'A good traveller has no fixed plans.' Tao Te Chiang
Madikwe is my happy place, my daughter likes to say. And indeed, when we arrived at our lodge at Mooifontein, the week before last, all the cares in the world seemed to just fall away. The four hour cruise up the N4 from Johannesburg, the half hour drive along dirt roads through the reserve, the […]
From the Lost Poetry Project This Sunday morning constitutional finds us traipsing across the stubby field, over the earthen wall of the dam where a couple of Egyptian geese meditate or drowse in a circle of brown water. We rise toward the morning light, climbing toward trees, seeing the rolling grassy joins and planes of […]
It was a tweet by Jonathan Jansen the other day that dragged the phrase to the surface of my mind, from where it had skulked like a prehistoric coelacanth in the deep-sea trenches of mordant recollection. That’s it, I thought. We are, in essence, a debating society. ‘We’ being South Africa. Jonathan is one of […]
We don’t call it Fall, here in South Africa. We do it the English way. We call it autumn. Be that as it may, fall has arrived, including this morning an unseasonal thunderstorm and rain. It’s not just the weather that is changing, folks, it’s the climate, as you know of course, unless you’ve had […]
If time is a river, it is a river with rapids and falls. We snipped another month off our wall calendar on Saturday, the first day of May, leaving just four months to go before we pack up and leave our house in Johannesburg and begin the long journey home, to Toronto. The calendar now […]
Private loss and public pain. Not the same, and not commensurate, but both laying emotional and mental claim. Reminders that we do not control events, that life has a way of breaking through our seemingly ordered universe and seemingly predictable lives. That gratitude and humility fit better with reality than hubris or bravado, that our […]
If you have been following along on Facebook on our 3700km road trip through the small towns of the Karoo, the Western Cape and all the way back to Johannesburg, you will have been following a story written partly in pictures – pictures taken, not for the photography but for the story, and on an […]
Traveling at Sixty was the topic of my last post – a post about slow travel, about taking the time to observe and relax, think and reflect. Now, a week later, we are on our way back, after nearly two-and-a-half weeks on the road and over 2000 km (so far) on the clock, with a […]
Traveling at sixty – 67, to be precise – is a much slower affair than it used to be. This is partly by choice, by design, but also by force of circumstance. The chief circumstance, Covid, is of course much more than circumstantial. It is an Act of God, a force of nature, something that […]
BERT – the Big Easter Road Trip – is at last under way (Bert was my paternal grandfather’s real name, by the by – we called him Pooch). We have mapped out the trip in easy four-to-five hour driving segments, starting this morning from Johannesburg, heading south on the N1 to Bloemfontein, to spend our […]
