Ava & Xavier’s African Adventure

“This is Africa dear boy!” Allan Quartermain (played by Sean Connery) explains in a gravelly Scottish burr. It would’ve been around this time last year I was watching ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ and decided it would be a novel idea to get on a plane to Africa.

That plane leaves shortly, whereupon I will be trading my aging sapphire Tudor bonnet for a pith helmet. From an equatorial point of origin in Uganda, this anthropological jaunt will trek overland across Lake Victoria and the Serengeti to Zanzibar, before flying to Cape Town and plotting a course along the South African coast, then turning Northward toward Livingstone and Victoria Falls. Its objective is to collect as many marbles of experience, angles of perspective and meaningful connections as possible inside the span of thirty days.

Avid readers (if you’ll allow such an absurdity) may remember Ava, who made a cameo appearance some five years ago in ‘Schmoozing.’ My long-time best friend, muse, and partner in crime will be accompanying me to ensure I don’t join a herd of Giraffe, never to return to familiar society, and to stop me from attempting to stage a coup in Zimbabwe. Hopefully her presence on this enterprise will ensure the chronicling of ’African Adventure’ will be less deadpan than Paul Theroux’s ‘Dark Star Safari,’ and (optimistically), read a little more like ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ by John Kennedy Toole.

This entry, when completed, will mark the 5th anniversary of sermon writing,  56th in a series of accidental essays which occupy a volume of nearing three hundred pages.

Ooo-wee!

PXW

 Graphic Copyright Luuk Gervink on deviantArt