commanding view of the northern shore. The castle was built shortly after the slave rebellion of 1804. The new ruler Henri Christophe built the citadel, which looks more like a Crusader fortress than a Caribbean stronghold.

We left the castle behind and circled the floodplains to the northeast of Cap Haïtien, before following the coast westwards.

We rounded the peninsula to Labadee, a resort leased by Royal Caribbean Cruises. It is yet another curiosity, totally removed from the reality of Haiti, where cruise ship passengers are disgorged onto palm-fringed beaches where they play in the surf without a thought of what lies beyond.

After Labadee, we changed course for Île de la Tortue (Tortuga), a turtle-shaped island off Haiti’s north coast that was once a major centre of Caribbean piracy in the 17^th century. Not much has changed. We were told that the island is still a no-go area for the authorities, as it is now the centre of the Caribbean drug trade. It looked peaceful enough, with a small settlement on the southern shore and sailing boats gliding though the turquoise shallows.

With no hurricane damage in sight, we skipped back across the Canal de la Tortue to Port de Paix and continued along the coast, before slipping inland towards Bombardopolous, which belied its grandiose name.

When we reached the coast again, we followed it south past Gonaïves to mangrove lagoons speckled with flocks of pink and brown flamingos that splashed into the air as we passed overhead. Just beyond the mangroves, the small town of

Grande Saline lies at the mouth of the Artibonite River. Its salt pans were flooded and much of the town seemed partially submerged. It was the only significant hurricane damage that we observed during the flight.

Time and fuel were getting short, so we made a quick detour across the bay to Île de Gonâve, the largely barren island that dominates Haiti’s bight. We found little damage and turned back to Port-au-Prince for a long final approach to the easterly runway.

After two hours of virtual silence, the airwaves filled with chatter from all the helicopters ferrying supplies out to Jérémie and Les Cayes.

It was an amazing flight, but we couldn’t help feeling somewhat inadequate. We were longing to join in with the relief efforts in the south.

Haiti

The alarm went off at two the following morning for our our five fifty-three flight to Port-au-Prince. We made our way, bleary-eyed, to the airport and found ourselves in a sleepy departures hall with all the shops firmly shuttered and not a cappuccino in sight. With Hurricane Matthew making its way steadily through the Caribbean, we checked the weather channels to see if it would make landfall in Haiti. It was veering towards Haiti’s south-western peninsula and was expected to arrive within forty-eight hours. We began to wonder if we would get there before the airport closed. But boarding commenced on schedule and we were soon on our way.

I had an aisle seat and Nicky was in the middle, so when we started our descent, there wasn’t much for us to see. I craned to get a view of the island, but could only glimpse patches of green, white and blues: the indigo of the Caribbean and the lighter blue of the sky. Reassured that the hurricane hadn’t arrived, I retreated to my book.

We touched down just before nine and emerged into a tropical clammy heat that felt like West Africa.

Neither the airport buildings nor the arrivals hall dispelled the notion that we might be in Africa. But the posters advertising Caribbean beach resorts just north of the capital gave away our real location. We were met by the base manager, Patrick and driver Sanley, who drove with a nonchalance that belied both the traffic and the state of the roads.

Dusty, garbage strewn roads with potholes that stretched all the way across and beyond provided a battleground for a helter skelter of cars, taptaps and motorbikes that weaved in amongst each other in seemingly random trajectories.

Port-au-Prince hugs the foothills of Kenscoff, the cloud-shrouded mountain that overlooks the city, and hugs them hard. Its many foothills are precipitous, growing in stature and steepness as they near the mountain, turning the twelve-kilometre journey from the airport to the crew house into a thirty-minute rollercoaster ride.

In its place was a voluminous six-bedroom house, situated in Belvil, a gated suburb, and one of the sanctuaries where wealthier Haitians, and UN staff, retreat from the mayhem. It seemed deserted, its doors ajar to take advantage of the breeze. We were shown up to our room, where we dropped off our luggage before exploring our new home.

Despite the obvious lack of a swimming pool, it was more than we’d ever expected from a crew house. Apart from the six bedrooms, there were two lounges, one with a television and the other on a lower level. The kitchen was a good size and seemed well equipped, if a little dated. When I had a closer look at the four-burner gas stove, I let out an involuntary shiver. It was wretched. The sort of wretchedness that eventually accumulates when something hasn’t seen a scourer since it was born: last century sometime.

The rest was typical of a crew house: stale food in the cupboards, bottles of water stacked haphazardly outside an empty cupboard in one corner and dirty dishes in the sink. In contrast, the garden was beautiful with a profusion of tropical flowers and a scattering of coconut palms. In one corner, a vine covered pergola looked like a good spot for Sunday lunch.

‘Where are the other crew?’ I asked Patrick.

‘In their rooms.’

Nicky and I looked at each other. ‘Here?’

Patrick looked at me strangely. ‘Yes.’

‘But it seems so quiet.’

Patrick shrugged.

One emerged a few hours later. He seemed to by a nice guy, but he soon retreated to the darkness of his room. The other didn’t emerge from his bat cave until the following day.

