Well...lets start that over again, shall we?
Wow four pages of entry deleted with a glitch in the computer. A ghost in the machine. What I want to know is...what button did I push to make all of that just disappear? Like poof!-Gone!
Sigh....
Well here we go. I started this blog as a diary for the travels my family has taken over the years, starting with our sabbatical to Northern Spain in 2012 (see previous posts). I then quite effectively I would say shared our daily schedule of our trip to China in 2015, three weeks in three cities in the country of China. I can honestly say, at risk of being tailed or followed or gaining a big fat unctious virus on my computer that I am glad I went to China, the people were lovely, but China itself is an unsettling place. There is a pall over the entire nation. I felt constantly like the views we were seeing and the stories we were being told were falsehoods.
To this day whenever I am outside working in the garden or going for a walk and I see a dragonfly I am reminded....the ONLY wildlife we ever saw in any city or countryside was either bugs or dragonflies. We never heard birds. We never saw birds at the seashore, seagulls were not to be found, and the only fish we ever saw were fat globolous koi fish, technocolored neon and dragon-faced. And planted, of course. Yes we saw fishermen, but the amount of debris and floating trash their fishing lines had to negotiate were depressing. All with the background of bulking massive boats and ships being constructed in huge shipyards. In every capable body of water.
So I can honestly say...with all of the experiences and all of the interesting things we saw in the Mysterious Orient...I don't really need to go back. Maybe it was the rampant case of C-diff or ectoplasmic diarrhea that I experienced...having to be within a few feet of a bathroom for the last ten days of any trip can color your experience-or that it took nearly six months to recover.
Or the fact that my eardrum shattered when I boarded our flight from Los Angeles to Denver. The air pressure on the China flight never seemed to correct itself, and as a result when I was on our short flight from LA to Denver I had a throbbing pain travwel the length of my left jaw and explode out of my left ear. Incredible pain and quite a bit of blood. Thankfully the gentleman who was seated to my right was a grandfather and he said he's used to seeing blood, and he and my other seatmate called the flight attendant over to take care of me. A hot towel compress later and I was able to survive the rest of my travel. The ear nose and throat doctor who saw me the following day dislodged a canal of clotted blood out of my ear, and I could instantly hear again.
So no, it is not on my list of places I need to return to again. But Spain and now Kenya?
Kenya I will have to return.
Kenya is in my heart for the rest of my life. I am forever grateful.
So yes I am going to finally recall the splendor and the beauty that is Kenya, and with the help of my cameras I can recall our trip.
If you wonder about the delay in writing about our journey well....the end of 2019 and then subsequently 2020 has basically kicked my ass.
So maybe a return to Africa is needed.
Ernest Hemingway said it best
"All I wanted to do was go back to Africa. We had not left it yet but when I would wake at night I would lie listening, homesick for it already".
