I put on my comm set and tried the radio. Nothing. Hardly surprising really since I was down in wet bush and trees. I had on these snowboarding pants, $45 last Christmas courtesy of the Old Navy store in the Puente Hills Mall, LA. It has an amazing set of pockets. I reached into one and brought out my mobile phone, lousy signal but it was clear after a few tries that I was the only one who had one switched on or had remembered to bring it along. I was briefly annoyed at this. The whole country seems to operate on mobile phones and you cannot escape from them.  But what happens when you really, really need to speak to someone?

        

  I reached over and unscrewed my GPS unit. "Itu mobilfon", it was whispered about. I recorded where I was and filed it as "crash" and put it into a pocket. I kept putting my headphones on trying various frequencies searching for any activity that might relate to the flight. I felt like a spaceman landed amongst Martians.  The group wanted to move the trike to the road but I was not sure in the circumstances how to go about breaking it down safely and needed expert advice. I said we would stand pat and wait for friends. We were all dripping wet as the rain thrashed the trees.

    The GPS is a great boon to navigation but I have questions about relying on it entirely.  There is a solid place for all the old navigation disciplines. When I later had a chance to look at my GPS log, I found that the track had me recorded as having gone west and then east before landing, i.e. west over the trees before going back to land on the eastern edge of the treeline.  My actual track in fact was never like this.  Where I landed was the furthest west I ever got.  Similarly, when Mick tried to confirm his soccer pitch landing two weeks later, i.e. at the exact place as before, his GPS had him placed over a mile further south.  I have no explanations at this point.

    I asked one villager who seemed to know about the other flyers to get help. He took my helmet and raced off on a motorbike.  He showed up at the soccer pitch and showed my helmet (and its Saltire Cross of Scotland) to Mick who recognized that it was mine.        

    I needed another phone number and I grabbed my bags and headed for the right wing, which was a ready made lean-to. As I rounded the tree I found that a dozen or so people were sheltering there and seemed unusually dumb when I gestured that I wanted to get under the wing. They made way good naturedly but slowly and with great reluctance. I reached into my briefcase looking for the Palm Pilot PDA Melinda gave me for Christmas. I swear that the village knew instantly as much as I did about my laundry, money and other contents of the briefcase. Their eyes, I am sure, were in my fingers. I was really worried about the money because any help would eventually be dependent on how much money they could conceive a foreigner having on him.

    I got out my Palm Pilot and the words "Itu mobilfon", "satellite" went around the group. How many mobile phones was I supposed to have? The pockets in my amazing pants were filling up with small bits of high technology.

    I took a few photographs and tried to do an inventory of what I had in way of an aircraft. Little villager fingers were everywhere and I got a bit loud about staying away. My photographic efforts were somewhat frustrated as every time I tried to frame a shot it would fill with faces, hands, hair as almost everyone about tried to get themselves into the picture. They genuinely believed, I think, that I wanted to photograph them and seemed puzzled that I was being so difficult about things. My pictures, I think, will show an honest compromise between my efforts to memorialize a good and faithful steed and the need to record the friendly and all too often dirty-faced humanity about me.

    Dragan arrived with a story that he had landed nose first into wet padi. Momentarily, he had found himself under water and, ironically, seriously in danger of drowning (guess who forgot to buckle up at Budiarto). He had damaged his wing but everything was OK and local villagers had carried his wing and airframe to a nearby village. No word of Mike.