These Dreams of You

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When she was in her late twenties, Viv returned to Africa for the first time since she lived there as a girl, to climb Mount Kilimanjaro on the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Immediately following this successful ascent — a framed certificate on the wall attests to the achievement — she sat for some hours at Kilimanjaro’s nearest airport drinking with a number of other overly exuberant western adventurers who at some point realized they had drunk their way through the week’s one and only flight to Europe.