The inattentive traveller will undoubtedly miss a few places.
When he arrives in the small town on the Indian Ocean where he will stop, it will appear as if it were made up of a road, a row of houses and shops resting on one side, a string of hotels and impenetrable gates lying on the other.
He will think that everything ends after those lines: the ocean on one side, nothingness on the other.
And he will believe he is not mistaken, unless for once he takes that one road that goes up to the west.
Then he will still see a line of garages on one side and a row of apartment blocks a few storeys high on the other, and he will still be certain that beyond there is nowhere. He will come to a crossroads and again, the triad case-strada-case will present itself behind him, in front of him, to the right and to the left, and then he will understand - or rather, he will believe he has understood - that this land is made up of huge squares with sides made up of streets and that in the middle there is nothingness.
He will return home, after having walked through those squares to get to Marafa, to Wasini, to Shimba or whatever, and he will tell of crystal-clear seas, of the vastness that divides the sides of those squares, of bewitching smiles he met on the sides of those mysterious quadrilaterals.
He did not know and will not know that he should have entered those shapes glimpsed only from the perimeter. He should have let them contain him in order to radically transform the memories of that journey.
He will return home and will have missed the farms of Jaribuni, on the terraces that descend gently towards the Ndzovuni River, whose waters will end up in the Rare and thus in the Kilifi Creek, softening it. Cottages made of agave poles, stones and clay sprouting from the earth that has the same colour, palm trees as tall as the sky, woven carpets that look like mosaics.
Remaining on the edge of the square, he will not have smelt the eucalyptus that travels crammed into old-fashioned truck boxes, speeding from the fields of the villages south of Ramisi to the perfume factory.
Villages made up of plots of land cut up by foot-wide paths leading, as if by way of the via crucis, to huts misaligned one after the other. Houses where someone arrives almost every day to collect palm water to make wine and someone else arrives to sell mangrove shrimp. You must have missed the morning embrace with the damp mist that envelops the grid of Kwale's streets, which almost makes you forget that you are standing just two hundred metres above the ocean.
Which makes you long for, and therefore delivers a Chapati and a plate of Mbaazi ya Nazi to warm your heart as you wait for the condensation to clear.
He will be at least as lost as I am, and that is heartening.
I live knowing that I do not know. I know that I have discovered nothing of my surroundings but a grain of sand in relation to the size of the beach.
And this knowledge keeps me here, lazily slumped on my couch, doing nothing.
Because I know that as soon as the urge strikes me, I will leave the four roads that enclose the square and something new again will welcome me.

--- Michele Senici, 1993. Educator, teacher, project coordinator.
I opened Casa Hera in Diani because I did not know where to continue my life.
Have I realised this now?
Certainly not, but that's OK, at least I observe, I think, I write.