By the dawn's early light

It's a long ride, from ORT in Johannesburg to JFK. Fifteen hours. But they can pass easily enough. If your usual last row is empty and you can actually lie yourself mostly flat, and you wake with only three hours to go. Through the window New York appears in lights in the changing night's darkness.

And it is only after the grumpy customs officer has stamped your passport and said grudgingly, Welcome home, and after the baggage has been collected (the fragile-marked box filled with wine deeply dented as usual by the spewing chute at this airport), and after walking through the double doors to the arrivals hall, and you see this tall man and his instant smile, not seen for four weeks, that you realize again how good it is to be met by him, at dawn.

My nose told me something had broken in that box. And my friend Don's fragrant bay extract was the victim of the chute. But everything else was spared.

We have been looking at the biltong I bought from The Biltong Shop (above, in Constantia Village, Cape Town) for days - it made it past the sniffer beagles, and tonight I think we will taste some thin slices. They are to savored. There is really nothing like it, Stateside.