Cape Town, South Africa 1 - 8 March 08

Earthrounders Meeting

1 March 2008. Stage 2 of our trip around Africa is about to begin. We flew by airline from the European winter back to sunny Cape Town in good time for the Earthrounders meeting which officially began on 4 March.
We moved back into our Somerset West home, generously lent to us by our friends Fizzy and Bob. Our Swiss aviator friend Claude Reymond (whom we had met up with three times on our South American trip in 2005/6, in Mexico, Santiago and Montreal) arrived in Cape Town before us, and we joined him for several pre-Earthrounder meeting meals, starting with Henry's Restaurant in Somerset West.

2 March 2008. While Angela worked on trip preparations such as drafting the flight clearance request to the civil aviation authorities in Madagascar, Flemming retrieved Honey Mooney from the hangar at Stellenbosch Flying Club and took Claude Reymond and Angela's cousin Laurel and her husband Eduard for a flight over Cape Peninsula. Later we visited Laurel and Eduard’s new house that they are renovating in Stellenbosch and dined with them at Gino’s.

3 March 2008. We lunched with Claude Reymond at Avontuur winery in Stellenbosch and then visited the town and its museums. We had drinks at the Hettlich's house with those of the Earthrounders who had already arrived, and met Dorise’s charming daughters Claudia and Bianca for the first time. Frank and Dorise Hettlich had volunteered to organize the 2008 Earthrounders meeting back in 2006 but Frank perished tragically in February last year when his Seneca had engine failure over the South Atlantic Ocean and he went down about 10 minutes from the airport on the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha. Dorise and her daughters decided to go ahead with organizing the Cape Town meeting in Frank’s honour, with the help of Claudia’s husband Robin. The Helderberg Mountain behind the Hettlichs’ house made a beautiful setting for the first of the Earthrounder get-togethers. Later we all had dinner at the Erinvale Hotel pub.

4 March 2008. Today, after several abortive attempts to make a phone call to Mozambique, we were finally successful in getting through and Angela got the clearance number from the Mozambique civil aviation authorities over the phone. As for Mauritius, we had been warned by the Aéroclub in Réunion that the authorities there do not allow single engine planes to fly there from Réunion for safety reasons. This took us by surprise, considering the flight time is only just over an hour and we have completed several oceanic crossings of 7 to 14 hours. Flemming checked the AIP for Mauritius and it states that while single engine VFR is prohibited, it seems that for single engine IFR we only need to notify the authorities, not ask for permission to fly there, so that is how we worded our letter to them. This evening we had the first official dinner with the Earthrounders at Erinvale Estate Club House. It was great to see all our friends again and meet some that were new to us, such as Colin Bodill who had some hair-raising experiences in the Antarctic during his first attempt round the world via the poles in a helicopter.