Posted by Chris Jones

SOMEWHERE ON THE ROAD TO JOHANNESBURG -- There have been times during this trip when I've forgotten where I was, exactly.

Today we stopped on the drive back from Durban at a roadside restaurant called Maxi's. It's the African equivalent of Denny's -- diner food -- and I ordered a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake from a waitress with a notepad and an apron around her waist.

Out the window, we could see golden fields and gently rolling hills. Cars whizzed by on the highway. Children ran through a playground. There weren't any trees to block the view. I ate my cheeseburger and I thought that I might have been in Kansas, or Nebraska, or North Dakota, or Wyoming. I might have been on the road to Sioux City or Missoula. If the van weren't on the other side of the road, I could easily have slipped into my old self, the man I used to be, for the rest of the afternoon.

But then we kept driving, and the thing about Africa is, it will always reveal itself, eventually. There are small signposts everywhere -- outlines of this unmistakable continent on truck trailers; black streaks of purposefully burned grass across fields; a tin-shack shanty town or a woman on the side of the road, hitchhiking, with her burden balanced on her head.

And then there are those big things, those moments that catch in your throat, when you remember that you could only be here.

We've just gone through a tollbooth and come over a rise, and there in the distance rises Johannesburg, unmistakable, with its battered skyscrapers and thin towers, with its aerials and smoke. The dust and the smog are acting as a magnifying glass and a filter for the setting sun, and it's as big as I've ever seen it, and as orange.

I was just thinking that it was the same sun my wife will feel on her face today, that my boys will play under in our backyard today, and that made me feel closer to them for a few dozen miles.

But now that I look at that sun again, now that I'm watching it sink below this particular horizon, I know that I could only be Africa, that I could only be a million miles away.