We woke up to the sound of drumming. We learned later it was a church group practicing. It was early. I remember so clearly. The taste of the air. The sounds. The way the light fell. The dusty ground. The bucket showers. Perhaps it was the fear, the excitement. Every sense heightened.

It’s been an exhausting month. Not a good month. Too much work. Too many deadlines. Not enough time to breathe. Not enough people. My kind of people. But this morning I opened my flickr account and it brought up this photograph.

I have friends who have long, rambling, sometimes heated discussions about why. One of the regular topics is travel. Why travel? What is it for? What urge drives the wanderings of 21st century nomads and why should we travel? There are lots of reasons. Some days I think I travel to remember. A perfect autumn day cycling with friends in Gyeongju, South Korea. Anapji Pond, a 7th century Asian pleasure garden. Fierce summer thunderstorms in Windhoek and Gaborone. The smell of dark fir trees on a chilled morning in the dry season in Eldoret, Kenya. Morning through a mosquito net in the small lakeside town of Kisenyi, DRC.

Memories of travel are a precious reminder that there is more than ordinary. It’s October. The year is drawing to a close. Adverts are beginning to tend towards Christmas. Memories of travel hover. An incentive, a reminder to carve the time out of a stressful, over-stretched, overworked month to make plans, to move on, towards something more than ordinary.

Kisenyi is a beautiful small town on the shores of Lake Albert in the DRC. If you ever have the chance to travel in that part of the world, visit. Do it quickly, before the oil-companies lay waste to this beautiful corner of Africa in their quest to get at the oil that lies beneath the lake.