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. Hailey interviews a teacher here, the owner of the community creche there. For my part, I chase laughing children down a side street as they pose with daft expressions in the hot dust. Then laugh madly at their faces on the back screen afterwards. Read the rest of this entry »

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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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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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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Watching Abu Simbel shining in the night sky and surrounded with the dark desert beyond, brought in on the cold winds that cut across the deck of our ferry, I said my silent goodbyes to Sudan. In truth, I had said farewell out loud, in person, the evening before. Standing in the dust beyond the town and watching the white sky turn silently orange, then red, before finally burning out into the deep blue twilight of evening in the desert . My goodbye was presided over by the still slightly veiled moon, saving its face for the next night’s transition to Aswan. There I stood and whispered my goodbyes to Wadi Halfa, to Sudan, to beautiful, kind people met and landscapes that I had only ever been able to fractionally guess at before.

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Or not. There is no Christmas in Sudan – not even the bubble-wrapped version where the jolly Santa Claus puts you on his knees and hears your Christmas wishes. No sir. Tomorrow will be another day of bright sun, delicious schwarmas, clapped out yellow taxis and business as usual.

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