Richard Stupart

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.

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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.

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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.

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Stare at a computer screen long enough and I swear your mind becomes a mass of white noise.  Which pretty accurately describes this evening – too many interesting links, blogs to follow up on and general clickery and I become an excitable puppy, unable to concentrate on anything long enough to really function. Blogging becomes an even harder task, as coaxing my thoughts into a structured story of any sort is akin to herding cats.  Which was why I went instead to go and rummage through the part of my cupboard where I store all of the goodies from past travels, to see if there is a story that I may have written previously on one of the various diaries I took with me to the places where the Internet has yet to arrive.
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With a number of months still to go before I can really get out and travel again (to Ethiopia this time),  there is some comfort to being able to roll like a pig in a sty through so many interesting pictures from previous trips.  Being something of a photomaniac, there are hundreds of pics from past adventures sitting on my computer – each with its own little story that usually causes the onset of a silly-looking smile. This is one of those.

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One of the blogs I follow like a labrador chasing a gross, partly chewed stick waiting for it to be thrown is Bearshapedsphere, written by an expat/traveler living in Santiago (go look and count how frequently you catch yourself giggling while reading many of the posts).  One of her recent pieces, about misadventures at airport security reminded me of my own drama some while ago in the Durban airport, South Africa, when catching a flight back to Johannesburg – which seems a tale worth adding to the collection which has sprung up around Eileen’s original story. For those who have not yet heard it, let me preface it by blaming my brother for at least half of what happened. It is important, if for no other reason than sibling score-tallying, that his role in my misadventure be properly represented.

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I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently trying to get better at HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. Scientifically speaking, it’s where you take multiple exposures of a scene,  to make sure that you can expose correctly for the bright bits (sunlight, car lights, fire, neon lights at a strip mall) and the dark bits (shade, dark alleys and so on) and then combine them into one image spanning a full range of detail with no blown out highlights or black underexposed bits.  For those not prone to scientifically speaking, think of it as filling your camera with reality-affecting drugs and taking the photos that result.

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I’m mad. That’s what she said anyway.  Mad. But that she understands. I’m not really sure how that works. I mean, if I am really nuts then the understanding bit should not be possible, or at least be abnormally difficult.

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