"Most travel books about Africa open with the author alone, carried along by some vehicle, looking down over some landscape and feeling anxious. ... Almost invariably books of this genre start with airplanes or ships."
--Wendy Belcher, Salon.com, July 28, 1999 article "Out of Africa"
"Every travel book employs the insidious device of the writer peering down through the airplane window and seeing this or that land, which is always made to look otherworldly."
--Lawrence Osborne, The Naked Tourist (North Point Press, 2006)
And now you know why Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik begins with the end, with the hippo chasing us, rather than with me standing aboard the German ship, looking apprehensively at Cape Town on approach.
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