This is a shot of the R719 and the railroad that runs parallel to it about 18 miles south of Bothaville in the Free State, a couple of miles south of our camp at Schoonspruit/Skoonspruit.
As I mentioned yesterday, one advantage of flying in a helicopter that has no doors is that your can get shots like this one, looking straight down onto the field of maize (corn) we were flying over. I recall I had to lean out quite some way to avoid getting the skids in the shot.
Since our pilot had been a pilot in the SADF, he preferred to fly his helicopter with the doors off! I thought this was brilliant! Although I had my set belt on to keep me attached to this quivering craft, I had the flexibility to lean out and take photos without having to worry about reflections from or scratches on the plexiglass windows.
In this image we'd taken off from behind his red-roofed house and I was able to take this shot looking to the north, towards Bothaville. Our camp is in the triangle made by the rail-road, the highway and the road that runs in front of the grain silo's. The settlement in the left mid-ground is the farm workers settlement.
It's called Guano Point because some intrepid explorer noticed a bunch of bats flying in and out of caves in the canyon walls. So they set up an operation, building gantries at the top of the canyon and scaling down the cliffs to the caves, so they could harvest the guano.
Of course, no visit to the Hoover Dam is complete without an aerial view. Now you can get a view from the Mike O'Callaghan - Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. I…