In this post we gave you some tips for your first trip to Kenya, tips we personally tested in July of this year! Today we’ll tell you about our soul journey in four words: Africa, sea, people, safari.
Africa
Returning to Africa is always like returning to the origins, to the beginning, to the spark of everything.
Africa is beautiful, colorful, explosive, and always displays its purest essence. Trees sometimes grow horizontally, bent by the power of the wind. Animals live the law of the savannah, with fullness and dignity because this is the circle of life. The weather in July is sometimes changeable and capricious, unpredictable, as they say here. In this it resembles existence, that can change from one moment to the next. Even if the sky is clear, clouds can form, it can rain in an instant, a very strong wind can rise, but then, briefly, everything returns to the way it was before, in eternal alternation.
The sea in Kenya
The sea is a succession of iridescent hues from turquoise to blue, from black to the brown of seaweed, colors that blend together, blending like dense, vivid brushstrokes on the canvas of Africa. It is a consistent sea, alive in perpetual and incessant change. A sea always the same and always different, advancing and retreating, subject to the tides’ whims.
People in Kenya
In Africa, people see wealth differently than we do. People collaborate on everything, whether it’s hammering a nail or building a house. They do it “pole pole,” as they say, slowly, slowly, perhaps singing.
And then there are the children, who run toward you smiling, in their makeshift clothing, who look at you with their immense eyes, who hug you tightly. Words aren’t necessary, it doesn’t matter if we speak different languages. Communication passes through a language that can’t be seen, but that strikes a chord with the soul. Holding their hands, dancing, and singing with them is a reconnection with the purest and most ancestral feelings, which makes you forget the frenzy of the world, allowing you to live here and now.
Safari
Safari literally means “journey”. And this is how a safari should be interpreted and experienced: as a discovery, an undertaking, a sort of miracle. A safari doesn’t mean frantically chasing animals just to find and see them. It doesn’t mean chasing them, stalking them just to take a photo. It means tiptoeing into their world ethically, respecting their environment, their way of life. Observing them silently without interfering in their lives, spectators of an improvisational show that could have an infinite number of different endings, with the awareness and wonder that even a footprint or a trace has value, that seeing all the animals isn’t a given, but that doesn’t make the safari less valuable.
Animals must be respected because they are not attractions. Interacting with humans is unnatural for wild animals, a forced act that can be dangerous to both us and them. Entering the savannah is like entering a primordial world, made of silence, dust, and twisted shrubs rising from the red earth. It’s like straining your eyes to search for the silhouette of some animal moving slowly, warily, elegantly. In the savannah you learn patience, waiting, and movement, fluid and calm, because haste and noise are unforgiving mistakes. And you learn beauty, the fierce beauty of a lion or the geometric beauty of a zebra’s stripes, but also the raw beauty of the circle of life, a cycle of death and rebirth.
The beauty of traveling
Every time we travel, we must fill our eyes with beauty, a beauty so enormous that it seems to overflow. We must capture every detail, every nuance, every color, every pulse so we can frame them and hang them on the walls of our soul once we return home. Vivid images, which we wish would never fade, imprinted forever in our fleeting memory. We wish at least the negatives would remain so we can print them over and over again. Because traveling is also this: creating new memories that overlap with existing ones, a magical palette that tells the story of our lives.