On Tuesday, he touched down at an airstrip near Charleroi, in Southern Belgium, where he had learned to fly, inspired by his family’s generations of aviators. Then it was on to Slovakia. In an interview on Tuesday, as he prepared for the final section of his journey, he described moments of beauty and boredom circumnavigating the globe.
There were “so many of these wildly different types that had those ‘wow’ moments,” he said, referring to his experiences flying over the windswept Sahara, the national parks of Kenya, forests in Myanmar and Thailand, and the mountains of Alaska.
“Big cities of the U.S. as well,” he said. “I was surprised how close you can actually fly. I was able to fly around the Statue of Liberty.”
Flying over oceans can be monotonous, he said. He rarely eats. “I look around, listen to music,” he said. A 24-hour-long playlist, which includes Coldplay and Queen, kept him occupied. “That surprisingly fills up the time quite nicely,” he said.
One day in late July, as he was flying across the Pacific to the United States, he was forced to stop on Attu, an uninhabited island at Alaska’s westernmost edge, to wait out strong headwinds. The ordeal was a treacherous one. He had just finished the last of his food: Oreos and a protein bar. It was getting dark, there were mountains, low clouds and no living creatures but sea gulls.
“I stayed the night on a completely uninhabited island, which was pretty special,” he said. “I found a shed on the side of the runway. I stayed there for the night on a broken-down sofa. I didn’t sleep very well there.”
Source: NY Times
