For your entertainment and at least partly for my nostalgia, I kept a list traveling from Cape Town to Cairo of various interesting statistics. It makes for a colourful two minute retelling of the course of events.
It was a gentle sort of love affair. Not the wild, passionate, love-at-first-sight sort of thing. More like that feeling that gently creeps up on you when you discover something underneath a friendship, usually far too late to do anything about it. But I digress. These stories have to start at the point where we are still strangers. Me waking up in the nicest, softest, mosquito net-est bed (nod to the word-maker-upper-in-chief) and deciding to visit some fifteenth century Islamic ruins in Bagamoyo. Not, in fact, Dar es Salaam at all.
The flame trees outside the Dar es Salaam train station are some of the most beautiful plants i’ve seen in days – more so as their orange flowers lick the deep blue of the sky, cloudless. It’s hardly fitting that here, in this loud and beautiful contrast of colours, our family must come to an end.
