"You never come all the way home. Part of you stays out there, keeping your place."

A year is a long time to be away, and Tanzania is a long way to come back from. For twelve months the days were enormous. We fished in Hemingway's wake off Pangani, we chased the light on the coast, we lived close to the water and the weather and the particular honesty of a place that does not care whether you are having a good year or a bad one. Then one morning it was over, and the long way home began. A truck, an airstrip, a small plane, a big one, a grey change somewhere at three in the morning, and finally the slow descent into Copenhagen, raining in the sensible way it always rains, where no one had been thinking about me at all.

The strange part is that I never really stopped working. You can build a company on the move if you are stubborn enough, and I was. Vallora grew in airport lounges and borrowed desks and bad wifi, in the hours between a sunrise and a flight, which means I spent a year doing the two things that do not belong together: chasing marlin in my head while answering emails with my hands. Far from the adventure and inside it at the same time.

Coming home to Denmark after that does something to a person. For the first days the city feels thin, like a photograph of a place rather than the place itself. But then the good part arrives. Old friends who stayed put and are exactly, blessedly the same. Family around a table. The particular comfort of people who knew you long before any of this. You remember that home is not the opposite of adventure. It is the thing that makes the leaving mean something.

And it is temporary, because it always is. The bags were barely unpacked before Bali was on the calendar, and the running list, the one every traveller keeps whether they admit it or not, was already sorting itself at the top:

1. Marlin.

2. Tigerfish in Congo.

3. Sunsets and gin and tonics for days, back in Kenya.

That is the truth of the long way home. You never come all the way back. You leave a part of yourself out there on purpose, the way you leave one fish in the water, so there is always a reason to return. Copenhagen gets the tired, grateful version of me for a while, and then the restlessness builds again, and I start, without quite deciding to, to plan the next one.

Shot by the father, lived by the son, on the long way home, already half gone again.