Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts

10 Aug 2015

The Gift of Flight - Part 4 - I learned to fly


The Gift of Flight  - Part 4 - The I learned to fly – by P.K.Odendaal – August 2015.

Last night I came back from a flight to Zimbabwe where we were for the annual church conference of our congregation there, having had to fly the President of the Mission to attend it. It is the last leg of our journey and I take off from Polokwane, where we went through immigration and customs and where we refuelled. It has just become dark and the lights of the city are so beautiful when I climb out after take-off and turn left onto my course for Witbank where I live. It has been some time since my last night flight and I have to concentrate to fly on instruments, because the night and country is quite dark as we leave the ambits of the city.

20 Oct 2013

Travel is so broadening ... or The Pilgrims Digress


Travel is so broadening ... or The Pilgrims Digress - by P.K.Odendaal - September 2013. 

By this time you have gotten used to my mind wandering in totally different trajectories than my body and you have gotten used to look deeper at things than what you can see. The occasion is my visit to South Africa. I prepare my body for this arduous journey of 25 hours - drastically down from the 43 hours it took me in 2002 - from Canada to South Africa.
Well, the logistics of such an itinerary is quite easy to understand but what we do not see is quite complex and hidden from the eye.

25 May 2013

The Gift of Flight - Part 3 - Flying the Husky to Victoria

The Gift of Flight - Part 3 - Flying the Husky to Victoria - by P.K.Odendaal - May 2013.

I have obtained permanent residence in Canada this year, and now live in Edmonton. One of the logistical issues was to ship my Husky aircraft to Canada - a few simple words, but a very daunting task, in hindsight. I shipped the Husky in February and was told that it would arrive ten weeks later in San Francisco, from where I would fly it to Canada - a very daunting task, but very simple in hindsight.

18 Sept 2012

One day in Naples

Copy this link into your browser (this link works now, sorry, Google changed the way pictures are viewed):

https://photos.app.goo.gl/yr7scHJriuGYJ8Yq9






6 Jun 2012

Travel blog 2012-02 Death in Venice

Travel Blog 2012-02 - Death in Venice - by P.K.Odendaal - 5 June 2012

It is all over now ... and we knew all along the end it was in sight, for quite some time. But, even so, when it came, it was unexpectedly and most unwelcome and almost heartbreaking.
Yes, we have left our cruise ship today after twelve magnificent days at sea and in many different ports, and bade her farewell, having made some new acquaintances along the way. But what is more serious is that the highlight of our trip, or so we thought, turned out to be such a disappointment. Everybody knows Venice is beautiful and breathtaking, and on this fourth visit of us, I intended to make the visit even more spectacular by visiting all the beautiful cathedrals and churches of the city - a favourite pastime of mine.

29 May 2012

Travel blog 2012-01 Rome is burning


Travel blog 2012 - Rome is burning - by P.K.Odendaal - 28 May 2012.

So it is back to my travel blogs as it is summer in the Northern Hemisphere again, and as always, my mind will take priority on this trip, whilst my body follows the fixed itinerary.
And the location of my body is on board ms Nieu Amsterdam, a drifting island somewhere in the Mediterranean. I find the state form of this island kingdom quite exotic. It is not capitalist, although I can see some strains of capitalism here and there. It is also not communistic, and any sign of socialism has been hidden carefully. I do not know whether this is on purpose. We have a dictator in charge of everything, and he does not care whether I have a say or not - he just won't listen to me or any popular vote on board - in fact here we have no voting rights at all. we call him the Captain, and a real dictator he is at that, but he sees to it that he keeps his word and gets us to the right destination on time, every time. And, come to think of it, he looks really well after us, and has told us that he only has our interests at heart and none of his own ... now that is an excellent good dictator .. you can take my word for it. I wish the whole world was filled with their kind. The food and lodging is better than any country I know of, and we are really free to do what we like ... I mean within bounds. Jumping overboard is not allowed and neither is staging boycotts or strikes.

9 Sept 2011

My travel blog 2011-2

Travelblog 2011-2
Humanism is for the birds - by P.K.Odendaal - 28 July 2011.
Continuing my travelogue in Canada and the USA - July 2011. See Travelblog 2011-1 for first part.
I slept over at Alpena in Michigan - a town on the western shore of Lake Huron. At one of the many ports along this shore I noticed some black objects in the water forming a row. A person standing on the shore told me that it was buoys holding up the fishing nets, so I told him that they would never get away with that in South Africa. Lake Huron is so wide here that you cannot see the other shore - it looks like a sea and has an international boundary running in the middle of this sea. One can easily take a motorboat and travel from somewhere on the shore of Michigan to somewhere on the shore of Ontario. As the customs officials will not like this, I wonder how they are going to stop it other than getting some buoys to float them at the point where the imaginary boundary cuts through the water. I bet they will not have much time or inclination to search all my bags as they did at Port Huron - hanging in the water like that.

My travel blog 2011-3

My travel blog  2011-3 - by P.K.Odendaal 1 Augusust 2011
... about InHumanity and .... InArt - or - I've got a little list.
I am presently in Ottawa (pronounced awddewha in Canadian - a language distantly related to English). But more of the travel side a bit later. I first need to come clean from my previous blog.
When writing the last part of my previous blog, I got so upset about the Inhumanity of us humans, that I stopped it short in order to recover my pose ... and to recover my normal aloofness. In fact I have decided to go to the other extreme and recomposed myself into a lighter mood to address Inhumanity. This is a normal reaction when one feels that one becomes emotionally involved ... a very bad omen ... so one throws a smokescreen and addresses the opposite  notion.