1.  We are going to Africa. Our tiny plane flies through the darkness, shifting up and down. On my SONY I listen to a Talking Heads song I have fallen in love with lately:  Heaven…is a place…A place where nothing… Nothing ever happens…while I try to imagine the place where we are going.
2.  Harare, Zimbabwe. Our plane is hours late and it isn’t till dark that B and I finally take a bus from the airport to Harare. We trudge through the streets with our backpacks on, searching for street names, and are passed by one or two wondering Zimbabweans, who keep their distance. We know it looks different here, but can’t define how. Underneath, I suppose, we were ready for anything, and are surprised to find that, like home, it has buildings and people.
3.   It wasn’t my idea to come. It was B’s—my boyfriend. We had been out of college one year, living together. Three months ago, he announced he was taking a trip around the world. I could come if I wanted to. He showed me the Lonely Planet guidebook, the “backpackers Bible,” explained how we would do it. I could come, or I could lose him to the world. I applied for a passport, began to save.

4.  Africa. It’s a magic word now.

5.  In the Livingstone station, B and I are waiting for the train to Lusaka, already three hours late. Two women amble out to the platform, dresses swishing against their thighs, dark and elliptical, then click back over to the benches in high heels that are peeling at the bottom. Drops of sweat form and expand on the forehead of a man standing on the platform. The station is a stage where things happen one by one, falling into the heat of the day like beads in shampoo. A little girl jumps around the colored square on the floor, her dress flying off in a different direction from her thin, flat body.  When the train finally comes, we get into our 2nd Class berth. I stick my head out the window and form part of a row of heads turning back and forth, looking at each other like ventriloquist dummies. The scenery chugs by: red earth, green crops, and sky.

6.  It has only taken a week for me to understand that I am a millionaire, here.  Live like the locals, is a Lonely Planet credo, but the truth is, we are worlds away from them. I have never seen such poverty.  A stream of details: the foot bottoms of babies, carried on their mothers’ backs; the knee- high leather boots and khaki knickers of Harare policemen stalking by; the sound of people running down the platform in a rush for the fourth-class carriages, silent and desperate to get a seat.  Africans carry everything on their heads: bundles, bunches of fruit, plastic water gallons. In Bulawayo, I see a young girl standing and talking with friends, an entire chest of drawers balanced on her head. On the bus, I stare blankly at a man’s shoe, realizing slowly that half of it is missing. In my twenty-six years of life, I have never seen this in my own country.

7.  B and I will take the train to Dar es Salaam, or as the other backpackers call it laconically, “Dar.” To get to the train, we must go to a place called Kapiri Mposhi, a tiny town in the interior that tourists simply do not come to.  As we walk down the dirt road to the Tazara station, there’s a buzz in the neighborhood that escalates to a general scream. The children playing in front of every house jump up and down, shouting at us, “how are you! how are you!” Some of them run recklessly up to the road, dirt-and-snot-streaked faces tilted into the air, and brace their feet against its sides, trying to touch us and run away. The bravest, Esta, screams her name and shakes hands with me without fear.  The Tazara station is large and relatively modern, built in a joint venture with the Chinese in a fit of optimism. On the wall inside hang small, framed pictures of Nyere, Kenneth Kaunda, and Mao, all friends. Outside there is a parking lot, immense and perpetually empty, as no one in this town can even dream of having a car to park in it. As we cross it, a boy calls down to us from the balcony of the empty station, “give me money!”

8.  Victoria Falls, Zambian side. Hottest day in Africa yet, spent laying around the pool at the Intercontinental. Fifteen minutes after swimming, I’m dry again and baking, cringing into the shade made by the plastic umbrellas. In the pool is an English couple, the woman fat around the hips, the man’s body trim and meaty. He supervises his two boys, swimming in sun hats and shirts. Daddy is teaching the older son how to swim. From the wading pool, the younger cries out, trying hard to distract Daddy’s attention. Mummy wades waist deep into the water with her watch and sunglasses on to catch her son and exclaim “very gewd” disdainfully.  The two worlds of tourism. B and I talk “living like the locals” with the other Lonely Planet- ites, but here we are at the Intercontinental. We could be anywhere—Las Vegas, the Caribbean, New Jersey. The umbrellas and the pastel blue of the pool are symbols, more than the experience, of the Way We Like to Live. It’s only outside that’s really Africa, where the van into town won’t start, and ten to fifteen depressed locals sit in the dirt in front of the souvenir barn. Behind a screen of leaves, the Falls thunder and refract in the hostile sun.

8.  I am not the one who knows what I want; B is. We met in college, 5 years ago: he a self- confident New York Jew; me a diffident WASP from the suburbs. I wouldn’t have come if B hadn’t made it clear he was going with or without me. Now, three weeks in, my resentments have begun to mount—why am I never enough for him?—and our daily fights have made us realize that we need to separate.

So I’m losing him anyway.

