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The first time I took to the skies in a microlight was while covering an adventure race in Maputaland, a wilderness area situated within the far northern reaches of Kwazulu-Natal. It was a windless day when one of the local farmers offered to grant me a bird’s eye view of the event, packing me into his crop-spraying microlight to soar high above an impenetrable swathe of bush veldt bristling with fever trees and wait-a-bit thorns. After the initial rush of take-off, I settled back to enjoy gliding along on powerful thermals, while below us competitors were locked into a bundu-bashing battle with inhospitable terrain. Occasionally Wesley would swoop into a steep dive to chase our ground shadow, skimming a few metres above herds of impala and a few ungainly giraffe scattering across the lilliputian landscape below. I revelled in this unique flying experience - the wind in my hair, the late afternoon sun on my face and a near-consummate freedom to follow in the wing beats of birds up on high. Unlike a helicopter or the majority of fixed-wing flying machines, a microlight enables you to genuinely become one with the full flying experience. We did have one short moment of panic though, ducking and diving to avoid a flock of surprised vultures invading our air space, but on the whole the flight felt as safe as driving along the N1. None of my subsequent flips gave me any reason to think of microlighting as anything but a laid back and leisurely trip into Blue Sky country; that is, until I hooked up with Trygve Skorge. I approached his company, Aquila Safaris, in order to arrange a photography flip along the West Coast and was certainly not anticipating a mind-blowing morning of aerial acrobatics. In between busy schedules and shitty weather, it had taken us nearly two months to eventually settle on a suitable date (and only after numerous 04h30 phone calls to check on fickle wind conditions out on the West Coast). So when D-day eventually arrives with less than a week to go to before the delivery deadline for the said article, I find myself eyeing the morning breeze with a certain amount of anxiety. But a lowly photojournalist doth hold no sway over the weather gods and I have but little choice to set off on my dawn trek to meet Trygve at a small airstrip a few kilometres inland from Melkbos. | 
