Our bus trip took 12 hours, then we took a bush taxi. We saw elephants, hippos, baboons, a cheetah. The beach was deserted, and the hotel looked like an antebellum mansion, complete with Spanish moss.

After a while, a trip becomes the stories we tell about it. What we say, what we omit. What we remember, what we forget.

Here are the cotton fields, the market, the red striped cathedral, the old bridge and the pigs rooting beside it.

What was once a place alive and breathing, filled with wood smoke and goat bleats, is now a sheaf of digital images — and the stories I tell about them.