It’s 15 August 2009 at 5:30 and the alarm has just gone off. I fall asleep immediately again and forget it went off. I wake up briefly when Bernadette gets out of the tent to go shower. I think I fall asleep for another 10 minutes before waking up again and deciding I’ll get up. We need to leave the camp site at 7:00. The previous night had been very cold, and I can see the ice on the tents and the vehicles as I go to also shower. I get into the cubicle and get ready to shower, put on the water and as I get in it is ice cold. I need to make a decision, will I get out and go and see what is going on, or brave the cold and just get finished. I decide to brave the cold. Just before I start going into hypothermia I finish and get my clothes on as quickly as possible. The upside of having my body at freezing point is that when I walk outside into the cold air, the air actually feels warm on my skin. We get our final instructions and then we’re off to setup a rescue site. Bernadette and I are on our own while the other 2 teams head off to another section to setup a crash site there.
Morning
We are given GPS coordinates of where to get onto a farm, as well as a point of where we must setup the crash site. Easy I think.
Farm entrance
Once we get onto the farm I head off into the direction the GPS point is, and try and see which roads are leading towards it. In the briefing we were told the farm owner knows about us and if there are not roads to get to the point, we can make our own roads. This is something we don’t normally do. It’s fine for 1 or 2 people to make use of a road you create yourself, but if there are more people following you in the future it leads to erosion. So we are careful to only do this when there is no other choice. And at this stage, we didn’t have another choice so I carefully started driving up the mountain, avoiding huge rocks.
Where is the road?
At this point we notice a farm bakkie coming towards us, so I thought I’ll just go and greet him. When I get to him, it’s the farm foreman, and he doesn’t know anything about us being there! I explain to him what we’re doing and told him I was under the impression it had been organised with the owner of the farm that we would be using their farm. After putting him at ease that we weren’t there to poach, he actually helped me by explaining the best possible way to get on top of the mountain. He even drove with us to the gate that leads to a road that actually goes up the mountain. I am glad he showed up, because the route he took as too made more sense and was a lot more safer.
As he turns around he does warn me that due to the snow they’ve had the last couple of weeks the roads are pretty bad and that they struggled getting the tractor up the roads during the week. I reassure him that we’ll be safe and only go as far as we feel safe to go.
Time was ticking on and we’d still have to do a bit of driving before even getting close to where we were supposed to be. The first part of the drive is fine, we even spot Springbuck and Zebras.
The Farm
Half way up the first little hill we have to get over the road is badly washed away and there is a huge boulder that had come loose from the cliff next to the route and landed in the middle of the road. No amount of road building would help.
This is a nice road!
A minor obstacle
Ok, now what?
We decide to try and see if we can get to the top of the hill using another route that we would need to lay out ourselves. It took me about 20 minutes walking up and down and checking out different routes until I saw a way to get up there. At least if we didn’t make it up, the worst that would happen is that I would need to reverse, failing which I can use the winch to get myself out of there. So with Bernadette guiding and taking photos I started going up the hill. I got stuck in a hole halfway up, and reversed a bit. I got out to check and the hole was quite big. After filling it with rocks I tried again and made it up. Amazingly I didn’t knock anything on the bakkie. The only part that was left now to get up this little hill was a very rocky uphill. With a bit of momentum I made it up. Bernadette walked up the path and got into the bakkie.
New road
Colt doing me proud
Safely up
Long way to go
Here we were on a plateau and drove leisurely admiring the beauty around us. I kept on forgetting our time was running out and we’re actually here to work. I turned off from the road and headed up, in a direct route, towards the mountain’s top. I spotted a nice cliff that I thought would make the perfect crash landing site. We got there, parked and got out of the vehicle. We were still 3.5km away from the point they wanted us to setup, but I decided we’ll just go as close we can. I wasn’t willing to risk our lives or my vehicle’s well being. The place we had stopped was very steep, and as I looked out into the distance I spotted a road leading up further into the mountain and looked to be closer to our destination. We got back into the car, and because it was so steep we couldn’t really turn. I had to reverse down for about 900m while trying to avoid huge rocks and little cliffs all the way down. When it was safe, I turned the vehicle and headed up the road we saw. It was looking good, we were now 2.9km away from the intended point. I figured we had another 30 minutes before we would need to be ready for the first plane to come.
About 400m further we reached another plateau, but this had even bigger and more rocks. Careful, but fast, driving in zigzags took us to about 2.4km away from the point. I decided that we would stop there and get setup. We had run out of time.
Is it a plane?
Our brief was to setup our vehicle to look like a plane that had crashed. We used a couple of banners to create the vision of a plane that was on the ground. Our quick breakfast was barely over when we heard the first plane come over. The task of the planes were to fly in a certain pattern until they spot us. They would then radio in the helicopter and guide them to us by radio only. For the first exercise the helicopter would land, deploy 3 medics, and “rescue” us.
