Panga- Camping on African Shores

The waves lazily meander to their happy deaths at shore, becoming bright white bubbles floating along the coast. The grass rustles, pestered eternally by the naive wind, which cuts through the screened porch without thought.

The distance is dizzying, and the blurry blues of sea and sky call into question the beginning and end of both.

Above the ceiling, bats peep away their grievances with one another, bickering day and night.

A lizard crawls across the vast expanse of screen in search of nothing in particular. Having found it, he scurries back the way he came.

The sea heaves an eternal sigh, never pausing to take part in the trivial act of inhalation.

The strip of green trees between the grasslands and ocean looks like a monk's haircut, blue baldness stretching out to eternity. I am perched on that monk's nose.

We went to a church service on Sunday, which was in a cement building across the road from a little cluster of wood and tin shanties. These are separated by a bit of distance from the rest of the village, more wood shanties and a couple nice cement buildings. Maybe thirty structures in total, if that.

I use the word shanty because for me it calls to mind a sort of seafaring motif. These villagers are hardly seafaring, despite their proximity to farable sea, but the things that they scavenge off of the beach often make their way onto houses. Nets, buckets, plastic stuff, etc. Furthermore, the wood used to make the houses takes on a weathered driftwood look, either because they got it off the shore, or because of the salty atmosphere.  If it were not for the people, the village would look like an abandoned fishing town.

I digress. Church. We drove up just as they were starting singing. There were two women, one man, one girl slightly younger than me, and a guy about my age. Also a large pile of children, varied ages, all elementary to early middle school. I found the demographics curious.

I got the standard awed look because of being a giant. We sat directly behind the kids. The kept peeking at me and then hiding their faces, giggling and embarrassed.

One chunky little girl, toddlerish age, gave me an unabashed stare. I blinked at her and smiled.

The face she returned can only be described as flirting eyebrows. She looked at me, serious as a heart attack, and waggled her eyebrows, maintaining her grim facade. I laughed as silently as possible, and a game was born, except now she smiled when she made eyebrows, knowing that it would get a reaction out of me.

Meanwhile, the pastor of the church was delivering a message in French. He was dressed in an understated pinstripe white and tan shirt, and khaki pants. He spoke quietly. The woman next to him translated into Nzebe, the local language, shouting every bouncy consonant-heavy word into the soul of all twenty or so audience members. She wore a bright green and blue dress, with ribbons of spicy yellow running about. the two of them were quite the pair.

There was also a little girl with a bump on her belly. It was concerning. It didn't seem to cause her pain though, and she seemed to have a fun time poking it. That was a weird combination of worrisome and adorable.

The beach is the sort of picturesque paradise that's been written about so many times that it's tough to say something new. The sand is white, and as fine as sand gets. When you stomp down on the dryer stuff, it makes a protesting squeak, like wet rubber brakes. The sand is graduated from soft powder near the trees to perfectly flat hard surfaces at the edge of the water. The sand constantly moves about, but never changes shape.

A while's walk down the beach, there are piles of volcanic rocks, with a glistening black shell like bubbly oil, and a center the color of dirty blood.

There's a non-permanent stream cutting across the beach in a preposterous diagonal. Small sandbars make water hills, which seem to defy gravity staying upright. In the deeper portions, the water takes on a tea color, which is decomposing plant matter washed out from the treetops. It actually smells nice, like tea,  but very subtle.

Juxtaposed against the bright white of the beaches, the dark green of the jungle, and the lively blue of the sea, is the dull white, gray, and black of driftwood logs.

These massive logs get cut down somewhere inland along the river, and are drifted out to the ocean to be picked up by big rigs. Some miss the mark and hit the beach.

Alone, these logs would look very dreary, but next to all the other colors of the beach, they add unique character to an ocean's edge that would be otherwise cliche.