Hah, like Sandi I stepped off the plane at NBO, looked around and thought, &quot;Yowza! I can't believe it; I'm in <i>Africa</i>.&quot; Heart a-thumping, a tiny bit misty-eyed.

Cannot wait to go back.

She looked me in the eye in the Okavango. I fell in love with her in the prow of a mokoro at Xigera, she was cloaked in gold and diamonds sparkles shooting from the cools surface of her waters.

She held out her hand and invited me in &quot;Come play with us in Africa, we are the sme age&quot;.

She rolled in the waterhole to reveal a gaping mouth and pink glistening back.

She chimed in the throats of a thousand bell frogs all through the velvety black night in the dark of the moon, alight with a million fireflies.

She washed over me in the sunrise and reflected her glory from the feathers of the lilac-breasted roller.


But I truly fell in love with her, Falling still - when I stood and walked beside the most magnificent beings I have ever met - Jabu, Thembi and Morula in our walk across the tall dried grass and mopane. Smelling their elephant breath, wiping their elephant snot from my camera lense, holding my hand as we walked along in the African bush.

Every scent, sound, sight is remembered as of a lover - distant. And returning will be my heart's delight.

Jude

This will probably sound strange to many but for me it was seeing the clouds over Kenya as we were flying in from Heathrow. My mother sent me back 'home' when I was sixteen since we had left East Africa when I was four. I remember looking at the clouds and they looked like cotton growing in the fields, rough, not bleached white and super fluffy. I always have my head in the clouds I guess. That and the smell and colour of the earth when I arrived in Entebbe.

Juliet

Hey Jude!

...&quot;a poet amongst us&quot; very nice!