Africa

We spent last night poring over the details of this stunning piece of cartography, an old roll down style World War I map of Africa, its territories parceled out like hot pizza slices for the world’s colonial powers. Even the Italians took a bite in the form of Libya and Somaliland. The Engineer found the Africa map alongside several others in a Wisconsin dumpster and for years now the South America map – torn and sepia-toned and peppered with 1920s shipping routes– remained fixed on the wall at the top of the staircase, where we often sat dreaming, our arms around Kiwi’s shoulders, imagining all the places we’d someday see – the Amazon, the Peruvian highlands, potato farms and llamas and crystal Argentine rivers cut only by the edge of a kayak paddle. I study these maps more often than my 401k, a mistake that will someday haunt me, but for today, I’ll take a busted map over a crumbling portfolio.

We’ve never wanted to be greedy with travel – collecting countries like trinkets, bagging mountains like prizes, bragging about a place we’d come to know, yet only experienced for a week from the comfort of a western hotel. It was clear to us after a bike trip across Nebraska that there was much exoticism to be found in the heartland of America and so we made a solemn promise to explore more of our own turf.

And yet! Poring over this map of Africa now, imagining the crumpled Ethiopian highlands emptying their precious water into the Nile, the whole eastern continent shifting and faulting away from the Red Sea, like an angry spouse in the middle of the night, inching away from what once seemed like a permanent institution – how can we not want to experience that landscape?

And so we plan. Hope. Tap away on our keyboards until we make the Africa journey a reality. And if all goes well, this time around we’ll bring home a friend for the little black dog.