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There was another passenger to come, the brother- in-law of a company bigwig, but when he hadn’t arrived by 9pm, Captain Insh’allah started the four old turbojets and called for taxi clearance. I stole the ground engineer’s seat in the cockpit and we creaked and lumbered into the Sussex air.After a few minutes, I went back into the workmen’s hut. “The nose-wheel won’t come up,” I said, “and we’re 20 tons over landing weight, so they’re dumping fuel and then we’re going back to Gatwick.” “Nice try,” said Baxter, “but I’m not falling for that one.”He finally fell for it when we came blasting over the runway threshold, unnervingly fast, unnervingly heavy. Captain Insh’allah hadn’t bothered dumping all the excess fuel. He had found a loophole in the operations manual.”But we’re still 15 tons overweight,” I bleated.”No problem.

The manual says we can land 15 tons overweight, in an emergency,” said Insh’allah.”But what’s the emergency?”He peered at me over his half-moon glasses. “The emergency,” he sighed, “is that we are landing 15 tons overweight. Insh’allah.”It was a perfect landing; and as we taxied back to the stand we could see the bigwig’s brother-in-law, sitting in a crew bus, waving and beaming. He thought we had come back for him.We left the following evening, after they had fixed the nose-wheel: a $10 microswitch. Isn’t it always? Here’s a tip: get into the $10 microswitch business, and you’ll never go hungry.This was the plan: five hours in Khartoum airport, pick up another tramp jet down to Harare, collect our own hired aeroplane – a little Cessna 180 bush-plane, or possibly (there was some question mark over this) a Cherokee Six, the Range Rover of the air – and head off into the bush.Things didn’t quite work out like that. Stuck for what seemed like an eternity in Khartoum, we finally reached Harare after hitching a missile-dodging ride on a Sudanese government cargo plane running troops and supplies down to the inglorious and disgraceful civil war in the south, before then going on to load up with Zimbabwean cigarettes for the return trip. Harare airport isn’t a particularly inspiring place, but after five days in the armpit of Africa, Baxter and I were wildly over-excited to be there, climbing giggling into the sort of taxi you usually only get to see in the blurred and grainy news footage of the aftermath of a multiple pile-up.”What bring you to Zimbabwe?” asked the taxi driver.”Freedom!” we cried, “Cold beer! Loud music! Bad women!”"No problem!” said the taxi driver.

“You get all that in Harare!”Half-an-hour later, we had been dropped at our hotel. A grave and scholarly looking waiter informed us that we had visitors “A person,” he murmured, “and .. some sort of woman.”I sent Baxter off to deal with it. The taxi driver had returned with a small, spherical prostitute, so lacking in allure that her choice of trade was a mystery It was as if a deaf man had taken up piano-tuning. Baxter sent them away, and we settled down to plan our first day’s flying.Here is some good advice.

If you are planning a flying holiday in Zimbabwe at any time, I suggest that you check in to the Selous Hotel, Harare, and simply stay there You can always tell lies when you get back home. It will save a lot of trouble in the long run and, what’s more, it is now one of my favourite hotels in the world. To hell with your Hiltons and Hyatts and Marriots; to hell, indeed, with Harare’s own swanky Meikle’s Hotel, full of Japanese executives and American busybodies, all trying to pretend that this is how they live all the time. The Selous is a small, utility, no-frills place, with a set school dinner every night and a proper breakfast in the morning and, most importantly, the sort of staff the Hiltons and Hyatts and Marriotts would kill to get hold of.