So once we had unpacked, with no-one to talk to, Nicky and I rolled up our sleeves, boiled up some water, dug out all the cleaning stuff that we could find and began the long and arduous process of dismantling the stove piece by piece and giving it the first thorough cleaning of its life.

By the time we put the kettle on, our first day in paradise was drawing to a close. And Matthew had yet to make landfall.

The Big Apple

We could easily have changed our minds. Our boss said that we could withdraw our resignations any time during our notice period, right op to the last day. One of our colleagues had recently done just that, returned to work with chilly toes and his tail between his legs. When the doors of the New York bound Airbus closed and it started moving, we both let out a sigh, releasing all the pent-up tensions from the last three months. The deed was done.

Before this all started, when we were still dreaming of leaving our jobs to sail around the world, Nicky had declared that as long as we motored out the harbour, turned right, raised the sails, passed Cape Recife and set course for Rio, or St. Helena, or wherever else our fancy took us, it didn’t matter if we never made it. If some freak wave sank us before we lost sight of land, it wouldn’t matter, she would die happy knowing that we’d had the courage to take the risk to venture towards the unknown.

Crossing the Atlantic in an Airbus wasn’t quite the adventure we’d imagined, but, metaphorically, we felt that we had passed Cape Recife and left the safe life behind. Because of poor connections in New York, we would have almost twenty-four hours to explore.

A day is not enough to do more than scratch at the Big Apple’s skin; many New Yorkers never get as far as the core. But we were determined to take the biggest bite that we could.

After dropping our suitcases at the hotel before breakfast – no check-in until much later that afternoon – we took the Long Island Railway to Penn Station. Nicky quickly befriended two young men from Chicago, who were sitting opposite us. They were as clueless as we were about how to get around, but the man across the aisle, who overheard our conversation, chipped in and matched the subway’s tangle to our plans.

We were on a tight schedule, and a budget, but we had a plan. Our first destination was the iconic Staten Island Ferry, which took us from Manhattan across the Upper Bay, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to Staten Island, and back again, for free.

Then the Metro took us to West 72^nd Street and Central Park’s Strawberry Fields, across the road from The Dakota, where John Lennon was shot. Strawberry Fields was, unsurprisingly, jammed with tourists wielding their look at me sticks like light sabres. For them a memorial park was not a place for quiet reflection. The man ripping it up on his guitar, belting out a cacophonous version of ‘Imagine,’ didn’t give peace a chance.

With two items on Nicky’s list ticked, it was time for mine: Greenwich Village. I don’t know why I wanted to go there, but to me it is synonymous with New York. New Yorkers have a reputation of being unfriendly, but Nicky proved the opposite. She started chatting to a flight attendant at the subway station, who was waiting to go home after a long flight home. He was so tired he hadn’t noticed what the weather was doing outside, was surprised when we told him that it looked like rain. He recommended a small Italian restaurant without a sign outside on Bedford Street. Cotenna was everything that he promised, and more. The Saturday lunchtime gathering was sparse and mostly local. We were served by the Maître D’, a Frenchman who rules his domain from under a pork pie hat with a soupçon of Parisian surliness. (He seemed to be having a bad day, with a number of his staff not having shown up for work.) But his demeanour added to the atmosphere, and beneath his indifferent exterior beat the heart of someone who really cares about food. The meatballs, washed down with an excellent glass of red, were sublime.

It was a late lunch and as the sun began to set on the city that never sleeps, we made our way up Seventh Avenue to the mayhem that is Times Square for the final act. Roadworks had turned the busy intersection into gridlock. Beneath the veneer of discordant lights, competing for attention, a NYC policeman posed with a gaggle of oriental tourists, while nearby a Congolese hawker handed out advertisements to anyone who would take them.

A sheik, by his garb, pontificated for a clutch of cameramen. Then, as night fell the other shows began: groups of women wearing little more than body paint joined the me
lee, touting tourists for tips. We left them to it, retreated to the subway and back to the hotel. We finally got to the room at nine o’clock, knackered. We set the alarm for 2 AM and collapsed into bed.

Meanwhile Hurricane Matthew had veered away from Jamaica and was headed for Haiti.

Sold

fs6b8726 Only when we had accepted our new job and resigned from our old, did we begin to absorb the reality of our decision. Nicky hardly slept for the first two weeks; first from excitement, then from fear. Shortly before we were offered the job in Haiti, she had learned that she had a benign tumour that was growing and needed to come out. Nicky is not good with general anaesthetic. The first time she was wheeled into an operating theatre, she had a look on her face that I’ve only seen on one other occasion: it was the same look I’d seen on my father’s face the last time I saw him. Somehow, he knew he’d never see me again. Nicky’s surgery went well, but she was on light duty for six weeks afterwards.

Mercifully, it took only three weeks to sell the house. During that time, it transformed from a home into a show house, ready at a moment’s notice to welcome a prospective buyer. Living in a house that has nothing out of place, with all the surfaces (including the desk in my study) neat and uncluttered, is not something I want to do again. But Nicky’s attention to detail and Precious (our housekeeper’s) diligence worked. Prospective buyers fell in love with our house and before long we had accepted an offer. Then began the task of sorting through two lifetimes worth of possessions and deciding what not to keep.

