A short story... "Flying High"

After finding the right departure gate on StMaarten airfield (a small miracle in itself) we were slowly walked across the hot landingstrip to our chariot of the skies!
It was ... smaller than we expected...
After we had all squeezed into the TINY twin engine propellor plane together with just 4 other pasengers
(Two very relaxed dreadlocked natives and a couple of apprehensive looking tourists),
we strapped into the small folding chairs and happily awaited our fate
In the skies!

It took a while for this wonderfull piece of aviational technology to take off because the crew had to fix some control instruments and actually replace a fuel gage on the spot (I was right behind the pilot's open cockpit looking at it... interesting!)... after the neccessary lastminute screwdriver and wrench work we were ready for take-off!... no worries!

We soared into the blue cloudscudded sky and proceeded to bop and skid around through the air like a bouncy fourwheel-drive on a mountainous offroad dirt track.
It was a lovely and unique  (though slightly loud) experience , affording us many close-up birdseye views of waves and islands followed by close up views of absolutely nothing as yet another cloudbank obscured everything and the turbulence did it's "bucking bronco on amphetamines" impressions again.
The pilot seemed unperturbed and even found the time to relax and play around with his smartphone , sharing pics of his garden and family with the copilot while "driving"...

Following an interesting avian hour anda half We landed in "Canefield airport" a tiny field on the edge of the water with a shortlooking bit of asfalt stuck on top and a shack with uniformed natives on one end.

After we had thanked the gods of old for delivering us safely onto terra-firma again and after we had recovered from the initial panic of realising that our luggage had not been put on our ("tiny, only six passengers,how the hell can you get that wrong")plane , there followed some amazing examples of Carribean uniformed bureaucracy  (the details of which I will spare you here) 

We were picked up by our wonderfull grandly dreadlocked nature guide David (who later turned out to be an exellent tracker aswell as he actually located and retrieved our cases for us at the airport on the other side of the island where it was sent by mistake...ahem...)

We rode with David in a bouncy fourwheel drive over dirtroads 
(Which bopped and skidded around like a carribean charter plane) to our first destination , a cabin in the lower rainforest...
(And let me reassure you it's quite different to our own cabin in the woods back home!)

Now we are here chilling...
We walk the beautifull Rainforested hills, we sleep, we read, we eat fresh fruit and other local produce
(What can be better than an island full of bananas, mangoes, pineappels, coconuts and suchlike?)

Nearly everybody local we met sofar sounds or looks like a reggea musician and we're starting to acclimatise...

There is no wifi in our cabin, but i can connect very closeby , I felt like writing a bit (makes a change from only reading) so here is a story-blog...just to keep you updated on Stenny's Carribean adventure!

VERY Greenthingz!
Stenny