A Room with a View

This is Day 2 of Writing 101.  

Today’s Prompt: If you could zoom through space in the speed of light, what place would you go to right now?

Today’s twist: organize your post around the description of a setting.

We have just arrived home from Kigoma, – dusty, road-weary, but still smiling about our time beside Tanzania’s other great lake, Tanganyika.

On the home straight, puttering slowly along amongst Mwanza’s congested afternoon traffic, we passed the sparkling waters and rocky outcrops of our beautiful Lake Victoria.  What a shame we can’t swim in her.   What a pity she is infested with Bilharzia, the parasite that enters the bloodstream through the skin and eventually causes internal organ shut-down.  I’m sorry to be so fickle Victoria, but already how I long to be back on Jakobsen’s Beach.

Let me take you there, just for a minute.

We’ve reached the end of the muddy track.  Put aside fears of getting bogged.  Pitched our wee tent under the protective arms of an acacia tree.  Glimpsed the water through a screen of verdant growth and followed the short trail down to the beach.

Our first sight of the tiny bay makes us draw breath.  It is picturesquely beautiful.  Its curved shoreline is fringed with boulders and palms.  Rising behind them are hills of tropical greens. The horizon is flat and broad, the cloud-flecked sky meeting what could be a sea.

The sand is red like a fox. The smooth rocks are ochre and grey. The lake is a flickering dance of blueish, greenish, whitish light which, on closer inspection, is completely transparent.  Our happy feet are in the water, it laps around our ankles, – very soft, very cool, – and every grain of sand below is still visible.

As we step deeper, up to our knees, the clarity remains.  Tiny yellow fish dart around our legs. In we plunge.  We have goggles, but hardly need them.  The water is silky and welcoming as we explore rocky crevices, clumsy giant observers of myriad stripey ciclids going about their watery daily routines.  Swim, eat, avoid being eaten.

Two days becomes three.  Early morning wake-up dips melt into glowing sunsets. We were there and now we’re here.  Not quite at the speed of light, but I still need to look at the photos to remind myself it wasn’t a dream.