Richard Stupart

Journalism is nothing if not the beautiful license to find stories. Beautiful ones, tragic ones, ones that make you think. Sniffing them out like some sort of literary bloodhound and bringing them back, tail wagging. What happens to afterwards at the hands of the editor doesn’t bear thinking.  But the hunt is good fun.  In between snuffling for stories in Grahamstown’s surrounds, I have been making headway on typing up the full account of Cape to Cairo travels. Twenty thousand words later and I am only in Zambia, with a world of places and people that are a delight to revisit again. My eyes wonder about my hands as they wrote the notes the fingers now gleefully tapdance into the world. Taken from the pages that saw Ethiopia, scrawled somewhere between Bahir Dar and Gonder, this is a piece I have yet to reach in my transcription. It’s one that has returned to my mind often since coming back.

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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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I’ve been in Ethiopia for almost two weeks now. It’s been a delicious downtime from constant traveling up to this point – a chance to stop thinking about Cairo, about endings, about the fact that nothing lasts forever. But this morning it will be time to move on. To Metema at the edge of Ethiopia and on into Sudan to write the closing chapters in this journey.

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Followers of this blog will know of my plans to go and explore Ethiopia at the end of this year. Being the exciteable sort I am and having ready access to internet and the Lonely Planet guide to the country, I have started doing research into the people, landscapes and history of the country. It was, however, an unrelated book that I have been reading which mentioned the Danakil Depression. Oh my god.

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…is always an excellent idea. After having decided where I would like to go and explore at the end of this year for another three to four week backpacking adventure, I promptly fell sick. It appears that after Mozambique my body was somewhat exhausted and was letting me know that I should stop pushing my luck. So one bout of throat infection and a minor fever later, I am back on my feet and able to share the news.

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