Infatuation. That’s a good word for our dizzy relationship with places we feel particular affinity for. I’ve often thought this–that our relationship to, say, a city, has the same qualities as our relationship to a lover or a partner. I feel that with Oxford–this is what I keep trying and then re-trying to represent in The Book, The Book which has become like a beast in my mind. I keep trying to over-complicate it, as if I don’t trust myself, when really it is all very simple. Really it is only a manifestation of a love affair with a particular place.

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After lunch we take our time. I sunbathe by the edge of the lawn, watched by naughty monkeys and the occasional brave pair of rock hyraxes. My soundtrack is made up of incessant, gaseous grunts from the hippo and the shrill notes of the birds.

I sit for too long, too close to the sun, and then I have that heavy feeling, which comes over you just before sleep, or sometimes vertigo; my lids half-close against the glare, my limbs go sticky with sweat. My head feels hazy, full of sand; I’ve no doubt that, were I to suddenly stand, I would briefly but powerfully become dizzy, overcome by the black mist of heat-and-inertia-induced weakness.

So I move slowly to the shade, set up camp again on the smooth, cool terrace. I don’t know where everybody has gone–off hunting monkeys with slingshots, perhaps, or enjoying an impromptu snooze.

Laughter comes from inside. Grunts form the disgruntled hippos at the lake. I remember suddenly an ornament from my childhood, a blueish-green glass hippo, flat on one side, which stood, I’m sure, in the bathroom for quite some time. I feel it’s possible I even used to play with it in the bath.

Speaking of baths: I watch birds taking a bath. Action fails me. The monkeys crash onto the tin roof. They have enough energy for all of us.

I move back into the sun. I lie on a deck chair reading Blaine Harden’s piece on good intentions in the Turkana district of Kenya. He writes about the Norwegians, who decided to take the old fishing proverb literally, and not only teach the Turkana tribe how to fish (incidentally, these pastoral people consider fishing to be only a last resort, the desperate measure of a man who can’t keep his herd in tact), but also to build a multi-million dollar frozen fish plant in the middle of the desert. Within two days the plant had run out of fuel, and the attempt was deemed well-intentioned but misguided. And so it goes in Africa, Harden writes–money and wasted resources are poured in, but in the case of a flailing continent, it really isn’t the thought that counts. They need more than good intentions, they need good solid thought, research, and proper infrastructure.

Then I take a nap, being remote as I am from Turkana and its troubles.

Later we go into Naivasha to run some errands. We stroll half-anxiously up and down the main street. We attract glances by dint of our incongruity. One man wants to sell us something, but we decline the offer; otherwise people steer clear, as if we don’t really exist, maybe. A sweaty illusion; a pair of shadows. It’s a heavy, muggy afternoon, and the street moves quite slowly. Once a vehicle pulls into the post office and expels a brazen, pink-faced white woman, but otherwise we are on a brightly-coloured Mars. Our lives do not overlap with theirs in any way. The facades crumble and the shops seem asleep; in the bank, I see a woman in flared suit trousers and high-heeled sandals, and am almost relieved at the familiarity of her bank-teller composure, except that it feels even stranger out here. I see she looks out of place, too.

The security for the bank is thoroughly modern. An askari in a baseball helmet, holding his gun, sits outside and waves us in, one at a time. We push through one glass door and then wait while a metal detector scans us. A prim voice says, “Metal Detected. Please Step Forward,” and we push at the door and stumble into an air-conditioned, empty lair. Going out is just the same, but there doesn’t seem to really be any concern about safety and security, as if it’s all an elaborate theatrical production, and in a way, I’m sure it is–to make “us” feel safer, and “them” even further removed; but the reality is always simpler than that and in this case the truth is this: we’re all as fragile as each other.

We drive back, away from Naivasha, towards the edge of the lake. The street is teeming with walkers, cyclists, kids on their way home from school, in uniforms and winter hats. Along the side of the road runs a piece of the original Lunatic Express, now more or less abandoned, though all the infrastructure is there.

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Imagine the explorers of old, on their slow dogged ships. How long it would take them to discover this place; how much lore and witchcraft it would seem to possess when, alighting from the motherly deck of their womb-like ship, they saw–this. The strange fruits and dark skin of exoticism. How like a birth. To be evacuated from the warm familiar into a place with no language known to you. Is this why we crave the experience of travel–at least why the thought appeals to us, even if we do it rarely ourselves? Not escapism at all, really. But a return to the earliest sensation. Birth, rebirth. The oldest story. It’s always the same stories.

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The other country, is it anticipated or half-remembered?
Carol Ann Duffy, “In Your Mind”

At breakfast, X reminds us of Paris Syndrome, a transient psychological disorder that strikes certain Japanese tourists visiting Paris for the first time. It’s caused by the vast chasm between their expectations of the city and its busy, gritty reality. The distance proves too great, and they become literally sick from shock. I remember finding that Paris far surpassed any half-formed expectations I might have had of it, but then, my expectations come usually from fictional representations, and in the case of Paris it was mostly Hemingway’s poverty-stricken portrayal in A Moveable Feast that formed the pre-images in my head, and when I got there and found that time had marched on here, too, I was relieved, in a way, and refreshed by the knowledge that the city was partly Hemingway’s but also far bigger.

