My first encounter with Africa was neither a mission nor a project. It was a family trip around 2010, when I was about fourteen. The sea, the coral reef and a few days on safari were enough to open a question that never quite closed.
Kenya allowed very different experiences to sit together: a resort on the Watamu coast, excursions in the Indian Ocean and four or five days inland. For a teenager, it was a rapid passage between worlds that had previously existed mostly in images.
The disappearing sea
My clearest memory is Watamu's tide. In the morning the sea filled the horizon; a few hours later, hundreds of metres could become ground you could walk across, among sand and pools left by the water. Then the landscape changed once again.
The Kenya Wildlife Service describes Watamu through its white beaches and reef-protected lagoons. I did not yet have the vocabulary to read the ecosystem. I only felt the surprise of a place changing in front of me within a single day.
From the coast to safari
The second part of the trip was the safari. The presence of Kilimanjaro, seen along the journey, added a completely different scale: no longer only the detail of the tide, but a vast landscape in which animals, roads and distances changed the measure of things.
Years later, meeting Carlo Landucci and discovering photography would give that curiosity a more conscious tool.
A first journey does not explain everything
I cannot assign a precise, immediate transformation to a teenage holiday. I can recognise what it left behind: the sense that Africa was not a single image, but a continent to explore repeatedly, with more time and a progressively less naive gaze.
