Yes. A love affair was indeed about to blossom.
You see I was with my girlfriend , Heidi, a luciously endowed Germanically blonde hostie. We lazed on the beach at Surfers Paradise , and on a surfboard, I dazzled nobody .. I was outdone by the expert youths of the day. I had a huge wad. Of cash that is.
At night, I showed her no mercy.
We walked into the well lit hangar right by the paint shop. It was love at first sight.
There she sat ... the buxom little Aztec ... prop spinners protruding slightly upwards ..and forward like ... well you know ...
The masking tape was being removed and the new stripes were crisp and oil free for the short term. Our company name, CHIMBU TRADERS LTD was in small letters above the door.
I had bought her over the phone... From her madam. She was an old Bush Pilot Airways plane and had been ridden hard and put away wet.
But I wiped her ... lots. I wiped the oozing lubricants from her skin ... and from the cracks....
But she had some cellulite .. she wasn't perfect ... hail dimples ...
She had been gone over by a good bush engineer as I had requested.
I paid the money . She was now my old whore in a new dress.
We flew North from Sydney along the beaches of New South Wales and into Queensland , my home state.
It was a threesome ..VH-BPW , Heidi ...and me. The light bumpy air made her tits jiggle so.
Up along the Barrier Reefs sparkling like fire opals and emerelds .. over the hundreds of miles of cattle country .. the endless sugar cane fields and still North along the jungle draped coast... and across the straight between Thursday Island and Daru , on the Southern Coast of Papua New Guinea.
Now, the rugged and wild beauty did offer solace .... I had two throaty Lycomings taking me back to a country that quickened the pulse , throbbing to the danger.
March 1972
I cruised high above the mouth of the Fly River and above Kikori too. I could see North , maybe a hundred miles or so, to the awesome spine of this rugged , but luscious country. I could just see the white speck of the Baimuru Hotel , conjouring up scenes in my mind , like a Bogart movie ... Casablanca .. African Queen ... the Crab and Mutt.
Behind me , in Australia was a career that I had left at the altar. Uniforms, rules, checklists, overnights in the same place for the thirtieth time this year...how many times would I have to sit in the right seat .. Brisbane-Sydney-Melbourne..... Melbourne- Sydney - Brisbane ... and so on .. and so on..
In the right seat .. looking left to a bored guy I didn't really like .. and then twenty years later ... left seat looking right to a boring guy I didn't really like....
I didn't want to look ahead twenty years as I had done in the Army. As a young well schooled and skilled Lieutenant, I walked into the Officers mess at lunch time. There at the bar were grumpy old Majors hunched over their drinks at the bar all sharing bulbous scotch soaked red noses .. expressionless ... they didn't like we youngin's...
Not for me ...
I had to satisfy the hunger in my soul.
The smooth , throbbing Lycomings took me to the heart and very soul of this mysterious land ... The Land Where They Turned Back Time.
Behind my left wing now, was Kikori . I had been there with Maurie Young , a mercenary Canadian art dealer and procurer for a musuem in New York or anybody else ... whoever had the dough.
Instead of me waiting in the villiage for his canoe flotilla to return bearing heaps of artifacts , he invited me along in the long thin hollowed log canoe to which was attatched a long shafted Seagull outboard.
These canoes only had a slit in which to put your feet , one behind the other .. they rolled easilly and required balance .
Up river we sped .. wakeless .. slicing through the muddy brown Kikori river .. up to a villiage rumoured to have an Agiba , a skull rack... painted and decorated skulls on a series of posts in ascending order, depending on the importance of these slain enemies the bodies of whom would have been eaten. Maurie and I were hunkered down for balance and I got an urge to stand up like our helmsmen. I wobbled drunkenly to my feet and stood at last, the stale dank air against my sweating face.
We came around a bend in the river .....
I gasped at the sight...