It's hard to tell where a non-fictional plot starts and ends, but I want to say that this one started with a perplexed elephant in Botswana, continued with a burning car in the Namib desert, and ended with a waterfall wedding in Zimbabwe, and everything that happened before and after was a different story.

I could tell you that story, but I think it’s just as well if you tell it yourself. Your imagination will do the talking anyway and the less I prompt it, the more it talks.

Let me just say this:

Elephants are rare in the Delta that time of the year, but maybe he was the last, or lost, or maybe that’s the same. The three Mokoros lay still before the buff giant, stopped in their tracks like arrows midair. Subconsciously mulling whether to charge or not, he had put time on hold for all of us and the only motion we could still complete was a slow duck. In front of me and first in line for the charging, a Peace Corps volunteer and her half-brother. What things let to what others I hardly recall – so you can fill in the blanks – but some days, some beers, some dead seals, and some thousands of miles later, we jumped out of a burning car in the Namib Desert…