the parsley.blog.landscape.life

Originally posted December 2, 2008

at the gym the other night, someone walked by me with a t-shirt that said:  When you study Africa, you study the world.

someone was asking me recently about my visit to Africa. it wasn’t long, only two weeks, and it was only the once. I have family with connections to Africa, it is hard to explain how this got started; how does anyone fall in love?

(I thought about this a lot when I was in college, when it seemed I had friends who were completely passionate about Russia, or China, or Latin America, and wound up studying those places, traveling to them, making a second home of them, because for whatever reason their hearts led them that way. I don’t think I was ever like that – although being in love with someone from another country – that’s another story…)

anyhow.  I went to Malawi, Zambia, and a very brief layover in Johannesburg, in summer 2003 – winter in that hemisphere.  (and it seems, that for the rest of my life, they will ask me about it when I go to give blood.  it was winter! I didn’t get malaria! honest!)

it was not a very happy time in my life back home, and I was something of a mess. but when I think about Africa I don’t think about that.  I think about the red earth, and sunrise over Lake Malawi.

strange to relate, this was in the time before I had a digital camera, so I am breaking my own rule and posting pictures I did not take myself.  these are my sister’s, with her permission; though I might have taken some of them after all, since I was constantly grabbing her camera.

the safari in Zambia is both the most vivid and the most dreamlike memory.  I would need to spend a lot more time and thought to really understand the people, the culture, and the politics of any part of Africa, but when it comes to plants and animals and landscapes I have a different way of understanding.  certainly I listened to our guide, who was incredibly knowledgeable, but I also just hung off the back of the truck and looked at everything until I thought my eyes would pop out.

the dreamlike quality is only enhanced by the drive schedule; one at sunrise (not my normal getting-up time), and one at sunset, plus the night drive. they always find the leopard, it seems.  there doesn’t seem to be any great trick to finding the leopard. the listen to the various other animals giving their “Look out! Leopard!” cry and then follow that.

you sleep in the middle of the day, at least until you are awakened by the other guests reacting to the near-daily elephant incursion:

at at night, if you are a poor sleeper like me, you are just as likely to be awakened by the hippos tramping past your cabin.

I came back from Africa with about ten pounds of red dust in my luggage and a fierce desire to go back someday. I had the very great good timing to land in New York on a certain day in August, 2003.  Perhaps you remember that day?  I spent a lot of unscheduled time at JFK in the strange society that develops in a blacked-out airport, cursing the amount of junk I had bought at the duty-free and now had to haul around.

I eventually got back to Los Angeles the next day, by way of Philadelphia: but it was ironic to contemplate that everywhere we stayed in Africa, everyone was fully prepared for the power to go out.  the same could not be said back at home.