[From the first pages of the Cape to Cairo manuscript, Nov. 2009]
This is a story about traveling from Cape Town to Cairo on public transport. It’s also a little about what happens when you throw yourself out into the craziness of the world and try to do something you never thought you could.
It’s quiet outside. The world is sleeping and I shouldn’t be here. I should be asleep, but here is where the writing happens. It’s a place that the ghosts of the eloquent words finally come gently to my dancing fingers. Like intricate little knots, stories need to be understood before they can be written. Sometimes its as simple as the right words providing the momentum that coerces the string. Flopping into a loose and beautiful pattern. Sometimes it’s so much harder than that.
Returning is only over when you are back at a place you recognise as home, waking up in a bed that remembers how you like to spread out at night, for more than a week. By that yardstick, I’ll be home on Wednesday and you will get delicious audiovisual treatery soon after. For now, though, a brief storytelling interlude via some quick stats written on the dirtiest back pages of my journal.
Up at 04h30. In Entebbe airport by 06h00. On a plane by 08h30 and starting the long trek home. It’s all so managed. So clean. In your seat. Eat your meal. Listen to music or fall asleep for distraction. I feel awry in the whitespace. My clothes are filthy, and probably smell a little.
It’s undeveloped, and it has crap roads – these things are true. But it is also full of really friendly people, to whom we have not had to pay a single bribe, who have really gone out of their way to show us a great time.