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.
After on and off storms chasing my activities at Livingstone, it was an African-blue sky that watched over the hours-long bus ride from Livingstone to Lusaka. Lusaka would not be my destination today though. A tiny dot of a town – nay, a village – called Chisekesi would be my final hop off point. “Are you sure this is where you want to be?”, asked the conductor nervously as the bus stopped and I stood up to climb off.
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.
I have been neglectful in posting stories, but have pages and pages filled with thoughts and images of the things I have seen and am absolutely bursting to share. Tomorrow is a train ride from Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia, which ends on Friday in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. There will be rest and a chance to compose the stories I cannot wait to share in a manner that will do them a little bit of the beautiful justice they deserve. These fingers have been busy, and their tales I will spin into this blog as soon as I arrive in Dar.
Love for your patience in my wandering absence.
- Rich
For the abysmal failure at a-post-a-day, I apologise. Partly finding Internet is not so easy (what was I thinking), but its also been perfectionism on my part at not being able to really tell the stories as what they mean, more than simple narrative. I realise now that the reflective stuff on what it all means is impossible to determine now. That will only come in hindsight. So, instead I present an extract from the large and growing moleskine journaliing of days’ events that I have been updating religiously. It’s the foundation story of the learning to come, but in its raw form (and it is a bit rough – big eyes), this is a partial account of arriving in Livingstone this morning.
