Dark Star Safari

 ...the Africa I knew was sunlit and lovely, a soft green emptiness of low flat-topped trees and dense bush, bird-squawks, giggling kids, red roads, cracked and crusty brown cliffs that looked newly baked, blue remembered hills, striped and spotted animals, and ones with yellow fur and fangs, and every hue of human being, from pink-faced planters in knee socks and shorts to brown Indians and Africans with black gleaming faces and at the far end of the spectrum some people so dark they were purple.

The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone ‘on safari’ is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.

Out of touch in Africa was where I wanted to be. The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party’s extension, being kept waiting all your working life—the homebound writer’s irritants. 

But also being kept waiting is the human condition.

Travel in the African bush can also be a sort of revenge on mobile phones and fax machines, on telephones and the daily paper, on the creepier aspects of globalization that allow anyone who chooses to get their insinuating hands on you. I desired to be unobtainable.

I was going to Africa for the best reasons—in a spirit of discovery; and for the pettiest—simply to disappear, to light out, with a suggestion of I dare you to try and find me.

Everyone always available at any time in the totally accessible world seemed to me pure horror. It made me want to find a place that was not accessible at all… no phones, no fax machines, not even mail delivery, the wonderful old world of being out of touch; in short, of being far away.

The whole point of my leaving was to escape this stuff- to be out of touch. The greatest justification for travel was not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.

Africa is one of the last great places on earth a person can vanish into. I wanted that. Let them wait. I have been kept waiting far too many times for far too long.

----Paul Theroux