I miss the emptiness.

It’s pretty here. It’s green and lush and all the words that describe pretty places. It rains a lot. There is water. Lots of water. There are monkeys in the trees and so many birds.

But I miss the emptiness.

I never see the sky here. It’s mist and trees and mountains. Sometimes there’s a glimpse of the deep blue in winter or the clear blue in summer, but I never see the whole of the sky. The valley is picturesque. It’s picture-postcard pretty. But postcards are static. They’re the same picture. They stay the same. It’s that kind of pretty.

I miss the drama of empty landscapes. The road that goes on forever between rough, harsh bush, dotted with rocks and windmills and the occasional sheep far in the distance. I miss being able to see the distance.

I miss the rolling, empty grasslands with the thorn trees and the aloes and the dusty, dried-blood soil.

I miss the majesty of the craggy, Cape folded mountains soaring beyond the vineyards.

I miss the sea, the rough, dangerous, cold Atlantic with a million moods, every one more incomprehensible than the last.

My mind keeps drifting back to the summer grasslands and the long-horned acholi cattle silhouetted against the storm sky.

The green and the valley and rivers are pretty. The tree-green covered mountainsides of Korea and the big rivers were pretty, too. The same full green land and dull grey sky. Not steel-grey, blue-grey brooding storms. Just mist-grey. Overcast-grey.

The happiest places of the last nine months – places, not moments, because people can make the other places okay – but the happiest places have been just the places I’ve always loved. The grasslands of eastern Congo. The dryness of Eldoret before the rains. The Eastern Cape. My Eastern Cape. Driving past Cradock and Bedford and the winter-swept Nieu Bethesda. The “arse end of the world”, to quote Marguerite Poland, around Grahamstown. Even Stutt, with its forests, but set like a stone rippling grasslands in all directions. And those forests, like the African rainforests, so much richer and more complex.

I long for the endless, complex loneliness. The lush, green, pretty, cluttered beauty here is, well, pretty. But some days, against the backdrop of incessant soft, green rains, I wish, I just wish I was a million miles away.