Lebombo border post

Approaching the SA / Mozambique Lebombo border post: It's a dead-heavy heat that's lacquered across a mostly colourless, tinderbox-dry pan-flat landscape. It's a parched landscape desperate, and begging, for summer's rain.
As my eyes get bored with staring, they unfocus into a non-present moment. That's the direction of where Samora Machel's plane hit the ground in 1986.
Then, suddenly, the bleakness left over from winter is destroyed, and interspersed, by vast, wonderfully lumo-green banana plantations: for contrast's sake the luscious, flailing palms stand, ironically, soldier-stiff in rich-red loamy soil.
Komatipoort passes in a flash.
Then the wide-flat blue beauty of the Komati River, in less-of-a-flash, flowing fast and hard from last week's first, but faraway rains.
Passport's out.
"No smoking & alcohol allowed", and "no blasphemy", is inscribed on the inside of the luxury bus we're traveling in.
A fresh, strong wind's blowing aggressively from Maputo's direction; amidst this bleakness of the landscape - and the litter-strewn devastation of the no-man's land between borders - it's surreal to smell, and sense, the exotic Indian Ocean so close-by.
I'm also well aware, because it was during my life time, of the ghosts of the war that shredded Mozambique. Also an awareness of the loss of life, mostly always of the poor and downtrodden, and of the ghosts of land-mines (and body parts) this now fine road is built upon.
Nor should we ever forget the sublime 'wars' that the former SA apartheid regime inflicted upon its neighbours.

Quiet time with coffee

'Round about this time on most days, when I've got rectangular eyes from my laptop screen and can no longer think straight, it's time to hit the N4 and to travel the approximately 20 or so kilometres to the Seattle coffee shop at Millys, just the other side of Machadodorp, on the way to Belfast.

Here, through the three dimensional lens (yes!) of a tall cafe mocha (no cream) I make sense of today, yesterday and sometimes tomorrow. Today, just before getting into my car to travel home I took this photo facing the sunset as I gave thanks for the day.

There's an unusual not-quite-chill on the air: the leaves are turning, they are falling from the maples, the sun is setting earlier, birds are packing up home and heading north. I'm looking forward to a time of much less light, hibernation, rest and contemplation. I'm ready for the winter.

Tomorrow, while researching the book, I head down the N4 and past Nelspruit and on to Komatipoort and the Mozambique border. Especially after Nelspruit, relatively unchartered territory for me, I want to take in as much of that heavy-with-history road just south of the Kruger National Park, and to the eastern edge of the country - especially the Lebombo mountains that triangulates Mozambique, Swaziland and South Africa.

On Friday I'm expecting to fly to George and then, at the ocean's very edge in Mossel Bay and with my beloved Klein Karoo at my back, write up the parts of the book already researched... and again seek guidance and inspiration beneath the St. Blaize lighthouse.