by Richard | Feb 4, 2010 | Creative Writing, Journalism
My plan on returning home was always to pass right through and into something new. Not to turn my back on the people I know and the work I do in that place they call the Real World, but to augment it. To do more. More of the things that excite me. More of the things...
by Richard | Jan 30, 2010 | Politics, Thinking
One of the most rewarding aspects of travel for me is that it is a learning experience, serving to correct my own misconceptions as much as it gives me the opportunity to try and communicate something of what my own life and country is like to those I meet. On more...
by Richard | Jan 26, 2010 | Cape to Cairo, Interviews
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...
by Richard | Jan 22, 2010 | Africa, Cape to Cairo, Travel
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. He was a...
by Richard | Jan 10, 2010 | Africa, Cape to Cairo, Egypt, Travel
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 –...
by Richard | Jan 7, 2010 | Africa, Sudan, Travel
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...
by Richard | Jan 5, 2010 | Africa, Cape to Cairo, Sudan, Travel
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...
by Richard | Jan 2, 2010 | Africa, Sudan, Travel
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...
by Richard | Dec 31, 2009 | Africa, Cape to Cairo, Sudan, Travel
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....
by Richard | Dec 24, 2009 | Africa, Sudan, Travel
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...
by Richard | Dec 21, 2009 | Africa, Ethiopia, Sudan, Travel
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...
