This marks the two hundredth post on WhereTheRoadGoes. It’s been a long journey over the last two and a bit years. Sometimes it really is often only on looking back that it becomes clear how truly far we have come.
It’s a warm Sunday, dry from the suggestion of highveld dust on the sleeping air. Mixed in with the breeze, sweetening it, the sound of praises being sung in a nearby suburban park. An innocuous place on any other day, Sunday has transformed it, becoming a church to the jubilant celebration of Christ. Worshippers in robes of lush blue and impossibly brilliant white shuffle, sway and weave between the ululating and singing of the possessed. No walking dog or pedestrian picnic will intrude on this space today. As if fuelled by the afternoon, drifting lazily past, their worship blooms, wanes, flickers and explodes with the birth and death of each Sunday moment. Thousands burned in a day. Read the rest of this entry »
Just a quick welcome to those arriving here from www.travelblogs.com. Covering a few years of travels and related writing, this blog is in the process at the moment of counting down towards departure on a journey from Cape Town to Cairo done entirely on public transport. With the countdown now at 38 days and reducing fast, you can read an overview of the trip route here, planning here and a summary of related posts here. If you would like to find out more about me, or pop me an email sometime, take a peek here.
Otherwise, please take a look and sniff around a bit. I hope you will find something to inspire your own wanderings, writings and explorings. And if you are here in 38 days, I can’t wait to take you with me on the long and magical journey across Africa.
- Rich
52 days left on the countdown until boarding a flight to the Cape. There remains, as ever, a good deal still to be done – but little by little, tasks are being performed and small nuggets of self-satisfaction are being earned. Such as this weekend, for example, spent trying to find a place in Grahamstown for next year.
Sometimes even if you don’t. Yes, I feel more than a little guilty that I haven’t updated these pages in an age – though by all accounts, this does not seem to have stopped the internet beating down the door (albeit modestly) in the last few days to come and read the stuff here. I guess that means this site is starting to have depth. Yeah. Depth baby. I love how that rolls off the tongue.
It was high time that this blog got a new look. Something that tries to say traveler a little more and tourist a little less. And this is the result. There are some more widgets and other bits and pieces that will get added in the coming days, but this is about as much as can be done on low grade coffee and little sleep.
Jonathan made a point recently about (among other things, but I have never been good at the finer philosophical points) how to a large degree the choices we think we have and the experience of the world that we are able to shape for ourselves is often predetermined by the background and understandings handed to us by those around us (our families, friends and broader society).
Chatting with a friend tonight, whose life is taking one of those severe emotional/financial/everything shocks that lives are wont to take on occasion, reminded my about an important fact about the world. Fact, in this instance being an easy replacement for “Richard’s Opinion”.
I have come to believe that, in the end, there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who lived their lives on their own terms – who may not have been a success in the conventional understanding of the term, but who owned their destinies, woke up each morning with the power to decide their own day and be the first person to whom they have to answer. The corollary to this first category are people who found it easier to fit in, to trade wild and reckless dreams for a mortgage and the security of a paycheque – to live a life where they will not experience major upsets, and can pursue the respect of their peers in the game of life. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m new to the whole blogging thing, so had been looking for inspiration for a while now as to what would make a good experience to blog about. Unlike my more debonair brother, I am not touring Asia on an onion-free, volcano-filled English teachathon, nor have I seen much in SA recently which is more spectacular than, say, the local Spar. Not to knock Spar, – the place can be quite spectacular on the odd occasion (such as when it is on fire, filled with screaming weasels, or both).
Nevertheless, the desire to say something profound and leaderly afflicts me much as I suspect it does anyone who has taken the time out to set up a blog. After all, if there are so many fazillion people out there on the internet, surely there must be someone out there who would give a damn about my opinions. Nay, not just give a damn, but follow them with the same zealotry as one might one of those obscure jihad websites that I am told exist, but never seem to turn up in my Google searches.
So it is under this expectation that I am hoping to find the time/strength/willpower/humour to continue a blog over the coming months on interesting things which grab my thoughts and which, but for the fact that my work constrains me like a 50′s housewife in a kitchen, I would love to go out to a bar and share with the local population. Given the current foci of my existence, this is probably likely to be a combination of business, webby stuff, current affairs and fawning jealousy at my younger sibling’s fabulous adventures. :)
