It’s hard to tell where a non-fictional plot starts and ends, but I want to say that this one started with a perplexed elephant in Botswana, continued with a burning car in the Namib desert, and ended with a waterfall wedding in Zimbabwe, and everything that happened before and after was a different story.

I could tell you that story, but I think it’s just as well if you tell it yourself. Your imagination will do the talking anyway and the less I prompt it, the more it talks.

Let me just say this:

…it started with a disheartening noise somewhere deep inside the car’s guts and we pulled over onto the desert shoulder as the engine sputtered out. The night really is darkest before the dawn and the red glow by the trunk was vivid against the blackness. “The car is on fire,” she said. I thought it was the hazards flickering in a cloud of sand our tires had whirled up. She was right and I was wrong, and the other half of our quartet had already started bolting away from the car like springboks. It was an oily fire somewhere underneath the trunk where a fat jerrycan brimming with gasoline was begging for its big moment. But the more certain I was that the whole thing would blow up any moment, the more I dragged my feet, heavy with the imminent loss of all my tangible and intangible possessions in that red family car – every notebook page a piece of my heart, every picture a piece of my memory. And here my memory fails me a bit when I try to retrace the detours that led me from the burning car to the waterfall wedding – the 3000 km pickup, the three months in a tent in a Windhoek backyard, so your guess is almost as good as mine…