'A good traveller has no fixed plans.' Tao Te Chiang
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 [...]
All happy families, Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, resemble one another. If this is true, then families who share in the kind of happiness we enjoyed on a family trip to Montagu, in the Western Cape, in December 2014, are happy indeed. The family, on holiday in Montagu Rob and I had flown out from [...]
We all see this every day: headlines that scream, 'Five things you should stop doing right now!' 'Three things you need to know.' 'Scared of the stock market? Do this today!' And on and on and on, from all corners, all comers, every wannabe pundit and pretend journalist and (groan) aspirant 'influencer.' Who are these [...]
Rob and I agree, there is something unreal about our lives right now. This odd sense of unreality rests, uneasily, on a simple fact: after more than four years of living in South Africa, we are just six months away from packing up our rented townhouse in Johannesburg, moving out and - Covid willing - [...]
If I have been remiss lately in posting my photographs, here are two images from an ongoing series on rural Ontario, with the promise that there will be more to follow. And just to mix things up, here is a teeny weeny poem from my Lost Poetry project. Words and pictures, folks, words and pictures! [...]
Sometimes a rhino is just a rhino. This big fellow, bringing up the rear of a group of white rhinos as they lumbered up a rutted track to the top of a ridge before disappearing down the other side, maintained a watchful eye as we jolted along in his wake, in the open LandCruiser, last [...]
This was not one of thoseSwooping soaringPhoto opportunities, you know,Where the bird glides in fromStage left andExits beautifullyTo the rightWith a pristinePink and silverSalmon or somethingA missile ready to launchFrom its clawFlakes of morning lightFalling from its not yet barbecuedFlesh. This was murder, a brawl in the shallowsWhich ended badlyFor the thrashing creature in the [...]
At a time like this, when half the world is on lockdown because of the pandemic, when civility and decency and the very foundations of democracy seem at risk in the face of racist populism and rabid know-nothingness, when the planes are grounded and we can barely venture out of our houses, when our ‘advanced’ [...]
I am startled and yet not surprised, in returning to my blog, that almost a hundred days (of solitude, I am tempted to add, in the spirit of Marquez) have passed since my last post. Last time I wrote we were 10 days into the lockdown, and the number of reported cases in South Africa [...]
