Richard Stupart

The stories from good travels never really end. There is always a new one, a new gloss on an old one, or simply a retelling to someone who has never heard it before. Sometimes it’s a connected event that triggers a memory. Other times its a photo, a scrawl left on the pages of a journal by an earlier self in the hopes that a later one would come across those pages and be able to remember not simply the facts of an event, but to feel again what it was like to be that person, to be there, then.

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This marks the two hundredth post on WhereTheRoadGoes. It’s been a long journey over the last two and a bit years. Sometimes it really is often only on looking back that it becomes clear how truly far we have come.

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I have liked Matador Network for some time now. I found the site a little over a year ago, looking for more bloggy, personal viewpoint-type stuff ahead of a trip to Southeast Asia. Lonely Planet was, and remains, my authoritative reference for places to sleep and transport links, but I was looking for something else at the time. Beyond the technical details of how to travel to where I was going, I wanted to get that sense of travel before actually getting on the plane. The sense of wonderment at being a tiny little part of a decidedly large and interesting planet. So that was how I ended up, wide-eyed, reading through dozens of pieces of writing from what I came to realise were a whole bunch more people out there in the world driven by the same fundamental desire. Read the rest of this entry »

For your entertainment and at least partly for my nostalgia, I kept a list traveling from Cape Town to Cairo of various interesting statistics. It makes for a colourful two minute retelling of the course of events.

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Been talking to myself forever. And how I wish I knew me better

The lyrics had been bouncing around my head for the last two days. Some songs come and go, others stick in your brain when they happen to strike the right note and refuse to leave. This is one of those this morning. Intellectual house guests with no shame in overstaying their welcome. Hanging on until you find the right person to pass them onto. Waking up for my first lecture as a journ student, they were still kicking around, terrible at taking a hint.

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My plan on returning home was always to pass right through and into something new. Not to turn my back on the people I know and the work I do in that place they call the Real World, but to augment it. To do more. More of the things that excite me. More of the things that fill not just a day, but a life with purpose. It’s that plan that has drawn me to the beautiful but oh-so-tiny town of Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape of South Africa for the remainder of this year. To study photojournalism.

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