[From the hip] So let me get say this right off. Ituri district is absolutely nothing like what you have been told the Eastern DRC is. It’s undeveloped, and it has crap roads – these things are true. But it is also full of really friendly people, to whom we have not had to pay a single bribe, who have really gone out of their way to show us a great time.
I finally finished transcribing the last days of my journal from Uganda somewhere around half past one this morning. One last push to get the last precious, straggling words off their handwritten pages. Loving each one, keystroke by keystroke – trying to remember when I wrote it. How I felt. In light of how the post that came after this diary blew up on Matador, here are the last three days of the diary. A prologue of sorts for the curious.
As many readers may be unaware, I am still a student this year. After finishing the postgrad diploma in journalism at Rhodes University last year, I remained to pursue an MA in Media Studies through a part coursework/part dissertation program. The dissertation is meant to start in the third quarter of this year, but I have been beavering away to try and get a proposal finished in the next month or two so that I can get started early. I think I can work harder and finish faster. So it’s at least worth trying to, and seeing how I go.
It’s late, and I’m tired, and I can’t get back to sleep. So I am up and writing again. Sifting through thoughts that come in the nights, when the day and all of its distractions have passed. I’m back in South Africa again. At last. I arrived somewhere around 04h30, having said goodbye to Katherine on the other side of the world. Long distance relationships are a bitch sometimes.
‘Today is gonna be the day…”
A sign slicing by reports only four hundred kilometres until Johannesburg, before being lost behind me. Lost in the dead flat Free State fields. I’m not checking the mirror today. There’s enough behind me.
Hi Richard
I am you, five years from where you are now. You are about to travel to Asia for the first time – to Malaysia. I know you are excited and have absolutely no idea what you will encounter there. But know that it will be the start of a way of thinking that will come to consume you as the years pass. You will journey much more, on paths much further than that you now confront – and it is in this spirit that I am writing back to you. To give you a thought on your travels – borrowing a few pages from that other famous speech about life that routinely does the rounds on the Internet. If I could give you only one piece of advice above all others, it would be this. Read the rest of this entry »
The flame trees outside the Dar es Salaam train station are some of the most beautiful plants i’ve seen in days – more so as their orange flowers lick the deep blue of the sky, cloudless. It’s hardly fitting that here, in this loud and beautiful contrast of colours, our family must come to an end.
Eileen from bearshapedsphere is busy a-mustering horrid-yet funny (i.e. you survived intact – mostly) stories from the far reaches of blogzakstan. Ranging from being caught in the middle of a taxi-war (a more gentle, non-South African version of one, thank god) to the epic search for the 99 bus here. So if you have a terrible, terrifying or tortuous tale of travel, now is the time to file said megaultrabad story here. Now. As for me, having written about terrifying bus rides of my own, and near-cholera-inducing accommodation, this new story (which actually happened shortly after the Laos bus ride of terror (see above link) began thus…
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.
It’s not my quote – that one comes from Fight Club, so you will have to give Chuck Palahniuk credit for so eloquently expressing angst with our short time in the world. It’s a quote that has stuck with me since I watched the movie again recently (and then felt the need to rant briefly against the world). But being all angsty about the fact that I will not be here forever simply for the sake of wanting to vent has never really been a productive pastime.
I’m not taken too often to publishing sappy writing on this blog, and am even less prone to posting simply to show a link. But some stories are too beautiful not to be told, and pushed upon you, the reader. For the girl from Portugal I met for exactly one night and spent years learning Portuguese for, though I never saw her again. For someone loved more than she will ever realise as she goes to save the world. For every simple. honest story like those which may reside in your own life, do yourself a favour and read this damn link.