The End.

Sitting at the little airport in Arusha, I feel slightly shaky and close to tears. It could be that it’s nearly 2pm and I haven’t eaten anything yet today…but more likely I’m just sad to leave. I hear the whir of propellers and the grumbling of an engine and look up to see the zebra stripes lift off the runway – Felix in his happy little 4-seater Cessna rumbles off and out of sight. With his sly but easy smile, Felix is a dapper pilot. On the flight in (I being the only person in the world who travels from Seronera to Arusha via NAIROBE and KILIMANJARO) he is confident and deft, but not serious. We pull a couple of wicked turns and tilts, and then this charming Swiss pulls out all the stops. Felix drops the plane faster than gravity’s grasp on our bodies and we do a brief few seconds in zero-G. Things go soaring through the cockpit – the ashtray (it’s an old plane) levitates past my head, my luggage relocates from the floor to the back seat, and the dirt flies up and into our hair and onto our laps. Felix looks a bit sheepish – “Guess I should vacuum, eh?” I am giggling like a little girl. We dust off and take stock of the damage and we do it again.

But now, sitting and trembling with my milky cup of tea at the little Coastal Air terminal, I am in vague disbelief that this summer is over. Later today, the exhaustion will set in as I haggle with the taxi from the airport. Sitting in rush hour traffic, a crazy man will try to climb into the cab with me. “Look!” he will say, frantically pointing to his hand, even though there is nothing there. HE will mime handcuffs and mumble, and my driver Jumal will step out and pull him away. I will get to the hostel hungry and weary and I will listen to some disgusting missionary shout over the phone to his brainwashed son, lecturing him about some dumb girl he is dating back home at his private Christian college in bungwater, VA. The man talks loud enough for the whole hostel to hear and prays loudly on his phone for his son to see the light. When I wind up across from this man at dinner, it is a good thing that I do not have the energy to tell him about the taste he leaves in my mouth, because I would not have the energy to stop myself.

But all of this will happen later. For now, I sit in retrospective and brooding silence. I am strangely sad to leave a place that I barely got to know, struck with a bizarre sense of loss to leave a place that I will return to in less than a year. I cannot explain these feelings so I do not try. For now I just sit in retrospective and brooding silence, wishing Serengeti a sad and silent goodbye.