Last Sunrise

This was my last African sunrise, a view over the Indian Ocean from a beach on the east coast of Zanzibar seen through the outrigger of an ngalowa.

I had woken early, 5.30am, and walked out onto the beach in front of our room. At that time the air is chill, the sea a mirror, and the only evidence of the approach of dawn a greyness in the eastern sky. The beach sand, washed by the night's high tide, is cold, crunchy underfoot. I remember seeing the neighbouring village's ngalowas away to the right, so I walked along the beach towards them, reaching them as the sun broke the horizon.

While I knew this was the last morning of our beach holiday and, therefore, the last opportunity for a shot like this, it never occurred to me that we wouldn't be back in Tanzania if not the following year, then the one after that. Our lives changed direction, our African holidays replaced by holidays in Canada. 

So I didn't think it would be my last East African sunrise but, as it turned out, it was made memorable by the boat, for I have always thought of the ngalowa, such an elegant yet practical machine, as one of the icons of that African coast, just like haggis is for Scotland. But, if you look closely, this is an old ngalowa, seaweed growing from its anchor rope, its wood desiccated by years under the African sun.

I'm not going to see Africa again. I'm too old, too increasingly decrepit, for safaris, so I now know that my last view of the continent that has been such an important part of my life was this one, a study in blue taken in the late afternoon from a cruise ship leaving the Mediterranean. It seems, in a way, such an anticlimax.