Turn Your Lights Down Low

My room in Beravy in the south of Madagascar, and the awesomeness that is Mada Surf Lodge in Anakao. Their bungalows are perfection and vita Malagasy all the way. Namangy ahy saka kely; and I’m still pondering which board to buy. Argh!

 

Travelling from Tana to Nairobi and on to Iten for one of the most exciting and important assignments of my career: with Julien Wanders and his crew in Kenya. To disappear into the reportage vortex, to take notes, to photograph, to focus, to focus, to focus, is the best in the world. (Have I mentioned focus?) Everything else stops, all the thoughts in my head …

 

Boniface a.k.a. Master of Disaster a.k.a. The Talented Mr Chesop a.k.a. the one who brings good fate, and Isaac The Kind checking his feed on the way to Tambach track at 5.30 a.m. The mystical magical forest in Iten. My ride to Eldoret and breakfast at Keellu Resort, the only hotel in the world whose owner thought it would be a good idea to build a nightclub inside the premises. Argh! But I still cherish all those memories …

 

Quiet days in Nairobi at Valerie’s, a mushroom in the fall forest. (“It’s so beautiful! It looks like a flower!”) Working in my mom’s business class apartment in Aargau, and finally, finally rolling back to Africa courtesy Swiss Air Lines Business Class, and an airport hotel in Nairobi.

 

On to Mada, and, oh, new curtains in my room at the monastery! The end of an era … Out with the old, in with the new. I’ve lived in Sambava for so long but I’ve never come across that badass handpainted sign. It proved to me again how supremely awesome Madagascar is!

 

Flying across Antongil Bay (“oui, ça fait pas mal de temps qu’on se connaît”) back again to Mada’s south for an assignment on deforestation, working in my beach bungalow under sub-par conditions, and walking through mangroves miaraka alika, then back to Europe again, organising my possessions at my brother’s house, hunkering down in Paris for Christmas and New Year’s.

 

2020 is going to be a great year, I can feel it in my bones. Onward and upward!

July to December 2019