So planning has begun in earnest now. Ranging from wishful window shopping and looking at backpacking toys I really don’t need (another backpack? Slap) to more sensible things like travel insurance, visas and vaccinations. The latter being today’s topic du jour.
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As regular readers of this blog will know, after originally planning to travel to, and then backpack Ethiopia at the end of this year, a change in travel plans of my intended backpack buddy led to a change in the scope of the project. Intending to travel from Cape to Cairo on public transport (train, bus and yet smaller vehicles), I have been reading up on the routes taken and lessons learned by those who have done something like this before and written about it. I have now decided on my own route.
Some weeks ago, I was at the Mampoerfees (Mampoer Festival) in Cullinan, just east of Pretoria. I wrote about the bizarre sense of alienation I felt as an English South African here, but realise in retrospect that I completely forgot to actually talk a little more about some of what I actually saw at the event. Which makes for a fascinating probe into at least one part of traditional Afrikaner culture. Trying to get a grip on the weirdness in order to write about it was also one of the initial reasons for going in the first place. So that story will be told now
So we are driving back from a fun-and-fire-filled day yesterday afternoon. Kelly and I, that is. It’s long drive back, with at least five hours of fields, mountains, small towns, more fields, more mountains and so on. Depending on your company, these trips generally tend to go one of two ways. Either the two of you don’t really engage and will spend much of the trip listening to music of some variety (depending on the company, this notion of variety may stretch quite far) or you end up in the sorts of long and meandering conversations that such trips can often bring about. This was the latter (and my preference by far). I have come to relish those wandering exchanges and am thankful for the friends with whom I can have them. The ones where you talk about this big issues in life, teasing out ideas and perspectives on how you presently answer them and try to follow that forever-fascinating rabbithole together. Which is how this tale begins.
With this Tuesday being a holiday, any South African who has been paying even mild attention has realised that the country had more or less shut down on the Monday to make an extra long weekend out of the time available. A friend (who will go unnamed for her and her employer’s sake) managed to stitch together enough Mondays and Fridays with the public holidays in April/May to get off ten days of work in total and spend the time hard at work resting. The fact that South Africa is a country adept at padding holidays with leave, resulting in a work calendar with gaping holes is nothing new though. What is more educational today is what I managed to get up to with my allotted four days. Which is to say getting to burn stuff. A whole mountain in fact.
I have long been a fan of mad plans. The sort which seem just that little bit dafter than the vanilla plan, but falling just short of laughing-and-forgetting-it madness. The recent days have seen a few new additions to what was formerly a large blank wall in my home. Specifically, a ceiling height map of Africa, string and those ever so fun pins with the round heads that you can pin into the map and tie string to. It’s part of a new and cunning plan, you see.
A few more arabic classes down the way and the reading thing is getting easier by the day (pops fat head). Besides a multitude of new and entertaining sentences that I can now construct – such as ten different activities that a donkey might perform in a car (a really useful trick for when I.. um… nevermind), I have also learned the word for dog. Kalb, in this case, marks a special point in any language course, you see.
I am an English South African. Henceforth called an ESA to save my poor little typing fingers (which is most of them) This means that somewhere along the line, my parents’ parents’ parents were dropped off, most likely in Cape Town, by the ships of the British Empire back in the day when Africa in general was one of the favoured playthings of the likes of Cecil John Rhodes and other plunderers for the crown. Being an ESA – as opposed to, say, an Afrikaans South African or a smaller, more connected group like Portuguese or Jewish South Africans – can make for a confusing identity some days.
Some years ago (many in fact, when high school was a very recent memory and the fun times of tertiary education were only beginning to unravel before me) I learned Portuguese. Unlike Afrikaans (one of the eleven, at least, languages spoken in the wide and diverse country that is South Africa), I had actually chosen to learn this language instead of having said education imposed on me as a petulant scholar. Something I became grateful for as time went by and traveling taught me that Afrikaans was in fact a fun and secret South Africans-only code which could be used to ask inappropriate questions or wonder out loud to friends when abroad, safe in the knowledge that you would never be understood. Except when there were Dutch people around, mind you.
The thing about living in a country is that you all too often fail to appreciate (or frequently even see) much of what makes it so interesting to the rest of the world. I think sometimes you just get stuck in the anecdotal rut and forget that there are people who travel halfway across the planet to see the sights that you are missing. Occasionally, when I remember this, it makes for a nice change to step out for a weekend and go and see the things that the travelers to my corner of the world get to see. I can report that it is a wholly satisfying experience.
