Richard Stupart

Camera in hand, I follow Hailey through the roads of Glenmore as the Sunday afternoon beats down on us. She, in turn, is following Ben Mafane, the township patriarch whose athletic frame understates his age. It’s easy to understand why he is dubbed the ‘Mandela of Glenmore’, having been a former boxer who now teaches the sport to many of the local youths. Some of them are with us, forming his entourage as we go from house to house.

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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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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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A few weeks on and returned and adjusting to life in the small microtropolis of Grahamstown. Of which there is so much to write, so many places I want to go and play with my camera, and so many big discussions to be had in the Rat & Parrot tavern. Those self-important discussions about challenges – about life, direction and meaning – that  universities seem to burst with, fading beyond their walls as responsibilities run screaming into your days like an insistent toddler.

But while these stories brew and strengthen like a fine ale waiting to be tapped, here is an interview on wanderingeducators.com, who caught me even before my flight had returned from Cairo and interrogated me thoroughly on my last two months.

Traveling from Cape to Cairo was, in many places, a very solitary experience. I would be lying, however,  if I said that I was ever completely on my lonesome. Less than a foot high, generally quiet and inedible in Ethiopia and Sudan – I had a partner.

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The flight home was about the only uneventful part of the journey. Two days ago, facing the Giza Pyramids, I couldn’t bring myself to understand, to appreciate, what it means for this journey to have come to an end. Back in South Africa – exhausted – I couldn’t help myself skimming some of the photographs, some of the writing lying in my unpacked bag. Slowly, I am starting to feel the ending.

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At 10h30 this morning the train from Luxor hissed to a final stop and I popped my tired little head out in Cairo. It’s four days short of two months of near non-stop moving, busing, boating, trucking (or on-top-of-trucking, technically) and one night on a felucca. I am holding out until I have seen the Pyramids tomorrow before drawing a line in my mind to this journey, because that’s always how I imagined it ending. In front of the Great Pyramid of Giza, rather than the McDonalds of Cairo. Maybe I just like the drama of ending at one of the surviving wonders of the ancient world.

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Khartoum, Sudan. Pariah state of the western media, with a president indicted by the International Criminal Court for the genocide in Darfur. It’s Tuesday evening and the man in front of the taxi, who is taking time out of his own route, unasked, to find me a safe hotel and make sure I am settled in this strange place, turns to me and asks, “What do you think of my country”.

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I left Khartoum early on Christmas morning. You wouldn’t think it was. Absolutely nothing slows in Khartoum. Unsurprising, but strange. Only a sandstone church, alone in a landscape of crescent minarets outside the bus window, was sheltering its flock from the morning sun. Connecting them in spirit to what consumes the place I call home this day. For my part, I had found my way to the dusty chaos of the bus station and on to a bus bound for Bagrawiya.

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