Blessed be those nights

To cross the border from Botswana to Zambia, you need to be ferried across. Somehow, I remember good feelings aboard, an exhilarating sense of adventure as we basked in the evening dusk.

Botswana and its silences, its introspections, its deserts was behind us. Another loud, twittering world was beckoning now: the world of the black man.

The border post was full of incompetent officials, frenetic passport stamping, of for-ever-stuck, for-ever-moaning and for–ever-bribing truck drivers, and of our first malaria mosquitoes.

We arrived late at night in Livingstone, and tiptoed our way through the badly-lit, derelict town.

Set down this, o traveler:

arrive at night in an unknown tropical city, lie down in an unknown bed into an unknown room, get your mind intoxicated by the surrounding Mystery and gently fall into a heavy, magical sleep until the early dawn, when you will pop your head outside before the mist has settled down and the human ants have started their toil.

o traveler: blessed be those nights.