First hours in Africa

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My first hours in Africa

We arrived from London this morning. We slept so well the previous night at CB's place that we weren’t tired at all on the plane last night. We were giddy. And completely alert for the entire 10 and a half hour flight to Dar Es Salaam. The sun came up at 630 am illuminating the top of a blanket of clouds stretched into the horizon. I’ve seen clouds before. Lots of them. Flown since I was 4 months old all over the Americas and Europe, and once in Asia, and this had a different feel to it. The sky had a different quality. I was reading the nyt mag by the light of the window and the reflecting clouds when for a moment my periphery darkened. I turned as the pilot was mumbling something in the hum of the engine, to see a deep clay brown break in the clouds shooting up above the white landscape. Two peaks. Cut from the land. Lava creases down the sides of the mountains and at the top, what looked like pieces of white picked from the cotton so abounding and placed on top in fluffy bunches. Trying not to sound cliché. But, there was a pounding in my chest of recognition. Not of something I knew before but of something I just recognized from a dream a thought. An awareness from some story that this sort of thing existed. This is huge. This is part of my world that I knew but never saw. Now I was looking down on Mount Kilimanjaro. Looking down on the tallest peak in Africa. The only piece of Africa where it snowed. Snows of Kilimanjaro. Snow in Africa! What is that? This was our first day and moment in Africa and we were looking down on this! Amazing. Approaching land, we saw many houses partly built. Spread between the palm trees green grass and clay ground. Our side was not the ocean. So when we drove to Jane’s house and the smell of industrial tire and oil dust cut with sand and concrete dust carried with it suddenly a sweet salty fishy taste of the ocean, I remembered that we were on the water. Jane’s house butts up against the beach. A beach littered with old fishing boats with flaking paint, water bottles emptied and stripped, glass fragments all spread in the arms of a sprawling thick leaved vine spidery on the white sand.

---I just found this bit of writing on my computer's external hard drive. I'd meant to finish it and upload it the blog in a more timely fashion, but alas, I did not. So, here it is. Time has passed and I am not sure that I could finish it at this point. This was written on the day it happened and my memory of that day is not so clear any more...

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Photos

Mount Kilimanjaro
This was taken on a bus trip to Launch the new Nature For Kids Project in Arusha...

Mt Meru
Killi's neighboring mountain...