Fresh Caiman

Cafe De Wharf, Port-Gentile; a quaint little hovel nestled into the trees.  Located on a hectic corner where locals laden with all manner of luggage arrive and depart on ferries destined for villages up and down the Western Coast of Africa, struggling with their unwieldy bags amongst hawkers selling carvings and colourful African shirts, and piles of bootleg CDs and DVDs.  I was drawn to the menu's offerings of fresh gazelle and antelope, but unfortunately the only local fare they actually had on hand was caiman, a small alligatorid crocodilian common in these parts.  I found the taste rather unappetizing, like fish gone foul, but my guts were fine the next morning so I gather rotten fish is how caiman is supposed to taste.  I won't order it again.  The wild boar is far better!





Overall Port-Gentile is a lovely place and everyone likes it here, with shops selling any manner of brand name product, good restaurants serving scrumptious meals with French flare, friendly people, and quite noticeably when compared to East Africa, very clean.  I still have a lizard running around in my apartment, much like in Tanzania, so there's little doubt which continent I'm on.

But we are quite busy.  I have to reacquaint myself with the Super Puma, as I have a few thousand hours under my belt on the large French helicopters, but I haven't sat in one in nearly four years.  The L2 variant has enough differences and peculiarities that I spend most of my little free time with my nose in the manuals.  In addition, this is a new base and we are still unpacking and setting up the operation, and struggling with the daunting task of filing a flight plan, everyday encountering additional requests for yet more paperwork.  The procedure is like nothing I have ever seen, and you must see at least five people, often not where you would expect to find them, in a very specific order, to get everything in place, for each and every leg, so the SAR standby crew keeps themselves quite busy just filing flight plans for the following day's flying.  But at least I'm flying again!  Yesterday was an IFR trip in IMC up to Libreville, then back down to Port Gentile, cancelled and pushed back so many times that I was ready to write the trip off, but finally, happily, I was pulling pitch in an old friend and taking to the skies of Africa once again.......