Thirty two days ago, five thousand feet above the ground in a teensy aluminum tube held aloft by two gutsy little props, I unwrapped one of my complimentary muffins from its red saran wrap and, with a little help from my thumb, managed to get the whole thing past my teeth in one go. I then reached for my complimentary can of coke, leaned my head back and soaked the whole electric dose with warm fizz until it slid down the hatch like mooshed banana. Thus fueled, with a sideways glance out the window I flipped open my journal and set about the task of Painting the Scene with a kind of beret-grade poetic pontification that I can only summon with the help of a serious fix. Eyes glazed over with a high fructose sheen, I began.

"Kilimanjaro slips past - a jagged black ridge emerging from the low evening blanket of felted gray fog, a rough slice up to the gray/white cap, sharply raised 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."

I underlined GODS several times to indicate gravity and close my initial entry with a note to a more sober self, "(like in satellite pictures)."

Absent any compelling exterior motivation for traveling, an interior one can always be found in sending my normal, day-to-day writing censor (a miserly workaholic with eyes as red as his pen) off on a similar holiday and, liberated in his absence, imagine myself to be a totally uninhibited wanderer/poet of epic affiliations. Kerouac! Fermor! Steinbeck! Byron! I go where no man has gone before, think thoughts no man has ever thought and use phrases like 'ultimate reckoning' with no apparent sense of irony. Whole afternoons are spent indoors just getting down the right combination of adjectives to describe how 'sublimely medicinal' my breakfast just was or lament at how 'repugnantly piscivorous' my diet has become. At almost every turn, an actual record of events gives way to The Story, which is sure to march on and become a matter of celebrated historical record. (Or, perhaps more to the point, at least be a version of the trip which measures up to those toothless little moans of nostalgia I'll make in fifty years when grandchildren are helping me flip through old travel photos.)

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 twelve day stretch from Kigoma to Arusha was truly my own, during which time I managed to thoroughly sunburn and bruise myself while overspending on food, lodging and trinkets by an embarrassing margin. It's a miracle I made it back to Arusha at all. Thankfully, all of this had no effect on the Noble Adventurer you'll find parading through the pages of my purple pad, and grim memories of peeling the better part of my face off in to a guesthouse sink will be happily lost to the increasingly foggy past. All the while, the Noble Adventurer sped daringly between dazzling envelopes of adventure and intrigue, through a world ripe for the taking; braving the dim haunts and sullen stretches of tourism's displaced underworld to interrogate the Authentic Voice; an elaborate stream of compelling characters who fit snugly and significantly in to some great unfurling of a comprehensive new worldview that humanity might not be ready for. Sunburns do not feature.

As liberating as it was to document life through so rosy a lens, there are discouragingly few tangible facts that I might use to drive forward a normal, human-sounding 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 a rapidly disintegrating recollection of what actually happened. We'll give it a shot anyhow. Also, there's no way I'll be able (or want) to cram the whole trip in to one post, so I think breaking it down in to Andrea's Sensible Chunks (if she ever starts a soup company, you heard it here first) makes sense. Plus, dividing the trip in to separate posts has the added benefit of making me seem like a significantly more prolific writer than I actually am, which for anyone trying to keep a blog alive has obvious appeal.

Let's get down to it.

CHAPTER 1

Our first stop was Tanga, a 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 her's from med school. By the time we arrived, the clinic was rapidly becoming a dream that would never be, but they had fallen in with The Allards, an American/Kenyan family who were to be the first test of just how far back my eyeballs could roll in to the throes of a poetic swoon over The Ideal Life. More on that in a moment.

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 they moved to the coast to start a family (I'm smoothing/simplifying here). 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, which - as this scheme was described to me as we sat in the shallow surf outside their house - is how I discovered that 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.

Or, as it was recorded in the Purple Pad :

"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. My eyes slipped out of focus as the raw possibility of this new future stretched out like finely wrought webbing from the horizon, rapidly advancing across the landscape, enveloping the bobbing boats and stone steps and red sandy cliffs in seconds, catching the light of a low sun like 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 Africa. 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 ragged line of simple 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 across Mwambani to the Allard compound for breakfast. (This was usually a delightful walk, excepting the few puddles-flanked-by-bushes that could absolutely not be walked around and were lined with such shockingly adhesive mud that a morning pedestrian could easily be relieve of his flip flop mid-stride, forcing a rather wobbly mud-hunt for the lost flop with a cautiously extended toe. One never knows what might be hiding in puddles.) 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. It must be said that not a great deal was actually accomplished during our stay in Tanga, but that turned out to be just fine.

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 Pam's husband Eric (who, as you might imagine, has strongly held opinions about the the proper preparation of anything remotely 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.

weren't exploring Tanga, afternoons were spent lounging around "The Pink House" (a quaint little bungalow Sonya and Maria were renting from Pam), preparing food, drinking beer and preventing Monkey, Sonya and Maria's little bat-faced kitten, from escaping out the front door where Adabu, the Allard's ridgebackish dog - who had recently discovered firsthand that cats are rather tasty - was waiting. Patiently. Monkey is cute but has an endless supply of energy which he spends every last watt of attacking feet and fingers and being such a feisty little pain in the ass that all of us gave serious thought to 'accidentally' leaving the door open around lunchtime. We never did, but he WAS hurled and/or punted across the room several times after breaking through skin and that last extra reserve of patience we seem to afford infants of any species. Defenders of the cute and cuddly need not worry, he bounces and doesn't appear to bleed.

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. After all, this is only chapter one.