VP-26 Three More Stops in African Cities

We flew out of Monrovia, Liberia and flew down to Abijan, Ivory Coast. There we continued to fly our "looking for something unusual flights" with the same nothing results. Abijan was a modern city with French and African residents. We stayed in a pretty nice downtown hotel when we weren't flying. Plenty of time to mix with the locals. ADR3 WATSON and I roomed and roamed the city together. Seeing the sights and experiencing the culture. Sidewalk cafes, bars, and stores. One night we were out late and decided to leave the French (white) area and decided to visit the African shanty area. It was quite interesting looking in the local stores and drinking beer in the bars. People weren't friendly, no one said hello, no one accosted us either. The barkeeps flashed warning looks at their regular patrons. After the second or third bar we decided we should stop unintentionly annoying the locals. It's dawn as we leave and head back to the French area. We are half smashed and laughing with relief as we round a corner and see a large group of men kneeling on small rugs and bowing towards the rising sun. I sensed it was some kind of religion and tried to stop our laughing. Too late, a few of them start chasing us! Now we laughing because we are scared shitless. Luckily we are very close to an indoor cafe and run in there. The cafe people talk to the guys chasing us and the Africans leave. Later that night the police show up at our hotel. Lt Frederick must have known they were coming as he and the other two officers are in our rooms blocking the cops from coming in. After some discussion, the cops leave. This is about 9pm. The pilots tell us to stay in our room and get some sleep. We try sleeping but worry kept us awake for a few hours. At 2am the pilots are rousting all of us crew members out of our beds, have us pack our bags, out the hotel we go and into a VW bus they had rented with a driver and headed out of the city. When asked what we are doing, he said, "We're headed to the airport and flying out of here before the cops come back for you two." That was the fastest we ever manned that aircraft and got it airborne! We flew to Libreville, Gabon. We need fuel for the aircraft and the airport there has avgas. The field is pretty small but we need the gas so land and refuel we do. The pilots are concerned about taking off from the short runway that has small rocks all over it. We need the jet engines at full power to get the plane off the ground and full power jets could suck up some of those small stones and we could lose an engine. Not fun loosing an engine on takeoff. The pilots taxi around and find a less rock strewn section of runway and off we go hoping for the best. We make a safe takeoff and on our way. Shortly after takeoff the Direct Current (DC) generator on the starboard propeller engine quits working. That's a safety of flight issue and we can't land from where we just took off from.

The map below is a 1960 map of Africa. The map in the previous post is not as accurate but is more detailed.