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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
It’s dark. We left Marsabit an hour ago, by which time night had long fallen, but as I clamber down into the lorry’s cargo hold, the darkness becomes a dense, clinging oil. Occasionally pierced by small torches as the dozen or so others in the small space jostle for enough space to sleep in as the frame of the vehicle bangs and squeaks and unexpectedly leaps into the air.
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.
After on and off storms chasing my activities at Livingstone, it was an African-blue sky that watched over the hours-long bus ride from Livingstone to Lusaka. Lusaka would not be my destination today though. A tiny dot of a town – nay, a village – called Chisekesi would be my final hop off point. “Are you sure this is where you want to be?”, asked the conductor nervously as the bus stopped and I stood up to climb off.
The flame trees outside the Dar es Salaam train station are some of the most beautiful plants i’ve seen in days – more so as their orange flowers lick the deep blue of the sky, cloudless. It’s hardly fitting that here, in this loud and beautiful contrast of colours, our family must come to an end.
