Reading Jane Austen in West Africa

I always seem to end up reading Jane Austen when I travel alone. I read Pride and Predjudice when I was traveling in Costa Rica; of which, incidentally, I have forgotten absolutely everything except that there is a character called Mr. Darcey. Now I'm reading Emma and it creates a funny contrast reading about dinner parties, and crushes, and estates with names while, for example, sitting on a bundle of someone else's cured cow skins, getting sprayed with sand, waiting for a bus on the side of the highway; or bumping along a sand track in a van, seated between a man in sun glasses and a turban and a woman vomiting into a plastic bucket, and emerging so dusty at the end of the line that everyone's eyebrows and eyelashes are white.