T A B L E_T A L K Are cruises a great way to travel in style or overpriced schmaltz? Sail the friendly seas in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Insider's guide to Paris By David Downie Paris insider: The hottest places to eat, stay and play (08/05/98) A midsummer night's bacchanal in Moscow By Jeffrey Tayler Inhibitions -- and underclothes -- are tossed into the air on Ladies Night at the Hungry Duck (08/04/98) Coming down By Dwight Garner For the first time, Jon Krakauer talks about the bitter controversy swirling around "Into Thin Air" (08/03/98) Mondo Weirdo The deep A chance encounter with a seven-foot shark (07/31/98) Tallest Tree epiphany By Simon Firth A father and son make a rainy redwood pilgrimage (07/30/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		OVER AFRICA | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - Time to climb aboard. Andrew, who had been a very relaxed conversationalist so far -- chatting about his boyhood in Pennsylvania where he'd cut grass and answered the phone at a local airfield to earn flying lessons, and about quitting the U.S. Air Force after eight years to bicycle from Europe to Africa -- suddenly morphed into a pilot, with a pilot's preoccupations. I was not to step on the (fabric-covered) wings but only on the black plywood tread. I was to step on the leather seat of the front cockpit and then ease myself down into it, like an egg into a crate, keeping my feet off the puckered pouch on the floor, right in the center, which housed something or other important. The controls in the front cockpit were disconnected, he said (good!), and I was to give the thumbs up from time to time to let him know "everything was all right." "What do you mean 'everything'?" I asked, suddenly fearing responsibility. "Just that you're comfortable," he said. "We'll be taking off northeast, flying through a saddle in the Aberdares to Mount Kenya. Should arrive by 3." So there I was in the Meryl Streep seat, my oversize leather jacket bunched tightly by the lap and shoulder harness. The seat had straps for two either very slim or very friendly passengers. The needles in the dashboard dials began to flutter, and a stick labeled "throttle" described a mysterious arc all by itself on the left-hand side of the cockpit. The little plane hurtled frantically forward and I realized I could not see where it was going, my view totally blocked by the high curve of the dashboard. Out the sides, there was a view, threaded over by rigging that held the top wing to the bottom and served as a kind of harp for the wind to play on. We were aloft, and the noise, as Andrew had warned, was horrendous. It was as if the plane was screaming -- and who could blame it with the abuse it seemed to be taking. I concentrated on the low-pitched heartbeat of the motor, a steady pulsing that was never interrupted, though I constantly expected it to be, by that cough I remember hearing in war films. Time for a thumbs up. The wind flattened my arm each time I raised it, so after three tries I seemed to have been pantomiming thumbing a ride in the air, which was not inappropriate. Not long after takeoff, the screaming turned to something like singing, and this is no doubt where Mozart kicks in for the Safari passengers. Below were little settlements in the Great Rift Valley, tiny shelters giving scale to the steep valley wall, the Escarpment, over which we were flying. The flat valley landscape stretched out of sight behind us, pale green and glistening except where the clouds threw shadows over it like purple blankets. Then we were up over the Aberdare Mountains, thick green billows of bamboo and montane forest, a dark, secret place, home to monkeys and leopards, lions and elephants and once to the Mau Mau. Clouds began to roll in under us on the right. On the left, the sun was still shining. In the thermals, the tiny plane slipped and slid, its forward movement momentarily suspended as if it were dangling on a string. Another thumbs up, in case Andrew was worried for me. He must have been encouraged, because he executed a half-turn and stood the plane on one wingtip. As if pointing with it, Andrew was showing me a slender silver waterfall, tumbling in three leaps down black wooded slopes into a shining thread of river. Much later, a similar maneuver signaled a herd of elephants at a muddy water hole. The biplane soldiered on over lumpy forest that looked like an agitated sea. It was almost 3; we would be nearing Mount Kenya. Except in the early morning, this majestic snow-clad mountain on the equator is shrouded in clouds. I'd heard that one pilot had three times flown a plane into it. The Safari Club is carved into the mountain's wooded lap, and even when we circled over the clubhouse, pool, villas and golf course, Mount Kenya itself was invisible. Andrew made a tight little landing at Mawingu, the bush airstrip, and his second pilot, Jim Dale, came out of the gum pole office of Classic Aerial Safaris to help me out of the plane. Turn around, step on the seat, stand on the black tread, jump to the ground. The flight hadn't bothered my ears, but my knees wobbled. I had a question for Andrew. "If I couldn't see forward from my cockpit, how can you see where you're going from yours?" "A good question," he answered. "I can't." In the office I glanced through the guest book: "My heart and soul sing with emotions, Jan"; "I cried tears of joy, James"; and from Wilhelmina: "O that my life could have ended at the moment of climax when I touched the hand of God and He smiled upon my soul." In "Out of Africa," Karen Blixen had written: "Every time that I have gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realised that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great and new discovery. 'I see,' I have thought. 'This was the idea and now I understand everything.' " I didn't stop to write in Andrew's book. I wanted only to get to a telephone and call home. SALON | Aug. 6, 1998 Maryalicia Post is a freelance writer. Do you have a particularly memorable travel experience you'd like to share? Join the ongoing discussion in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk.