Dinner with Dr. Livingstone

When David Livingstone and the early explorers made camp in the Luangwa Valley, dinner was eaten by firelight, surrounded by nothing but the African night. There were no walls. No other tables. No certainty of what the darkness held beyond the flames.

In a clearing in the woodland, or on a bank above the Luangwa River, or in the shelter of a dry channel bed that has carried floodwater and now carries candlelight — a table is set for you alone. Linen, proper glassware, a menu built from that morning's harvest at The Farm. A single server, discreet and unhurried. And beyond the edge of the light, the valley continuing exactly as it always has.

The sounds of the night — the distant call of a lion, the splash of hippos at the river, the quiet chorus of the bush settling into darkness — are not a backdrop. They are the memory of past explorers at the table.

The explorers ate like this because they had no choice. You are choosing it. That, somehow, makes it better.