One Dry Season

With richly evocative images and wonderfully entertaining anecdotes, Caroline Alexander transports you to the dense interior of equatorial Gabon. In One Dry Season, she chronicles her adventures as she makes her way alone through dangerously primitive territory. When she first read of Victorian explorer Mary Kingsley's travels in the French colony of Gabon, Alexander knew she had to experience the present-day nation for herself. Soon she is retracing Kingsley's route—struggling through tangled vines in humid rain forests, chugging up the churning Ogooué River in a packed steamer, and fending off gigantic cockroaches. The country she discovers is a challenging mixture of Africa's exotic past and its practical present. A splendid storyteller, Caroline Alexander introduces you to the colorful new friends she made along the trail including a shy mission nun, a half-mad French woman, and a village chief who treated her as an errant teenaged daughter. Lisette Lecat's expert narration brings out all the excitement of today's Africa.