The long road home

Moments before we got stuck in the mud

While it took us about 11.5 hours to reach Katavi on our way down, it somehow only took 8.5 hours on the way back, and I have the welts on my bum to prove it. I guess there are advantages to having Spanish men drive when there are Spanish women in the other vehicle. We flew with such velocity that when we hit pockets of mud it would cover our vehicle, causing us to drive blindly until the wipers could clear our view.

Ryszard Kapuściński once wrote this about the Serengeti:

“…As if one were witnessing the birth of the world, that precise moment when the earth and sky already exist, as do water, plants, and wild animals, but not yet Adam and Eve. It is this world barely born, the world without mankind and hence also without sin, that one can imagine one is seeing here.”

When I first read this passage, I circled it in my copy of The Shadow of the Sun, thinking it was one of the most beautiful and original observations I had read about nature.

Beautiful it is, but I realized on the road to Katavi just how naturally this cascade of thoughts can fill your mind in unspoiled landscapes. Our road was often the only sign of civilization, and it winded through seemingly endless woodlands, with vistas hiding tantalizingly behind the trees. And then occasionally the trees would break and a valley would spread at our feet, with tree canopies extending as far as the eye could see. There were mammoth rocks, patches of grassland, and at their banks, the Malagarasi River.

This world “barely born” seems perfectly without sin. In the presence of this landscape, one can imagine any number of the continent’s stories coming to life: Karen Blixen soaring in Dennis Finch Hatton’s airplane and saying “Yes, I see;” humankind waking to stretch its first legs; unimaginable beings from times gone by lifting their heads at waterholes to roar at the sun. It was overwhelming to see that this landscape still exists; it was an Africa that I thought - and feared - survived in books alone.

I learned last week that there are plans to significantly improve this road, perhaps even pave it. In fact, we had seen evidence of this in the piles of gravel and road crews we occasionally encountered on our journey. This is in addition to plans to create and pave yet another road that will slice through the ecosystem.

I fear what this new chapter will bring for the landscape. After all it has seen – climate changes, species come and gone, the tectonic shifts – I wonder what the knell of the diesel engines will bring.

As we drove home, I thought about what it will mean if humanity returns to the land that once cradled it. Have we learned our lessons, or will we simply bring our sins back to the land from which we came?

World without sin