Villagers Assist
We took off the wing and righted the airframe. A crowd of villagers carried these things aloft and we set out across the padi. I found a bund and figured I might get out of this with dry feet. I took a few pictures and felt like one of those legendary Bwanas in colonial Africa - a long crocodile of people carrying his stuff and the White Hunter strolling along in the middle somewhere. Or, perhaps a better image, something out of one of the snakes and lizards cable channels, a column of ants carrying a jungle leaf back to the nest.
At this point, I came across a break in the bund where the farmer had tried to equalize the water between the padi. I stopped for a second, people prodded me from behind and it was quite clear, although I would never have had the nerve to ask, that I was never going to be carried across the gap. It was here that I discovered that had I landed in the padi that it would have consisted of 6 inches of water and about 12 inches of soft, gluey, grey mud. There was a muddy barely useable track parallel to the power lines and we followed this to a kampung to the south about 300 yards away. We were only a couple of hundred yards from the main road. At the village we briefly regrouped and the crocodile of villagers set off again, the wing in front, me in the middle and the trike plus driver being pushed along at the back.
My friend John McBeth lived nearby and I rang him. Or possibly he rang me. I cannot remember, I know I tried his number. We arrived at the road to find a huge crowd, a traffic jam and my wing on the side of the road. McBeth turned up and we told our stories. John and Yuli had been told at the resort that the trikes had had a bit of trouble. They had seen the wing as they had passed and had wondered if it was anything to do with me. It was good to see them and their presence lifted my spirits.
I spent most of the day with Dragan, Agoeng and the rest trying to sort out where we might store our trikes and how they might be secured. Luckily, Reza, the chief of the ground crew, was about to help negotiate with the local community. Mike turned up sometime after noon. He had an adventure. Since he had been some way back, he had a few moments to look around before the wind got him. At one point he turned and ran before it chalking up a ground speed of 116 mph before he brought the trike about and brought it down at probably one mile an hour ground speed. His rear wheels bit into the padi mud and brought the front wheel down. The next sequence, you would expect, would be for the trike to try and go tail over nose but the mud would not release the rear wheels and he came to a dead stop in nothing flat. Nothing wrong with pilot or the aircraft.
Like the rest of us, the locals immediately surrounded him. He made friends and got some help taking the wing off the trike. Then a column of villagers moved everything to a river about a mile away. Mike got hold of a passing barge and loaded the trike on board. There was a ticklish moment as the rest of the village tried to get on board too. He went down river until he came to a village near a track. He introduced himself to the village head and organized a truck to meet him on the main road. The only trouble he had was that the enthusiastic but inept loading onto a truck scratched his shiny rear mudguards.
Agoeng, my flying guru, ten times national hang gliding champion and a master pilot, made a perfect landing at the soccer pitch by the beach. He was keen to clear the area so another trike could land and accelerated off to the side and his front wheel promptly fell in a hole and the wheel assembly broke. Otherwise, all was fine at the soccer pitch.