Then I think of the infamous mal d’afrique, the dark yearning for the lost continent, the soul-sucking craving for something almost indescribable except in terms of geography. So strange, these sicknesses for places; so powerful geography’s grip on us, as if our bodies as well as our minds have been infected by maps and all that they represent.

Once bitten by an idea of a place (an image, a book, a line of poetry, a friend’s recommendation), our dreams, our very beings, become infested, and then the rest is inescapable. We go away–if not with our bodies, at least in our minds. Expectation matters. Representation, reality, logistics, and a thousand other tiny factors influence our desire, as well as our ability, to travel; more than that, they influence the outcome of any journey.

And it’s all to do with these place-ailments; there are more of them than we think, they are everywhere, we are constantly being called to or repelled from new and different geographies, always offered the chance to form an identification in our hearts, an affiliation in our minds which so aligns us with a destination (even if that destination is only a favourite bench in a little city square–travel is minute, infinitesimal in its everyday possibilities and occurrences).

I read a poem, “In Your Mind,” by Carol Ann Duffy–The other country, is it anticipated or half-remembered? she asks, and the truth is that it is both. Its language is muffled by the rain which falls all afternoon/one autumn in England. I’ve been half-remembering Kenya for years, though I’ve never been here until now. I’ve remembered through other people’s eyes; it makes the world such a strange place to be.

I am in Kenya. Say it again, so that it begins to sink in: I am in Kenya. But still half-disbelieve it, because after all this time, all this imagining, it no longer seems possible, it no longer seems like a real place; it’s only a recurring dream, or a place in the back of the mind. And then it occurs to me that I have lived in Oxford for two years and am only now getting used to it as a real place, only now coming to my senses; so how can I begin to do it here, in so short a span of time? “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are,” Samuel Johnson wrote–but how are they, really? Giddy with the thought of actually being here, I suddenly mistrust my own senses. Things as they are, I think, are inseparable from things as they may be. Things as they are are only the way they are because of how we have imagined them. I read Duffy again. “Lost but not lost,” she writes. I am lost but not lost–

Then suddenly you are lost but not lost, dawdling
on the blue bridge, watching six swans vanish
under your feet. The certainty of a place turns on the lights
all over town, turns up the scent on the air. For a moment
you are there, in the other country, knowing its name.
And then a desk. A newspaper. A window. English rain.

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The lake is vast but has been shrinking. The hippos were worried during the drought, huddling anxiously together, passing loud fretful nights and long hot days. This is what Naivasha does; at times, like in the late 1800s, it has shrunk to practically a puddle. And this year when the short rains would not come it was not only the hippos who were edgy.

But here we are, now, after the rains. We sip coffee on the yellow terrace. The lake, they say, changes colour, and I can see it doing so now, shifting from ghost-grey to something, something almost mauve, a sort of brown-purple-silver shade that runs into the horizon, into the hazy impression of Naivasha town, and then the milky blue sky.

We take a walk. This is the morning ritual, and we are almost religious in our careful observation of it. Not a foot out of line; you can’t be too cautious when the mean-faced buffalo are about. We cut through the green hills. They would make Hemingway proud, these hills; but just a few weeks ago the rains still had not come, and the land was parched and broken, and the animals were dying. The Masai Mara, we’re told, was littered with carcasses. A smell, and a feeling, came over the land. You can hardly believe that now: we’re in a paradise, a verdant wonderland.

A haven for creatures of great beauty and exotic allure. We see zebra, impala, giraffe, jackal, lovebirds, waterbuck, gazelle, eland. The earth is heaving with strange life. As humans we are small, and lonely, and half-mad. Occasionally in the distance we see a man on a bicycle, in a cloud of dust, but the Africans think the white man’s penchant for walking straight into the heart of danger is absurd, and though you see them commuting to the flower farms at odd hours, though they’re often out here in the bush without protection of gun or Land Cruiser, you won’t catch them doing it for fun.

I think how easy it would be to become complacent. The zebra don’t even give us a glance; we cut through them like we are parting a patterned ocean. The jackal, with their furtive eyes and hunched, wary bodies, trot far ahead, and even the leopard are never seen except via the gashes they leave sometimes in trees; but only last week a buffalo bull charged our friends, and, they say, if he’d wanted to get us, he would have.

Simple. Remember when I said that the lives of men are huge? That the rules out here are unknown? Suddenly, away from the hum of cars, the tin shacks, the human traces, I remember that the lives of men are only as huge as they’re allowed to be; that the rules when you remove the human element are as simple as they have been for the last billion years. You survive.

And the lake changes colour with every hour; and in some years it shrinks and in some years it grows, and though now they blame it on the flower farms, on bad irrigation, and though they may be right, it’s still bigger than all of the big lives of men put together, and what can we really do in the face of that, but sit and listen to the hippos?

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