The traffic hardly stops, if it does, at all – peering out of the hotel window at 1 in the morning only dazzles me, the electric white lights clinging to the palm trees, the yellow glow of the streetlamps, the moving rush and colour of blinking lights and moped lights.

I remember the bus ride, the first night: my reflection in the window (tired, anxious), and the strangers on the other side, the orange ends of cigarettes luminescent in the darkness. At the end of the dead-end alleys are nothing but glimpses of the silver sheen of food trucks. The sidewalks are muddy, curving down into the street at no definite end; the cement cracked in too many places, construction tools and shops jammed close together.

On other evenings, plastic shopping bags in tow, I walk past citizens perched daintily on their leather moped seats, arms draped over knees, spines curved over, legs crossed. It smells like gasoline and cigarette smoke, the sewage fumes spiraling up from the storm drains, and the humid air collects in my lungs and make my neck perspire.

I watch the cityscapes, the brightly illustrated billboards, admire the strange, foreign words I cannot comprehend nor pronounce. These strange movements of rush, rush, rush (people talking, the defiance of the traffic horns, the smell, the excitement) are bewildering and thrilling, somehow. Cloth masks obscure faces of countless drivers, and the whites of their eyes seek mine at times when we stopped completely.
I wave. Sometimes they wave back. Sometimes they don't.

I loll my head in my hand, elbow on sill, and watch the unremarkable landscape (dry, dusty) unfocus into the sunlight as my eyelids flutter sleepily and I count the number of shy, scampering dogs, tanned field workers askew in hammocks and the carcasses of cattle surrendered to the drowsy heat. It feels almost like summer.

Buddhist orphans in too-long robes hide behind pillars and whisper into each other's ears, balance babies on their hips and glanced shyly, nervously at me when I raise the camera to take their picture, when I sit beside them and pass them watercoloured pencils from boxes littering the floor. For me, it's a heavy, placid feeling. Peaceful, to that extent.

I fold my legs beneath me and begin to mix blue and red together, and at that moment there's not a place I could think of that I'd rather be.

-- Roxanne Forbes