The night draws close and the world sleeps. Quietly, in my own silent space here, the walls remind me of journeys past. Places, so many places. Framed, worn as a purple Ethiopian scarf, a magic ring from Senegal around my neck and another on my thumb – haggled from a trader in Aswan. Reminders of the distances we can cover. Of how much can start with a thought.
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.
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.
One of the most rewarding aspects of travel for me is that it is a learning experience, serving to correct my own misconceptions as much as it gives me the opportunity to try and communicate something of what my own life and country is like to those I meet. On more than one occasion in Sudan, I would have to give lengthy explanations to customs officials, bus drivers and other interesting people as to how it is possible for me to be white and South African. Many refused to believe that such a thing was possible. I’d like to hope that in a good humoured way, my white face and South African passport will leave behind some new views of my country – ones fractionally closer to an understanding of what my life is like, in exchange for the same incremental understandings of others’ worlds. But while it may be understandable that a customs official on the Ethiopia/Sudan border may still think that I live in some alternate African reality, I find it less amusing for an educated Chicago editor to have similar views.
It was a gentle sort of love affair. Not the wild, passionate, love-at-first-sight sort of thing. More like that feeling that gently creeps up on you when you discover something underneath a friendship, usually far too late to do anything about it. But I digress. These stories have to start at the point where we are still strangers. Me waking up in the nicest, softest, mosquito net-est bed (nod to the word-maker-upper-in-chief) and deciding to visit some fifteenth century Islamic ruins in Bagamoyo. Not, in fact, Dar es Salaam at all.
Traveling from Cape Town to Cairo is something that I may quite likely only do once in this life. So I’ve been spending no small amount of thought trying to decide how I want to write and record it, what I want to record, and most importantly, what I hope the journey will come to mean in the end. It seems like a futile question to consider at the outset, when the journey has yet to begin and its conclusion cannot possibly be known. Seems like. But isn’t.
One by one, lots of the little things I own have been frogmarched into a big pile, ready to be identity paraded so that their mugshots will accompany their biographicals online as they are sold off. The last thing to be sold will be my bed. Partly because I need it to sleep on, but even more importantly because of what its loss will represent.
“Welcome to Rhodes – I hope you enjoy studying here”, said the man at the counter. I grinned like an idiot. I don’t think even first years grin with such an overpowering glow of stupidity. Yes, in part the glow emanates from the place in me that likes the fact that Rhodes – a tiny little town-university in the Eastern Cape – actually feels like a cosy little university. Like a community, where my alma mater, the University of the Witwatersrand never did. But the truly stupid part of my glow was coming from somewhere else. From the thrill of taking a tiny, but terribly significant, step in my life.
To choose forever between following a distant star or trading with the devil for a lesser truth. This, above all else, is the decision with which we must live.
Strange days indeed. But breezily refreshing to the big questions. The ones that matter. A friend who knows where her heart would lead her – half way across the planet to another life. Another who cannot seem to find a place in this world of pursuits, of endless jostling and comparison. And my own most fundamental challenge to, in carefully planned time, begin to live consistently with what I believe of the world. To live in defiance of the order that raised me. Taking what I have become and denying it my obedient payback. Read the rest of this entry »
The great thing about a blog, besides the opportunity to endlessly tweak layout options and being continually surprised at which posts are the most regularly revisited (hint – I should open a help desk for backpackers going to Mozambique) is the freedom of the whole enterprise. I get to put my thoughts out on the interwebs and Darwin takes them in his gentle hands and decides to pulverise or popularise them. It’s a fair trade. I learn to write better or watch things become very quiet all of a sudden (cue tumbleweed). But having an audience is not really a sufficient reason to want to blog – no more than it would be a reason to stand naked in the center of town juggling small animals. Which would likely generate far more attention.