9.  Africa is not a good place to be a woman alone. Luckily for me, colonialism has never really ended–it’s just called tourism now. I’m in Mombasa, the sole guest at the Y. The Y is next door to the Nyali Beach Hotel, where for a small sum, I can sit all day in one of the lounge chairs.  Between the palm trees is the stage of the sea: dark blue with streaks of aquamarine and farther out, the white crests of waves. Blocking the horizon is the bulky shape of a rusted oil tanker, stranded long ago.  Inside the hotel confines, it sounds like a European way station. White deck chairs are strewn all about and from them arise conversations in all the Romance languages, like different radio bands heard at once. Not much has changed since colonization. African waiters, sweating under their jackets, wheel their trays past the umbrellas to serve half- naked whites laid out on their couches like invalids.  Low tide hits in the afternoon and I swim out to the raft where there are a few tanned bodies looking sadly at the evaporated water. I listen with closed eyes to the tumultuous conversation of three children from the American South who are jumping on and off the ladders, discovering things through their underwater masks.

“Luke, Luke, you can see things! Put on the mask!” “Kay, put on your mask and look in the water!”

“It doesn’t fit me!”
“Come on—I’ll hold you up—now look down” “And what happens?”
“You see fish!”

On the way back I lie face down, motionless in the water. Time stops. I would not want to be anywhere but this place.

10.  At midday, the crests of the breaking waves on the horizon look like a long line of brush fire. Down by the water’s edge, a few Europeans are cavorting in endeavors to amuse each other, and possibly those of us seated farther up at the hotel compound. Center stage, a young couple, possibly French, are having a sand fight. The girl, in an oversized t-shirt, turns her back to receive the splats of sand.

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. It’s one thing for those of us on vacation; another for those trying desperately to live.

An hour before lunch, the locals start lining up outside the wall that divides the hotel from the beach. They look like warriors, armed with homemade shields they’re hoping to sell to the tourists. Wearing grass skirts and war paint, they want to impress us with their authenticity. It’s a strange test of wills: they are trying to stare us into a sale, but we don’t buy.  As I lie on my lounge chair, I think about a road trip B and I took a week ago. We rented a jeep and zoomed through towns where rows and rows of goods were spread out on the side of the road: cheap, fluorescent-colored clothes, pots and plastic jugs. Outside of the towns, a whole life was laid out: fruit sellers, women herding goats or cows, girls walking in straight lines with water pots on their heads. Women and children would sit around a tree where a goat was tethered, staring bleakly off, hoping to sell some milk. Up on the cliffs men who had nothing to do curled on their sides, dozing together.  We couldn’t figure out what they were all doing there, and then we realized they were there for us. All this activity was built on the tender notion that you never know when a tourist will stop by and buy something. But there was something else too: the urge to be where something is happening, the same instinctual attraction that pulls people to rivers. What pulled them was the vicarious pleasure of movement, of speed itself.

Past Eldoret in the desert we came upon three little boys herding goats, naked. At the sight of our jeep, they jumped up and shouted in one burst, hurling themselves into the road after us. They followed us for a kilometer: running, arms flailing, still shouting joyfully. Someone is going somewhere!

11.  Here is the paradox: like all tourists, I have come to get away from what I know, but as soon as I encounter it, I seek comfort in the familiar. One morning I try to get out to the sandbar. On my way back in, I pass an American family from the mid-West splashing industriously along in the opposite direction. The big dorky father is in the lead, calling back instructions that get lost in the wind.  “Now don’t worry about sea urchins here—they’re not found in sea grass.” Splash, splash, splash.  “What’s that Jeff?” The family gathers around for a lesson. “A starfish. Anyone want one of these?” Walking away, I can still hear pieces of his mid-West accent blown in zigzags across the watery plains that are slowly filing up with the tide behind me.

12.  This is what it is to be a tourist. I am not an adventurer; I am an elevated consumer who buys experiences instead of 85-inch TVs.

And yet.

B & I are back together again, ready for our culminating experience in Africa: safari. In the Ngorongoro crater, as in Eden, the species are endlessly abundant and come in pairs, newly created: lions, hyena. A rhino and her baby. And then in numbers: wildebeest, zebra, buffalo. Flamingos.  Mid-morning, we watch three elephants graze. A trunk dips. With a delicious sound the water is pulled up into it, it curves into the mouth, and there is a sound like a garbage can full of water being tipped. After drinking, the trunks swing back and forth easily, rhythmically, and stop to enquire of each other by touching wet, mouth-like ends.  After lunch a pair of cheetahs are sighted. We join a convoy of tourist vehicles parked around the two reclining animals, that pant heavily in the sun. Flies buzz everywhere around their eyes and nostrils and one has a bloody patch on its forehead from scraping. They look out at us as at a mirage, a few gesturing lines troubling the boiling horizon. 

My gaze moves to take in the van across from ours, filled with other tourists, and I see us hovering around the last patch of wilderness, the last beauty: two panting animals, huddled in the dust.