What Color is a Mountain Stream?
Gawping, my words run
jubilant, downstream, a ribbon of
gunmetal insistent, persevering,
turquoise over a jumble of rounded
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Cruising eastward across Maputo Bay its hard to believe it's a bay at all. Once you leave the confines of the harbor and set the compass on an eastward course, the Maputo skyline falls away and the waves crest higher and higher until the tranquil ripples of the bay build into a legitimate Indian Ocean swell. Soon there's only the compass to guide you as the coastline fades into the harbor mist. But it is a bay indeed, as any ship captain can attest to, and we passed a bevy of merchant marine freighters queing up to enter the harbor and discharge their cargo. Then, ghostlike, an island rises out of the sunrise before you, and you have reached the barrier.
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The Harmattan descends upon Benin in a pale, chilling mist, obscuring the horizon, blotting out the buildings in other neighborhoods, and filling the air with choking dust. No other season I’ve experienced, from the monsoons of Southeast Asia to the 6 month Central American drought, is as oppressive. It’s hard not to be impressed by just how powerful the Harmattan really is, and in Benin, the Harmattan is not just a wind, it’s a season.
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Hardly a day goes by that the electrical current doesn't snap to a halt, the diesel generator grinds into action, and the lights flicker. When it's not a full-blown outage, there are endless power surges, dips, brown-outs, spikes, and worse. Some days we don't even bother to turn on sensitive equipment like computers, and even then the computer is plugged into a battery backup, surge protector, and voltage regulator. But there are good reasons to leave the lights off and go outside. Just look up.
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I first visited Nairobi in 2007 with Ericka. Coming off a week-long safari, we needed to find someplace to spend the night before flying onward, and found a mid-range hotel on the edge of town closest to the airport, where we spent an awful, noisy night listening to the adjacent bus terminal and sweating on questionable sheets. Morning came soon enough, and we hoofed it out to Jomo Kenyatta airport and got on with our lives. No metropolitan center can compete with the magic of one's first visit to the Masai Mara or Samburu National Park, but Nairobi was a necessary evil to that trip, not a destination.
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