Richard Stupart

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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