Travel Writing Competition 2011 Entries Page 3

I met a man who lives only today. Like a butterfly. He never lives tomorrow and never looks back onto yesterday.

We were warned. Rumors along the backpacker trail foretold of a long, often intolerable bus ride between Hanoi and Vientiane.

At half past seven in the morning, with the Congo to my left and Burundi and Rwanda facing me, I sat with a small group of travelers as our boat surged northward on Lake Tanganyika.

The plan was to stop by for a mere five minutes, but even before I step under the bright lights beyond the inner doors, it starts. Like the layers of an onion, what was first one big buzz begins to peel away and disentangle in pieces.

Sitting in a spacious, with and blue brick room, I gazed around me at a full (for once) class and found myself wondering what I could do to make them fall in love with the English language.

I was stranded in a boat in the middle of Pulau Perhentian's harbour, surrounded by perfectly still turquoise water.

I met a man who lives only today. Like a butterfly. He never lives tomorrow and never looks back onto yesterday.

The plan was to stop by for a mere five minutes, but even before I step under the bright lights beyond the inner doors, it starts. Like the layers of an onion, what was first one big buzz begins to peel away and disentangle in pieces.

I was stranded in a boat in the middle of Pulau Perhentian's harbour, surrounded by perfectly still turquoise water.

“Black rhinos are very aggressive, very territorial”, our guide told us, pointing to tracks on the ground. “This is the print of a black rhino. Look, come closer, you can see from the dung. It is fresh.”