Love is the one gamble where not playing guarantees you lose.

A linguist from Argentina who refuses to depend on a man and a physicist from Silicon Valley who believes love doesn’t exist arrive in Munich on the same day in 1986. When they begin an unlikely romance, they agree: careers first, commitment last.

Then he had to leave Germany and she wouldn’t move with him. A friend who had lost everything suggested a third way: put on a backpack and go somewhere else.

During a yearlong journey from Cairo to Cape Town on twenty dollars a day, they moved through a pre-digital Africa where everything had a spirit, and all that they’d agreed to began to unravel.

Some agreements weren’t meant to survive Africa.