I am a hoarder by nature, keeping any little thing that might one day be useful. Getting rid of most of it proved a challenge. Nicky is much more practical about material things. Her standard question became, “Have you used it in the last six months?” If the answer was “No,” the offending item was added to the growing pile of items to be sold, given away or discarded.

fs6b8709 Slowly the house began to empty; the books went first. A house without books is a desolate place; but the sight of empty bookshelves helped a little towards breaking our connection with our home.

Nicky’s car, Florence, was delivered to her new home; mine was sold to a friend. Bank accounts were streamlined, debit orders and subscriptions cancelled, visas obtained, vaccinations administered, boxes packed, Land Rover loads full of stuff moved into storage and currency was ordered. Meanwhile, Nicky was nearly recovered and Precious and I were knackered.

But it was only when the sign outside the house changed from ‘For Sale’ to ‘Sold,’ that the enormity of it all finally hit us. We were living in someone else’s dream house. We told ourselves that it wasn’t the same without the dogs, that we would find another house somewhere in France and make it our own. It was a refrain that we would often repeat, like the chorus of a lament.

In the days before our departure, we had to prepare for, and pass, a flight test on an aircraft that we hadn’t flown much in the previous twelve years, find the time to say goodbye to our friends and organise all the last little things that, no matter how hard one tries, are never completely organised.

fs6b8714 On the last day of the month we closed our suitcases, threw the final orphaned odds and sods into a plastic bag to be stored with understanding friends, said a tearful goodbye to Precious, who was off to her new job, and drove to the airport for the long flight to New York and on to Port-au-Prince.

In all the commotion, it hadn’t passed our attention that something called Matthew was brewing in the Caribbean, but we hadn’t had much time to digest its implication.

For Sale

When Ricky left a message for us to call him. We knew something was up. We took a deep breath and set off for Tasha’s, where we ordered cappuccinos to steady our nerves.

He didn’t disappoint. He had just signed a contract to provide an aircraft for MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. He wanted us to go as the crew because he knew that, as a couple, we were prepared to be away for longer than most pilots. Air tickets between Haiti and South Africa are expensive, so he wanted us to go for five months at a time, with two months off to follow. We countered with four on and two off. Ricky agreed. He wanted us to leave almost immediately, but we had to give three months notice to Comair, so we settled for a start date of the 1^st October.

Bubbling with excitement we headed for the iStore to look at upgrading our computers for the new job. I’m not prone to verbosity, preferring to keep my counsel most of the time. Nicky is normally the extrovert, splashing her 7,000 words about generously and even using some of mine. But suddenly I felt the need to use my daily allocation of 2,000 words all at once. The poor salesman probably didn’t want to know anything about us and I’m sure he didn’t care. But when I let him have the full 2,000 words about our new job in Haiti, how excited we were, and what a huge adventure it would be, he took it on the chin, played along and shook up a cocktail of enthrallment, even though we left empty handed.

A few days later we went in to work to hand in our resignations. They knew why we were there – we hadn’t kept our intentions secret. Between us, Nicky and I had been with the company for almost twenty years and it was not without the occasional lip wobble that we handed in our notice to the Chief Pilot and fielded questions from the curious corridor lurkers.

They say the most stressful things in life are losing a family member, changing jobs, moving house and getting a divorce. We’d just lost Max, resigned from our jobs and were about to put the house on the market. We clung to the hope that the stress from the first three wouldn’t lead to the stress of the fourth.

The Blizzard

About a week after Max died, we escaped to the Lowveld, where we stayed at Ashbourne Lodge, owned by Rob and Dawne Topham. Rob is a gregarious guy and reminded us both of Carlo, our larger-than-life ex-boss. When we told Rob of our desire to jump off the hamster wheel, he gave us an allegory that has stayed with us.

‘Most people,’ he said, ‘spend their lives sitting in front of a warm fire with a glass of red wine. They are comfortable, secure and content, unaware of the blizzard outside. Every now and then one of them gets up from the fire and opens the door. Some come straight back. But those that do venture out, when they return frostbitten and draggled, have the most incredible stories to tell.

It’s tough,’ he continued, ‘to get up, pull on warm clothing and step away from the security and comfort of the fire. It might end up in failure, but it’s worth the risk.’

And so when Ricky called, we knew that we had to step out into our blizzard. When I emailed Rob to tell him, he replied:

‘Fantastic. Collars upturned, balaclavas on, huskies tethered….then get ready for the first person to say, “Hell, you guys are so lucky!” Well done. Now…UN Peacekeeping! Nicky…long skirt, leather sandals, burn your bra, and don’t wash your hair until Michaelmas. Brady….bell bottom denims and a ‘Ban the Bomb’ pendant! Please send a photo when you have your kit appropriately assembled.’

I’ll post the photo when I find a pair of bellbottoms!