When Richard Delmore and his lover Sofie Cerruti decide to escape from the confines of their affair in the Twin Cities, they choose the white sands of Zanzibar and the verdant slopes of the outer lip of the Ngorongoro Crater as their romantic destination. It's a temporary paradise they're after, a reprieve from the limitations of the life of deception they lead in the States. But once they begin their safari through the Serengeti the two lovers become spiritually lost in the teeming yet inhospitable plains of East Africa, where they are forced not only to deal with the consequences of the truths they have kept from each other-the deeper and darker secrets that are painfully worked out allegorically through the events that surround them-but to observe the contrast between their "civilized" and sophisticated lives in Minnesota, and the primitive and sometimes primordial world they have entered.