In the glow of the taxi’s headlights, a guard appears from behind a gate. He opens it and lets the car into the darkened driveway. Power’s out in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city. The streets are pitch black. So is the guest-house compound.
Inside, a receptionist sits at the kitchen table, lit only by a candle, across from a man, probably her boyfriend, listening to music played from a mobile phone. She introduces herself as something like Ida, but I can’t tell if she’s pronouncing it with two syllables or three.
“Like the opera?” I ask. “How do you spell it?”
“I-D-A-H.” She’s got skinny arms and legs and a gap between her two front teeth, and she laughs even though I’ve not said anything terribly funny. It’s eerily quiet here. “What does it mean?” she asks me.
“What does what mean?
“My name.”
“What does your name mean,” I reply, putting it as statement, not a question. “In English it means Idah. You.”
She peers at the form I’m filling in by candlelight. “Scott,” I say. “In English, my name means Scott.”
The guard leads me to a dorm room behind the main building. There’s nobody else in it, and since I lost my flashlight months ago, I return and ask Idah for a candle. I light it, place it on one of the beds, lock the door and absorb a feeling I’ve missed while traveling with others these last few months: the aloneness – not always loneliness, but sometimes, yes – of travel, a feeling that’s at once banal and overpowering. I soak in it, a stranger in a strange place, Zimbabwe, with nothing now connecting me to the rest of my world, no left messages or postcards, neither internet nor mobile phone, nobody except Idah knowing exactly where I am at this moment, staring at a candle in a dark, empty room.
I snap back to it when the power finally comes back on, noticing I’m not alone at all. There are ants covering – and I mean covering – whole sections of the floor. They’re crushed under foot and crawl up my ankles when I stand up. I decline Idah’s offer to spray the room and sweep them out the door, but like those beads I tried to throw into the sea, they return. I finish the night watching African music videos with Idah and her boyfriend.
AT VICTORIA FALLS. I’m rather more delighted when people I met earlier in my travels start creeping back into my life. In Victoria Falls, I run into a Dutch-Belgian couple I’d met months ago in Cameroon. They’re still making their way south to Cape Town in their own car, coming from Namibia in the west; I’m heading north and east. It’s a chance meeting, and we head to the Falls together.
The Zambezi River, I’ve heard said, is higher this year than at any point in the last 20. The spray from the cascades is so heavy that it’s effectively pouring upwards, and what goes up comes down again upon us. There’s therefore more frolicking than viewing on the Zimbabwe side, for at the lookouts opposite the main falls, there’s nothing to be seen but a great white mist.
I’m rarely alone from here onwards: Across the river in Zambia, I meet another travel writer, Marie Javins, who’s inadvertently been following in my footsteps down the west coast of Africa. We’d begun swapping stories online after Marie found my blog, and we soon discovered we’d have a one-day overlap in Livingstone, the town named after the purported discoverer of the Falls. Later, in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, I hang out with an American veterinary student studying Zambian chickens. We’d met briefly at a hotel in Togo. In Lusaka, we end up at an Indian restaurant in a posh hotel where a one-armed singer with a wooden hand serenades us with easy-listening classics backed by a band of musicians stiffer than the undead. I remark that it feels like we’ve stepped into a David Lynch film.
Finally, the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, or Tazara, built in the early 1970s with Chinese investment, a two-day journey on a rattling train that cuts through national parks and reserves, including Selous Game Reserve. My cabin mates spot an elephant and a giraffe. Buried in a bad Norwegian crime novel, I see only impala and wildebeests. The terminus is Dar es Salaam, the port and main city of Tanzania, whence I catch a 20-minute plane ride to Zanzibar, the first time I’ve left the ground since flying from Tunis to Madrid in October. I’m here on the island now, staying with a resident I met on a camping trip in Namibia two months ago.
BACK IN ZANZIBAR. In a few days, I’ll head up to Nairobi to meet another friend from a faraway place, from a different life, who just happens to be in East Africa at the moment. We’re planning a short safari, for in eight months in Africa, I’ve yet to see a single lion, and I refuse to leave the continent until I do so.
Here in Zanzibar, I’m essentially back to where I began in Africa last summer, on the Swahili Coast, having circumnavigated three quarters of the continent almost entirely by land. I’ll probably feel thrilled about that some day, hopefully soon, but as I sit on the beach gazing at a languorous Zanzibar sunset, I can only recall the words of one of the two teenage British volunteers with whom I’d shared the train cabin from Lusaka. I’d already put my feet up on the berth as they boarded the train. “Wow,” one of them said. “You look really tired.”
This is the 30th installment of “Around Africa,” a weekly column in The National of Abu Dhabi.
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