Pluggin away.....

Night decks, SAR hoisting and line flights, VIP flights hanging around on the rig all day, the big wigs asking when we need to be wheels up to make their flights back to Europe, then totally disregarding the answer, blaming us for having to spend another night in Africa, wee hours Muslim call to prayer from loud speakers mounted twenty yards from my window, mountain biking, snorkelling and seaside BBQs watching the bedazzling crimson lightshow as the African sun creeps below the horizon.  I'm a quarter of the way through yet another forty-two day tour, plugging away.  My shoulder injury from my first week's mountain bike crash is still keeping me up at night, as I can't seem to avoid rolling over onto it as I drift off into never never land.  I somehow managed to take another spill a few weeks later and do pretty much the same to my other shoulder.   It's an injury I've never encountered in a lifetime of off-road biking and now twice in one tour?   Thinking hard about unloading this bike locally, as the devil seems to taken hold of her. I'm hurting and feeling old.  We're just back in from a perfect low tide snorkel on the Msemo reef, with the usual cast of characters in pretty much the same spot tour after tour after tour.  I especially enjoying swimming through the tightly packed schools of silver iridescent fish resembling a single entity as they fight for the centre of their mass, watching them shape shift and gracefully take form around my movement.  Too cool.

There's been a few night training sorties, a couple OPCs, and I'm proud to have upgraded yet another SAR Captain, as well as certify another TRI, so the tour has been very productive.  The manager eventually returned and was handed back "the Bat Phone", forever ringing and beeping with incoming emails that require an immediate response, decision, feedback, before the whole enchilada comes crashing down.  It's a hot potato that every manager can't wait to hand off to their back to back after six weeks attending to the damn thing's beckon call.  I hope I don't have to carry it again any time soon.  Work doesn't get many down, as we all love flying, but the situation, the being away from home, striving to kill time, personality conflicts and dramas, the conditions and cultural adaptations, does weigh one down, and you need to slap yourself at times, to remind yourself just how good you've got it.  The steady stream of over laden bikes, relics from the fifties in various states of disrepair, with bags of coal precariously balanced over the rear tire, stream in from  the forest, riding into town over the rough roads, precariously avoiding the dilapidated trucks, weaving Chinese motorcycles, kids, cattle and goats, then cruise amongst the mud huts ringing their bells, much like an ice cream truck, to sell their wares a bag at a time for a pittance, so local women can heat their pots and pans to cook for their families, before riding back up into the hills for another load.  We ain't got it so bad.