I left Cameroon November 23rd to begin my six-month-long travels, with the kickoff in South Africa. The plan is to travel up to Tanzania by land via Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia. From Dar es Salaam I will then fly to Thailand and hopefully visit Laos and Vietnam before heading to India, then stopping in the U.S. before I travel to South America. During most of my travels I will be alone, but I will also be meeting people during various segments of my trip.
I am keeping a personal journal during my travels, but I will also post blogs to share my experiences. So far, I have already fallen behind. Partly, this is because it is a challenge to find the time when I am traveling from place to place every two or three days. Also, it has been difficult for me to process everything I am thinking and feeling. I think there will be a learning curve on how to present these narratives with honesty toward the country, the people, and myself. I hope that they will become fuller and richer with time. I just ask for patience – from myself mostly, as I figure out how to do that.
South Africa
It was Africa as I had never seen it. I left thatched roof houses, dirt roads, and water wells. Yet in Johannesburg, I found myself among tree-lined streets, houses with European architecture, and malls with three stories. It was clean, modern, glamorous.The first hostel was white brick with wood floors and a pool. My bed had a heater.
Later, in a venture for food, I discovered that five blocks down there was only fast food, a pawn shop, and men smoking in the streets. Traveling through the city, I saw neighborhoods with mansions overlooking hills of juniper trees and neighborhoods with tin shacks dotted among a canvas of dirt.
At the apartheid museum, I was reminded of South Africa’s history. The displays seemed very complete, yet beneath the posters, the descriptions, and the words, there was something missing. There was no apology; there was no sense of shame.
The bus to Cape Town seemed lavish with its cushioned, fold-back seats and on-board restroom. But I resented the man next to me because he smelled of cigarettes. I huffed at him and moved away, and he immediately reacted with eyes to the ground and bent shoulders. It was disturbingly humble, as if I had done something to embarrass him. I wondered if I had unknowingly stirred a greater historical indignity. I wished I could take it back. Sorry, he said repeatedly, instead of “excuse me,” as he passed by my seat.
On the bus, the trains, and mini-buses – the cheapest forms of transportation- my friends and I were often the only whites. At most the bars, hotels, and restaurants, we were among only whites, with the exception of service staff. We moved in and out of segregated spaces, accustomed to the color of both backgrounds.
I met a Canadian student studying law just outside of Cape Town. She told me about the places in town only whites could go, and described a 1950s-era system of segregation - minus the signs in windows.
Houses with pools and juniper, stores with racks of dresses and cases of perfume, and paved roads with air-conditioned buses.
I tried to add and subtract the figures: wealth and poverty, a white government and a Black population, exploitation and survival.
It became disturbingly jumbled: a white government and exploitation and wealth, a Black population and survival and poverty.
Mozambique
We arrived without visas. It had already been a twenty-three hour bus ride from Cape Town to Johannesburg and my two friends and I were too tired to deal with the specifics before loading onto our next bus to Maputo. It was an important detail lost among the excitement of South Africa’s malls, wine tours and sushi. Even when the bus stewardess warned us we might be left at the border crossing, we widened our eyes with concern, rolled over and fell asleep.
Later, after we had cut to the front of the line through yelling and hissing crowds, bumbled around between borders in confusion, and lost all our body liquids in a nervous sweat, we reached Mozambique.
I looked around and saw that I was back in the real Africa. Rivers of trash ran down the side of a hill; passengers were packed into buses like cattle; young men with call cards lined the streets, and an old drunk danced with himself to music that blared through the streets.
But I realized that when I listened, I heard the sound of a different African rhythm: one that held similar beats to Latin America - smoother and calmer. Portuguese words brought forth Spanish that I had thought I forgotten. The brightly painted buildings were the palette of the Aztecs. And the roadside vendors were selling woven wicker, patchwork shorts, and lime sodas. But there was also a more familiar song, louder and in a different language: pay more because you are white.
But the beaches of the archipelagos were like paradise - white sand dunes and water so clear you could see every pebble twenty feet deep.
I learned to snorkel, I took a nap on a sailboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and I walked the full circumference of an island.
It was so perfect it was if someone might pull down the scenery or press a button and have it all disappear. It was hard to believe that this could really be my life – drifting freely in a landscape of turquoise ocean and cerulean skies.
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