Every trip ends in a city. Not on the plain or on the water, where the stories happen, but on a wet pavement in Copenhagen or a loud corner of New York, with a bag over one shoulder and the light already going at four in the afternoon. For years I treated that part as the gap between chapters. It took me a long time to see that it is a chapter of its own.

The city asks different things of you. Out there the day is decided by weather and animals and tides. Here it is decided by a calendar. The boots go in the cupboard, the linen goes in the drawer, and the suit comes out, a dark one, cut close enough to feel like a decision. My father never owned many, but the ones he had he wore properly, and he taught me that a good suit is the city's version of a good rifle sling or a well-set drag. Nobody notices it when it is right. Everybody notices when it is not.

Most of what we build happens here. Vallora was started on the move, but it grows in rooms with tables and whiteboards and people who have never seen a buffalo and do not need to. The skills turn out to be the same ones. Read what is actually in front of you. Be patient when nothing is happening. Do not take the shot until it is yours to take. I learned all of that in hard country, and I use it most in meetings.

What saves the city for me is the water. Copenhagen is a harbour before it is anything else, and on most evenings I walk it, from the old quays past the boats and the swimmers who go in whatever the month, out to where the wind comes straight off the sound. It is the same walk my head needs after a day on a screen that a long drive needs after a day in the field. Somewhere along it the noise settles, and the next trip starts to take shape.

Because that is the other thing the city is for. Planning. The maps come out on the kitchen table, the old notebooks, the list of people we owe a visit. A lodge in Kenya, a captain on the Tanzanian coast, a river in Congo we have talked about for years. The wild is never really far away when you are planning it. It just waits, the way it always has, for you to come back.

So I have stopped treating the city as the gap. It is where the stories are written down, where the partners are met, where the next chapter is bought and paid for. It is also, quietly, where we live. A suit, a long walk by the water, a table full of people who knew you before any of this, and a bag in the hall that is never quite unpacked.

Between the trips, in the city that keeps our place.