The Beach

This is the beach of my dreams, a wide, sandy beach somewhere along the coast of East Africa. It isn't a perfect beach - there are patches of seaweed into which are mixed the human flotsam washed in from a mighty ocean - and it certainly hasn't been raked and manicured for the tourists.

The vegetation at the back of the beach is dominated by high coconut palms between which are stands of casuarina. In places this becomes impenetrable, the home of iguanas and, further back, all sorts of game including monkeys and Cape buffalo.

The beach is deserted for it is early morning, before six, with the sun not yet up above the distant horizon. The only sign of human existence is the 'ngalawa, that elegant, lateen-rigged canoe that is the poor-man's fishing boat of this coast. There is a chill in the air and there is silence, a deceptive silence because this beach is rarely silent for, far out, there runs a fringing reef across which the great swell of the Indian Ocean breaks in a ceaseless roar: it is just that one is so accustomed to the sound that it becomes unnoticed.

This is the beach of my dreams because I was born at the back of one; I lived at the back of one. I was brought up to play on its sands, to make boats out of it's flotsam, to swim in its waves, and to walk far out across its low-tide pools in search of shells and shoals of tropical fish and corals and sea urchins. This is the beach of my dreams and I accept now that I will likely never see it again.