Memory Flashes

We spent the last night at the end of our 2009 trip to Namibia at a small lodge close to the airport. It was probably the least impressive of the places we'd stayed yet, for reasons unknown, it's been flashing back into my memory over the last few days. I'm reminded of the walk we took on the last afternoon, one during which I took photographs of the African bush, to remind me of its colours, its heat, of the battering shriek of the crickets....

....and of its wildlife - though there was nothing more impressive than the ant hills built by those energetic creatures during the excavations for their nests.

In the late afternoon we sat in the lodge's hide, overlooking a waterhole whose one reward for our patience was a black-backed jackal. However, we were treated to....

....a wonderful farewell African sunset.

The Namibian holiday was our first, very tentative return to Africa following our retreat from Rhodesia in 1970. It made us determined to go back again, which we did in subsequent years, each time to Tanzania. Those holidays provided us with hundreds of photographs which, with time on my hands, I now enjoy going through.

But the memory flashes are different, for with them I am, for a few moments, immersed. I not only see a scene, I hear its sounds, I feel its heat: it is real and, yes, I wish I was back there living that time again.