And so we came to the end of our time in Africa. Back in Harare, we celebrated New Year with Scotty and Devi at a dance held in the ZANU-PF headquarters, and on New Year’s Day, we went for a picnic with Devi’s relations out to a lake near the city.
And it was on our way home from there that we saw the final wonder of all our African travels: three Rhino, a male and a female with a youngster. The male walked across the road in front of us, turned and glared malevolently at us from behind the impressive protection of his horn. An amazing site to end our African adventures with.
A 4-hour flight from Zimbabwe put us back in Nairobi and we stayed the night at the New Kenya Lodge. There was no water, we were overcharged, and the manager had become an arsehole, so we left the next morning and moved out to Mrs Roche’s Camp on the outskirts of the city.
By a stroke of luck, we got our flight to Karachi moved forward from Thursday the 9th to Saturday the 4th, so at 1 p.m. on that day, we lifted off the runway aboard a brand new Gulf Airlines Boeing 767-300, bound for Oman and Pakistan.
The dark continent fell away below us: a vast patchwork of brown and green beneath the scattered clouds, and soon was lost under 30,000 ft of hazy air.
*****
On the ground far below, a herd-boy boy listened to the distant roar of a jet engine from far away. He gazed skyward for a moment, squinting his eyes against the glare of the afternoon sun beating down between the clouds, catching a glimpse of light reflected off steel wings. His attention was drawn back to his cattle by the bleat of a calf, momentarily separated from its mother. Thoughts of the aircraft disappeared from his mind, and he returned to the thought that an occupied the minds of his people for thousands of years…survival.
CurseOfTheTraveller 