"Les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent 
Pour partir; coeurs légers, semblables aux ballons 
De leur fatalité jamais ils ne s'écartent 
Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours: Allons! " 
Charles Baudelaire, Le Voyage

In June 1989, Gérard and Margi Moss took off from Rio de Janeiro for a flying venture which would take them on a circuitous path around the world in their single-engine aircraft, Romeo. They visited fifty countries on four continents and crossed two major oceans, the South Atlantic (Recife-Fernando de Noronha-Ilha do Sal) and the South Pacific.

On the long haul across the South Pacific, by chance they bagged the record for the first such crossing by single-engine from Australia to South America. The special moments were numerous: reaching the legendary city of Timbuktu; finding the Mountain gorillas in the forests of Zaire; diving the kaleidoscopic waters of Sipadan Island off Borneo; the sunset-picnic beside the magical moai on Easter Island. These were spiced with more worrying adventures: flying into a sandstorm in Mali; landing at a military airfield in Guinea-Bissau; threatened to be intercepted by F-16s in Thailand; the beginning of a fire in the engine whilst airborne; and lastly, almost losing Romeo during the relentless battering of a 5-day hurricane in Western Samoa. Thirty-two months later, they landed back in Brazil.    Their experiences are recounted in their book, "Freedom of the Skies", published by Airlife Publishing, England. 

A few statistics concerning their flight around the world:  

• 120,000 km (three times the circumference of the Earth) 
• 700 flight hours 
• 312 landings 
• 138 dollars - the most expensive landing fees (São Tomé Island) 
• 50 countries 
• 32 months 
• 4 continents 
• 1.70 dollars - the cheapest hotel (Inhambane, Mozambique) 
• 1 flat tyre 
• Zero engine failures!