The Zambezi Sunset on Ze Explorer

The weather was perfect, clouds on the horizon promising rain, really just a patch in a sky bigger than the ones they have back in Montana. The Big Sky so enormous and broad that you can feel that the whole world can fit inside it with room to spare. Meanwhile, back on earth, Mother and I depart by bus to the Zambezi Explorer. Looking at the bus, I have high hopes that we won't end up in cousin Pete's pontoon smelling hippo breath, then I see the dirt road entrance and shades of crooked creek boat slip come rushing back with sharp focus and faint cords from a banjo tune. When we arrive at the dock, I see the Zambezi Explorer which looks like a very wide and big yacht with three floors and rails and something you would find in the Miami bay instead of the Zambezi River. The Zambezi Explorer is definitely not a pontoon although I can see several of them out there in the dark green water.
The river cruise is luxurious with iced tea (definitely american but not american) more fruity than tea but not snapple-ish.
Then the food trays come out with the mixture of the expected and exotic like chicken on a spit, salmon rolls, and crocodile tail. Overall, very rich and tasty unless your my mother. For her, they are indigestion bombs.
We see some wildlife, giraffes, baboons, some kind of monkeys, lots of birds, a croc or two and several pods of hippos.
But it is the sunset that we stop for midriver the motors humming to keep us in place as the sun falls out of that big sky and sizzles into the River to the west. It is breathtaking and beautiful and I find myself hearing Toto singing in the background of my mind and the words of a hundred poems I will not write run through my memories. This is Africa, this is the kind of phenomena that can belong to no man or woman but it there for anyone smart enough to stop and watch it happen.
Then the crew sings and the beauty of what it is to be African hits me as I sit trying to hold my phone steady to record the song while my heart is carried away into the bush and over the veldt.