Living in the Eastern Cape is living in a graveyard. The bleached bones of stories pierce the landscape in silence, clung to by the sinewy dust roads poking off the tar where life still moves. They relinquish their stories only to those who go looking. Quietly asking passers by to take a detour, explore. There is a treasure down every vein of tarless dirt.
The streets are a mess. Vuvuzelas and singing crawl along up ahead. Someone was allegedly beaten up yesterday for getting too close. The local paper showed a pretty serious head injury on a fairly unhappy-looking man. He told the reporter that he had been assaulted for telling a protestor to stop throwing bottles at cars in the street. Brad, one of my journ classmates, is talking to the strike leader about the incident while Thomas and I circle the singing, dancing crowd with cameras, imagining angles, anticipating the dancing crowd’s moves. In South Africa, singing and dancing are as much a part of the protest landscape as violence. Read the rest of this entry »
I love the questions that readers of this blog occasionally ask about travel, life and the big choices we make as we negotiate our paths through it. Not because I have any answers in the maths-exam sense of the word, but because it’s an opportunity to stop, look back and regain some perspective. A reader sent me an email the other day which echoes some themes that have been bouncing around unusually often in conversation with some fellow journalists-to-be and with my online travel friends, so to make the universe happy, I have published the replies here in the hope that it might be useful to others. There may be no answers, but ideas might be the next best thing.
Nostalgia makes a fine mistress in the evenings. I’ve realised recently that finding interesting bits and pieces on travel blogs about Sudan is actually quite difficult. Searching for Sudan away from the South and Darfur, there is actually not a whole lot out there. So, in the interests of adding to the Internet, here is a short video from my Christmas home in December – the town of Atbara in Sudan.