- January 24, 2015
Photo 1
My 2 life time passions brought together in one picture, Dakota & Harley,
My first encounter with the Dakota came in 1949. As a toddler, with my family I lived in Trinidad and flew to Curacao in a Dakota. A year later, we sailed by ship to Indonesia and from Jakarta, we took a DC-3 flight to Borneo for our next sojourn of 18 months in a steamy Jungle. It was 1950 and within a year, I got a serious accident that almost split my skull at the age of 4. In the jungle settlement where we lived, the hospital had no X-ray equipment for a check and the Doctor sent me over to a Hospital in Balikpapan, a larger coastal city at some 600 km from where we lived. The Dakota flew me out there and from that moment, that aircraft was forever printed in my memory as the Plane of Relief, that saved my life.
In 1952, on holidays in Surabaya (Java), I noticed a huge and noisy motorcycle approaching us in a busy Main street full of traffic, a very unusual sight for a “Jungle boy”.
My dad took me by the hand and said “look at that, it is a Harley Davidson Motorcycle”. As the rider in a military uniform rode along on his bike, I must have watched him in awe. The encounter impressed me to the bone, I was bitten by the bug ever since.
