Richard Stupart

[Taken from the Ugandan Journals]

In transit at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, I bought a copy of Six Months in Sudan by James Maskalyk. I vacillated over the decision to buy it. Mostly because of not wanting to draw shillings from the ATM just for a book. In the end, of course, I would.
Read the rest of this entry »

For the reader who wrote in to ask the details of travelling from Cape Town to Cairo. I have lost your email, and feel like an idiot for it. Please can you email me again. I’ll send you all the stuff you need.

[From the first pages of the Cape to Cairo manuscript, Nov. 2009]
This is a story about traveling from Cape Town to Cairo on public transport. It’s also a little about what happens when you throw yourself out into the craziness of the world and try to do something you never thought you could.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s quiet outside. The world is sleeping and I shouldn’t be here. I should be asleep, but here is where the writing happens. It’s a place that the ghosts of the eloquent words finally come gently to my dancing fingers. Like intricate little knots, stories need to be understood before they can be written. Sometimes its as simple as the right words providing the momentum that coerces the string. Flopping into a loose and beautiful pattern. Sometimes it’s so much harder than that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Returning is only over when you are back at a place you recognise as home, waking up in a bed that remembers how you like to spread out at night, for more than a week. By that yardstick, I’ll be home on Wednesday and you will get delicious audiovisual treatery soon after. For now, though, a brief storytelling interlude via some quick stats written on the dirtiest back pages of my journal.

Read the rest of this entry »

Up at 04h30. In Entebbe airport by 06h00. On a plane by 08h30 and starting the long trek home. It’s all so managed. So clean. In your seat. Eat your meal. Listen to music or fall asleep for distraction. I feel awry in the whitespace. My clothes are filthy, and probably smell a little.

Read the rest of this entry »

[From the hip] So let me get say this right off. Ituri district is absolutely nothing like what you have been told the Eastern DRC is. It’s undeveloped, and it has crap roads – these things are true. But it is also full of really friendly people, to whom we have not had to pay a single bribe, who have really gone out of their way to show us a great time.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are twenty four minutes left on this laptop battery. Power to the plugs in ‘hotel’ Tropikana (don’t ask) has failed, though the lights work absolutely fine. Outside is a little dark, and slightly infused with the smell of burnt trash and roasting meat. Somewhere out there, a bar cranks out huge sound while patrons lounge in plastic furniture drinking beer. The waitresses at the bar no longer trust me to return their beer bottles and have begun keeping a deposit. This has not been entirely unreasonable on their part.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post should have gone up two days ago. But packing can be such a demanding mistress. Have I put in too little? Too much? Do I really need an extra bandage in the first aid section? (yes) Have the extra batteries for the camcorder arrived? (No). And so it has gone. So these are the words that should have been. Not on time, and not as carefully wrought as I’d like. But I suspect there will be a lot written from the hip in the days to come.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been holding my breath a lot the last fortnight or so. Catching myself needing to stop, unclench and breathe a little easier, over and over again. The invitation letter I need for my visa came through today. The fixer is confirmed. A thousand ephemeral shards of some implausible dream have suddenly spliced themselves together into something real. I can see my reflection in the enterprise at last. And some emotional spring has been storing the energy ever since.
Read the rest of this entry »

Two years and some some change ago, on a dark rooftop in Addis Ababa, I recall having my thousandth Ethiopian espresso with Jonathan, a friend and adventuresome soul who had come to join me for my days in the country on my slow road north to Cairo. I can’t recall much about the setting, besides that the light was a dull orange, and Jonathan had just received something called a peanut tea, that looked nothing like tea. Instead, it was a sort of peanut-coloured froth in an espresso cup. It may have been delicious. I can’t recall.
Read the rest of this entry »

[Taken from the Ugandan Journals]

Come morning, I sleep in until I can’t possibly anymore. Claw my pillow until every inch of tiredness has been attended to. Then brushing teeth in the damp, green cupboard of a communal bathroom, sitting on a top-loading washing machine that abuts the shower. Then breakfast.

Read the rest of this entry »