Strraight From My Notebook

27-VIII Lake Naivasha “There are few feelings like crouching in the grass on a wide landscape, creeping closer to a grazing Antelope, trying to ignore the distant roaring of the bathing Hippos, when suddenly you catch a glimpse of sharp black and white stripes gliding silently by you, almost close enough to touch; the feeling of being part of it all again, of belonging to a wilder realer world, feeling a little closer to home.” 28-VIII Hell's Gate “The sounds of the wild drift in on the breeze. The snorting Boar, the rutting Antelope, strange trillings and the snap of a twig as the Zebra pass. Looking out over an ancient gorge full of ghosts of Maasai Warriors and far-from-home Explorers, as stars wink and storms brush over the roof of Creation, and there’s no one else in all the world, a world that has never known loneliness. This is Africa.” 29-VIII Kenya-Tanzania Border "I’m now on a very bumpy dusty bus from Nairobi to Arusha, jumping and rattling down a red dirt road under the equatorial sun, passing cloud-crowned mountains leaping up from the red Serengeti plains, an occasional hut crowded with goats and color-clad women at a well peek through the thorny umbrella trees and disappear, and sometimes, if you watch carefully, a red-checkered figure almost as tall and thin as his spear treads his slow way over an ancient Maasai hunting path; lives and ages glimmer into sight, then vanish like frightened antelope into the dust and bush."