Under African Skies

I’m sitting on the bank of the Luangwa river. The sun has just set, painting the sky an ostentatious orange – reminiscent of Doug West’s paintings of an Arizona sunset. In front of me there are at least 50 hippos bellowing and snorting and getting ready to leave the water where they spend their entire day, for the bank where they pass their nights grazing on plants.   I’ve just watched the first star come out after a long day of driving in a remote corner of Africa. Six hours on a 4 wheel drive road, many river crossing and we have not seen any other tourists in 3 or 4 days- in fact only one vehicle in days of driving.

The African sky is an interesting one, often framed by Mopani or flat topped acacia trees near camp. Last night I looked at the Southern Cross hovering over our campfire on a different river and mulled how despite its peacefulness, the southern sky always seems alien to me.

I’m actually mystified by this.

Even though I lived in the Southern Hemisphere for over 4 years and spent hundreds of nights at sea on my boat looking up at the Southern Cross and others in the southern sky I never feel quite right seeing the southern constellations.

I’m not an astronomy buff. Despite the fact that I have spent thousand of nights camped out under the stars in Colorado or Utah, or on my boat in the northern hemisphere, I can still identify only a few constellations or planets- really just the big dipper, the north star and Orion. I admit I’ve done lots of drugs but never quite enough to make the Scorpio scorpion out of a few bright spots in the night sky.

And yet, even though I cannot recognize most of our northern hemisphere constellations somehow by spending so many night in a sleeping bag looking up at them, they have entered my sub conscious. Maybe they are a part of my DNA. I’ve been happy and at home in Australia and Africa but still when lying in a sleeping bag and gazing a the night sky it never feels quite right unless I can place the dipper and follow it’s two leading stars to Polaris- our north star and my guiding light.

In the 1800’s Cowboys herding cattle north from Texas to the railhead at Cheyenne, Wyoming alternated turns on their night watches by watching the big dipper rotate around Polaris.  And much as am loving both Africa and traveling, I won’t be home until I too can watch the Big Dipper do its night dance around the North Star.

Rob