Kilimanjaro slips past - a jagged black ridge emerging from the low evening blanket of felted gray fog, a rough slice that juts up to a white cap, sharp against a dull purple sky. For an instant my perceptual gimbal is yanked down like a window shade and the scene flattens, collapses, these pits and spikes in evening silhouette becomes a shoreline propped up on its side; the snowy peak a teeming peninsular port, rich from trading with the gods.

Absent any exterior motivation for traveling (a job, say), an interior one can always be found in banishing my normal, day-to-day self consciousness about writing and pretend that I've already made it . Kerouac! Fermor! Byron! I go where no man has gone before, think thoughts no man has ever thought and use phrases like 'ultimate reckoning' with a manly absence of irony. Breakfast becomes 'sublimely medicinal', only part of a 'repugnantly piscivorous' diet. I give myself permission, in other words, to write terribly.

A more subdued voice might describe the past month as a rather benign set of chapters; a sensible itinerary laid out by the delightful Ms. Andrea Bailey. In fact, only the final two week stretch from Kigoma to Arusha was truly my own, during which time I managed to thoroughly sunburn and bruise myself, overspend on food and buy altogether too many trinkets. It's a miracle I made it back to Arusha at all. Thankfully, all that had no effect on the Noble Adventurer you'll find parading through the pages of my journal.

As liberating as it was to document life through so rosy a lens, after flipping through a few times I have found discouragingly few tangible facts that I might use to drive forward a normal, human-sounding blog post. I'm keenly aware that I will be seeing all three or four of you loyal readers in the very near future, so a certain balance will have to be struck between the available record and my rapidly disintegrating recollection of what actually happened.

But let's give it a go.

CHAPTER 1

Our first stop was Tanga, a sleepy little city on the northwestern coast of Tanzania, where Sonya, a fellow graduate of Lewis and Clark and friend of Andrea's, was starting up a naturopathic clinic with Maria, a friend of hers from med school. By the time we arrived, the clinic was rapidly becoming a dream that would never be, but Sonya and Maria had fallen in with The Allards, an American/Kenyan family who live the kind of life that is best forgotten about as soon as possible, lest the sheer glamour of it follow you home.

Fourteen years ago, Pam Allard was a peace corps volunteer in central Tanzania. Then she wasn't, then she met her future husband Eric (a Kenyan of Italian/French extraction who owns a nearby seafood factory and probably moonlights as a model for menswear) and they moved to the coast to start a family. I'm smoothing/simplifying a lot. Pam is the sort of person who can do 10 difficult things well at the same time and still maintain levels of buoyant pep that most humans can't reach without the aid of expensive pharmaceuticals. After we left, there was much discussion as to whether - in a JUST universe - Pam could possibly have been so spectacularly ideal without some correspondingly evil second life lurking in a closet somewhere. No evidence of wickedness surfaced during our stay, though to be honest no real investigative energy was put to the task. We were too busy enjoying her company.

When she isn't designing furniture or chairing the school board or running a local aid organization, she's property managing for the other homes along their secluded section of coastline. Many are abandoned, and Pam finds tenants who are willing to pay a standard American rent - fabulous by Tanzanian standards - that she uses to fix up the place and make it sellable. This scheme was described to me as we all sat in the shallow surf below their house. It turns out I could live in a dilapidated mansion on the Indian Ocean for less money than I paid for the privilege of sleeping on the floor of a friend's study this past spring.

This realization was recorded in the journal like so :

Time slowed and the seconds clicked forward with increasing consequence as the whole picture began to ratchet slowly in to alignment with a glorious ideal. The raw possibility of this new future, stretching out across my vision like finely wrought webbing that stretched out from the horizon, enveloping the bobbing boats and stone steps and red sandy cliffs, each strand of potential catching the light of a low sun with the gloss of a freshly packaged dream."

I was rather taken with the idea.

Who wouldn't be? Mwambani, the village where Pam and her family live, is far enough from Tanga to give the impression of being a real outpost, which of course amplifies the whole dusty mystique of living on the coast of Tanzania. From the bus station, it's about a 20 minute drive, 15 of which is spent navigating a muddy braid of roads and paths that stretch from the main road to the ocean, snaking through napping goats and wandering cows and pond-sized puddles and little cement mosques bristling with acoustic equipment. Past palm trees and schoolfulls of waving children and a long line of thatch roofs with bright lines of laundry out front and friendly faces waving hello from the front step.

As Pam herself described it; "Paradise, more or less."

Each morning Andrea and I would knock back malaria meds and walk the 1/2 a mile across Mwambani to the Allard compound for breakfast. Sonya would have been awake just long enough to slice up a few mangos for breakfast but never so long as to make us feel as though we were putting her out, and, after eating a delicious bowl of honey-sweetened oatmeal and fruit, we would spend the morning chatting and drinking tea. Not a great deal was accomplished during our stay in Tanga, but maybe that was the point.

Near the middle of the week, while walking through the fish market, Sonya spotted a big red snapper on the central trading palette (where the daily take is dumped and bid upon) and after Andrea had bargained one of the local mongers down to a price she found him to be appropriately unhappy with (Andrea is very good at haggling) we had it scraped and sliced and plopped in to a little black plastic bag to carry home. That night it was shared with everyone on the compound and even Eric (who, as you might imagine, has strongly held opinions about the the proper preparation of anything aquatic) admitted it was pretty damn good. After dinner, we all nestled back in to deep couches (of Pam's design) out on the veranda and, sipping from glasses of the fine wine that one of the neighbors had brought over, talked and sang and played guitar long in to a cool African night.

Paradise, more or less.

There were other episodes - discovering the world's best hamburgers, evening strolls through goopy mangroves, the disappearance of George and the arrival of Wayne, my unlikely acquisition of a yoga bag, the colossal clothing market and my predictable defeat playing carnival games (which Andrea paid for), the fierce competition for lassi supremacy between mango and banana - but I'll stop here for now.