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to some of my readers), I want it known there’s no regrets. The lethal lullaby of an infected tsetse (the most romantically named of all flies) is arguably preferable to the anesthetic drone of computers, freeway traffic, and television sets; and the wild, hot beauty of the Selous is worth almost any risk.

    The Selous is the largest uninhabited game reserve in the world. Located in central Tanzania, a couple of hundred miles south of Mount Kilimanjaro, the Selous is no national park where tourists sprawl on rattan sofas, sipping gin and listening to the BBC as from the air-conditioned safety of posh lodges they spy shamelessly on mating lions. In the Selous, one doesn’t catch a safari bus to the corner of Zebra and Watusi. To see the Selous, one hikes and one paddles. And when an aggravated hippopotamus is charging one’s rubber raft, one paddles very hard, indeed.
    When I announced to family and friends that I was going hiking and river rafting through a vast patch of African cabbage, they didn’t ask why. They must have realized that after three years bent over an idling and backfiring novel, skinning my knuckles on every bolt and wrench in the literary toolbox, I needed to blow a little carbon out of my own exhaust. Perhaps they also sensed that after my recent dealings with editors, agents, lawyers, producers, and reviewers, I might be primed for the company of crocodiles.
    Nobody was particularly concerned that I was off to walk with the animals, talk with the animals, squawk with the animals. After all, I once turned down an offer of manatee steak in a weird restaurant in Cuba, and I have made it a lifelong practice never to date women who wear leopard-skin pillbox hats. My beast karma was pretty good.
    Nevertheless, having heard AMA terror stories of schistosomiasis and malaria, of elephantiasis-enlarged testicles so huge the poor owner has to push them around in a wheelbarrow, and yes, of the narcoleptic legacy of the tsetse fly, family and friends fretted one and all about tropical disease. Apparently, the evident scares us less than the invisible: we figure it’s easier to outrun a bear than a bugbear.
    Well, folks, not to worry. First, I was stuffed to the gullet with malaria prophylactics and pincushioned with inoculations against the most prevalent tropical maladies (unfortunately, there’s no [yawn] serum that wards off “sleeping sickness”), and second, the very fact that the Selous is unoccupied by humans or farm animals means disease is rarely contracted there. In the Selous, the tsetse is all pester and no siesta.
Ah,
but I’d overlooked one thing. The Selous
itself
is a tropical disease: feverish, lethargic, exotic, achy, sweaty, hallucinogenic, and, as I’ve learned since coming home, recurrent.
    Just when I think that I’m over it, that rush-hour gridlock, income-tax audits, and two viewings of
Amadeus
have worked their acculturizing cures, I suffer yet another attack of Selous flu. It comes on with a humid vapor, with a vibration of membrane, with howls and hoofbeats that nobody else in the room can hear, and although I might be in the midst of something truly important, such as choosing which brand of burglar alarm to install on my newly violated front door, it never fails to distract me with memories of a sweeter, cleaner, if less comfortable place; a place where clocks dissolve, where even death is honest, and primitive equalities prevail….

    It’s our first day in the bush. At this point, I’m still a tsetse virgin. From the port city of Dar es Salaam, we have traveled into the interior on a toy railroad: one locomotive, one car, and narrow-gauge track, all three built by the Chinese. It was definitely not a main line. It was a chow mein line.
    Okay, okay, but the chow on the train
was
pretty good. We bought it through our windows at brief village stops. There were cashew nuts, absolute state-of-the-art mangoes, and thumb-size bananas that melted in our mouths. Prices were so cheap