From the logbook...holiday flying

August 10th is an important day in Ecuadorian history. Rather than tell you about it, and get it wrong, I think it can be safely compared to America's 4th of July. That said, everybody had the day off today, except myself and 2 other pilots. Months ago without thinking we accepted a flight request for a large team to go into the jungle without realizing we would be "closed" on August 10th. Fast forward and here we are already a third of the way through August (wow) and we had 14 people to get into Mashient and hundreds of pounds of cargo. I made two full flights to Mashient and then I went to Conambo, seen below.

I went to Conambo to pick up a patient. When you live and work in the jungle, the "rawness" of life is daily present. The young man I picked up had busted a testicle and had kidney problems to boot. He looked like he was in severe pain (ya think?!) and gladly got on the airplane.

From Conambo we flew 25 minutes to Pacayacu to pick up another patient. Upon landing I found out that the patient had began walking out to Shell only a few hours earlier. Don't know how the communication lines got crossed, but that person missed out on a nice ride to Shell. I think this was "just" a broken arm. Keeping to the schedule, my patient from Conambo and I continued and flew 20 minutes more to Shell.

That concluded my working day at the hangar after 3 hours of flying and "only" 6 landings. I was home by 1:00pm, which still gave me time to get a nap, and enjoy the Ecuadorian's holiday.