It wasn’t all misery! The shore-side base was Singapore, and in the early 1970’s it remained a mysterious and exotic place to explore.
The ancient DC3 bounded and skipped along the rough grass airstrip rapidly gathering speed. With an almighty explosion, the starboard propeller stopped dead, the plane slewed violently sideways, and all was white-faced stillness and silence. And there they were, with a broken aeroplane, somewhere in the South China Sea, trapped on a narrow strip of land on the coastal flank of a monstrous volcano.