Six years ago Tom Claytor '85 left his Pennsylvania hometown to embark on a history-making journey around the world in a single-engine Cessna airplane. (See Colby, April 1994.) His goal, to visit all seven continents before returning to the U.S., is at least three more years from fruition. But after watching the National Geographic video "Flight Over Africa," one gets the feeling that the achievement will be a mere footnote compared to the adventure along the way.
The video chronicles Claytor's voyage into the remotest parts of Africa, some of which have not been visited by humans for decades. He visits a shipwreck on the beach along Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a place so inaccessible only a handful of people have seen it in the past half century. Later, he puts down in a former diamond-mine settlement, now a ghost town, deep in the Namib Desert and wanders through hauntingly empty saloons where miners once paid for whiskey with raw diamonds plucked from the sand.
To pay expenses--he has spent tens of thousands of dollars just keeping his gas tank filled--Claytor must seek out jobs as a bush pilot. The situations he encounters would make the most seasoned explorer envious. He faces down a charging elephant while watching a herd in Botswana, plays with chimpanzees at an orphanage for primates in Burundi, assists in the treatment of a wounded black rhino and observes another rhino having its horn removed--an anti-poaching measure--in Zimbabwe. And in between these on-the-ground excursions, Claytor flies above some of the world's most beautiful places, the shadow of his plane caressing mountains, valleys, plains and jungles.
The aerial photography alone makes the video worthwhile. Particularly enjoyable is his flight over Victoria Falls, captured in the light of a late afternoon sun that lends a glistening, velvety texture to the footage. As Claytor flies in and out of clouds of mist swept upward by the falls, his plane looks like a gnat in a thunderstorm, tiny and insignificant. The wing camera shows Claytor craning his neck through the cockpit windows like a kid at an amusement park trying to take it all in. When the camera pans in slow motion across a spectacular chasm filled with churning water, Claytor records the moment with simple sincerity. "Wow. Look at that," he says. The camera does the rest.
Also here are revealing glimpses of the spartan lifestyle and the solitude Claytor endures. The camera is his passenger, a silent companion recording the mundane--a tube of toothpaste swinging from a peg on the cockpit wall, for example--as well as the magnificent. When we see Claytor rising from his tiny tent beneath the fuselage on a chilly desert morning or crouching over a fire preparing coffee as the sun sets over a desolate plain, we are reminded that this man is as alone as one can be.
"Flight Over Africa" is an evocative adventure story brimming with human drama and natural wonder. Africa is captured in all of its mythic beauty, but most compelling is the feeling when the video ends that one has gone with Tom Claytor where no one has gone before. As the narrator of the video says during the introduction, "There are still a few places left that you can't get to from here." Thanks to this video, viewers can go to those places without enduring the crushing loneliness, the anxiety, the fatigue or the sacrifice of family that mark Claytor's experience. They will be grateful for the opportunity.