News from an atoll in the Indian ocean

As I write to you, dear friends, three sharks are circling around our boat. Frank is out there kayaking and for now, I choose to stay down below, listen to a violin concerto, drink coffee and write. My head has been filled with poetry ever since we got here. Where? Not so sure. Technically, we are at Bassas da India, an atoll in the middle of the Mozambique channel, but truly, with the senses of a simple mortal human being, it feels like another world, in the middle of nowhere. It feels like a place where anything could be possible.

I feel like being in a dream and being given a pen, and told, “now, write something beautiful.” I don’t even know where to start. My senses are overwhelmed. It feels like touching the bottom of the ocean or reaching the top of the sky, a breathless moment with no more relativity, nothing to measure things against, only our memories and the surrounding objects. We have started taking malaria pills since we’ll soon be in Madagascar. I don’t think I’ve had hallucinations yet, as one of the side effects of the pill along with other types of mental disorder, nonetheless, I find it hard to wrap my mind around our current experience. I keep on imagining the planet Earth and seeing us, like a little dot in the big blue somewhere on the southwestern hemisphere, but to be sincere, geography, physics and most hard sciences partially escape me in this situation and somehow I trust more my senses or my imagination that make me think of the starry night as a warm blanket enveloping us and making us feel safe in the darkness and our smallness floating on these waters.

Our time in Durban was well spent. The city has slowly filled up with meaning. It didn’t mean anything more than a big South African city, a place we would go to and look forward to receiving mail. I am so glad we made this last stop in Africa and through new friends, my appreciation for and understanding of the continent grew in a way I can hardly describe with words. We saw markets with half-dried bones and skeletons and once used-to-be animals and bark and rocks and exotic flora and fauna we’ve never encountered before. The people in this market wore white or dark terracotta face paint derived from a wetted soft stone. It all looked magical but smelled quite scary. We did not buy our fruits and vegetables there. We got the chance to have many great conversations with our new friends from this part of the world and gained a more real image of life here, and finally, I think for some moments, we crossed over the borders of being just tourists and we became a little more. After all, we spent over a month in South Africa. My heart is full of unforgettable moments: my first rowing lesson in a double scull in the harbour is one of them as are the many images, sounds and smells now carved into my memory that will always remind me of “Africa in the summer” as a friend of ours said one night with a smile that is impossible to forget. Needless to say, standing in the bow, I cried as we sailed out of Durban, a little like when we left Lunenburg harbour on March 28th. But isn’t life about being in the moment?

Still, I just can’t forget so many things and here and now, everything is possible. Maybe time travel? Certainly a place from which to reflect, to linger in moments that have moved us, moments that emerge from dreams made in the middle of the ocean. Maybe in five or six days we will be in Nosy Be, an island off the northwestern coast of Madagascar. I am learning Malagasy and can’t wait to see the nature there and meet people. I’ll be in touch and will write more if I can focus my mind that is now overflowing. I hope these words still make sense to you. This is how I am living this experience. At night I watch the shooting stars.