First Impressions

I first saw Africa through an air plane window. Flying somewhere over Namibia, I saw flatness. Unbelievable flatness. So flat that the small white clouds left exact replicas of themselves strewn across the landscape. As if the sun were shining straight down with the cloud the only thing standing in it's way. There is no depth to the ground just brown crisscrossed with the straightness of roads. The first brown was spotted, like the neck of a giraffe- brown on brown in irregular pentagons occasionally interrupted by a meager stream trying hard to go somewhere but ending no where. A large body of water somewhere mid country shows its edges surrounded by glaring white which is assumed to be salt. The giraffe spots have been replaced by large sheets of mottled brown lacking any definition except the clouds leaving their footprints. There is no lushness here. No imagination; only the harsh reality of a world where the sun beats down relentlessly and life struggles to survive.

As we got closer to Johannesburg the landscape became more familiar. You could see blocks of land allocated to agriculture and farming. The occasional house could be seen and things got greener. Areas of rock could be seen emerging from the flatness; small lakes and bodies of water. Many farmers fields are round, following the outline set by the irrigation lines. Fields vary in colour- some red, others black, many a dull yellow. As we descend to the ground, there are trees and suburbs and it feels like flying into someone's scale model train set- things seem just a little too perfect. The houses are cookie-cutter, the trees too green. There is a lot of space- which is strange coming from a Canadian.