Richard Stupart

Travel has, for some time now, been a sacred practice with me. Not necessarily escapist backpacking, but the willful breaking of ties to the places, people and rules-of-the world in which I am enmeshed. It is, I suppose, pilgrimage of a kind. Traveling has meant testing myself. In heart, in mind, in spirit. That’s why the stuff I write about is often not all that physically far from where I sleep at night, but always a thousand miles from the world of the familiar, the safe, and the known. I think I’ve grown a little from pushing each year, and I’ve not died yet. Which brings me to May.

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That’s a fairly well-suited metaphor for the state of my mind right now. Right through the long weekends, public holidays and off-days, I have done little else except read and learn. Once, upon a far-more-ignorant time, I thought that the phrase ‘reading for a Masters” degree was some antiquated turn of the Olde English. Not so. It appears that you actually have to read. A great deal.

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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.

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Light and dark are a simple analogy for so many things. Waiting at the baggage counter for my pack and pondering the miles of home beyond the exit gate, I think I would have done well to consider how light and dark interact. How they manage, in a way, to make each other. Allow you to see what it is you have left and what it is you are moving into. Your eyes adjust until someone opens a bright door and you hurt. I didn’t think any of these things at the time. Instead, I wondered why, for the first time returning from a journey, I felt panicked.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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