We had already discussed that Bernadette would be lifted into the helicopter in the stretcher and I would go via the strop.
After spotting the plane, and seeing that it spotted us, we waited to see which side the helicopter would come from. A few minutes had passed when we suddenly heard this heavy droning sound coming from just the other side of a small valley. Within seconds the helicopter came over our heads, turned and headed back to us. It looked like a scene out of a movie. With expert precision the helicopter touched down, and watching the hand signals between the occupants the medics deployed. It was really great to see the coordination between the pilot, winch operator and the 3 medics. The 3 medics came to greet us and explained again what is going to happen. While they were strapping Bernadette into the stretcher I went to grab the camera to take a few shots. With the helicopter making a lot of noise in the background, you had to listen carefully to whatever instructions were to follow. They signaled to the pilot that they were ready and he lifted off again and came to hover over us. The winch cable was let down, hooked into the stretcher, and Bernadette was hoisted into the air and into the helicopter. Once she was in, the let down the strop and together with one of the medics I was hoisted into the helicopter. It wasn’t high up, but even if it was higher, the noise of the helicopter was so loud in your head that even people with a fear of heights will be too confused to worry about the height. Once in the helicopter I saw Bernadette sitting there a bit nervously 
The helicopter then lowered back down again, and once we touched ground the winch operator signaled for us to depart. We were told in the briefing to depart in such a way that we kept in the sight of the pilot, and keep our heads low. Once we were clear, we turned around and waved as the helicopter left us again.
Bernadette in the stretcher
Bernadette
There she goes
Almost in
And then there was silence…… a lot of it. Such a contrast between the excitement we had just experienced.
It would be another hour before another plane was scheduled to come and “spot” us. This time though the helicopter would just come over us and head back again. We relaxed around the vehicle and I caught a few z’s while Bernadette read her magazines. It was awesome, here we were, in the middle of a mountain with more mountains around us, on the edge of a cliff with no one to bother us. In complete silence we enjoyed it there.
Paradise
A while later we spotted the other plane, and when it circled us, we realised he had spotted us before he went off again. When the third plane came later we wondered if this guy did spot us or not. The previous planes would circle us once they had seen us, but this guy just carried on flying his patterns. A few minutes later we heard the helicopter come over again. He circled us and then hover about 100m away from us for quite some time before he threw something out the helicopter. At first we were a bit confused until we saw the yellow smoke whirling away from the thing he had just dropped. It was obviously a marker he had dropped, because seconds later, the plane we thought had not seen us came towards us and circled. This would also be the last plane that would spot us for the rest of the day.
Smoke cannister
Not knowing exactly when we must head back to the camp site, Bernadette and I decided that we would leave no later than 16:00. We still needed to get down the mountain, and didn’t want to do it in the dark. Just after 16:00 we left. I had Bernadette drive while I packed the road for us to avoid the rocks. I didn’t want to damage the vehicle now. It took us 30 minutes to do 500m. It was great, we didn’t hit anything and Bernadette drove like an expert while I was carrying rocks around.
The next hectic part would be the part we had to figure out our own road earlier in the morning. When we got there I switched off the vehicle and we walked down. I decided that going on there was not an option, too many drop offs that would hurt the vehicle. Also, at the angle, the weight from the whole vehicle would be on the nose which makes it closer to the ground. I spent another few minutes walking up and down trying to see how we would get down. Further down the road there was another option. It was a lot more steep and I needed to get over the side bank before even getting onto it. I decided that was my only option. I moved a few rocks and told Bernadette to take her place to guide me down. As I got over the bank I felt the vehicle slipping as I wanted to move forward. I knew there were big rocks in the path it was trying to take me so I stopped and got out of the vehicle. It would be too dangerous to try and fight the slide, so I decided to just go with it. I got the rocks out of the way so that I don’t end up knocking the vehicle on the way down. With Bernadette at a safe distance I got the vehicle into gear, turned the steering wheel into the slide and just drove it. It ended up sliding a bit more, but with a bit more steering it came straight and I drove it all the way down. Bernadette came down and we were now on a sturdy ground. Slowly we drove through the rest of the farm as we spotted a number of Kudus and a variety of other buck. It had taken us an hour to drive about 2km down the mountain.
Around 18:30 we pulled into the camp and found the other 4×4 teams there. It didn’t sound like they had as much action as we did, but everyone was glad to have everyone bad safely. We had the debriefing at 19:30, but Bernadette and I decided to rather get our own little fire going because we were very hungry and tired. After dinner we settled into our tent for another night of cold sleep.
