Remember the travels, remember the companionship

Africa 2003 - safari as a way of life as Dan Eldon called it

Last day

Ithaca
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge(...)

(...)Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

The Last Leopard

Capoeira in Maputo

the city at the end of things

Maputo is a wreck of a city. A city-harbour at the end of the world, a Corto-Maltese city, a city at the end of things.

give us an hour for magic, give us a velvet hour

Melancholia

And then it happened. The vague melancholia that had set in by the end of our journey turned into that travel weariness which make strange places feel aloof and hostile. From this point onwards, things were tainted: the overnight theft, the suspicious barman who seemed to have set us up, the coastal rains, the difficulty to communicate (sometimes among ourselves), the conflicting prospect of finding our lives back, everything conspired to say: this is the closing of the bracket, go back to your miserable lives, this was but a dream within a dream.

Time was no longer on our side

Mozambique, upon crossing the border.

Portuguese in our ears: fresh like the first sip of the local beer.

I think we felt hung over by so many fast-passing landcapes (and confrontations with the self). The feeling that we got somewhere and nowhere in the same time: Mozambique already felt like an epilogue. Time was no longer on our side.

NIght shots of Nicola

Fleeting happiness

"Diomira: The special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time".
Calvino

Joce

We had an island in Africa

We slept in a little island on Lake Malawi, with a few fish-eagles, otters and spiders for only friends.

Lake Malawi

Evening in a village by the Lake Malawi. I use a long exposure on my camera to create ubiquitous effects.

scene by the river (where?)

Bee eater with blue make-up abover her eyes

Welcome comittee in Flat Dogs

Night thrills

Hippos all around the tent during the night, too scared or too wise to look outside, tracks of a roaming leopard in the morning: in Flatdogs, you lived in amongst the animals.

The mermaids by the camp

the enigma of arrival

the coarse fabric of hours
hours that never ignite
the sum total of a grinding life
and we forget and forget
the fires and the doors
the disruptions and the distractions
And we hope and hope
that it will take a journey
for something to crack open inside

there is hope but no waiting:
For you know by now
like falling in love
it takes the right time
It takes mysterious correspondences
(certain planet alignments why not)
it takes a catching unawares

Was it the elephants that crossed the camp
(And feather-like seemed to float in our field of vision)
Was it the river and the strange mermaids we shared it with
(The first Western travelers who encountered hippos for the first time called them mermaids for lack of a better word)
Was it sheer exhaustion after many days’ traveling
Was it the fear of the night before – of never arriving of never knowing -
Was it TS Eliot’s poems which I used to lull me into sleep
Was it the feeling to have stumbled upon an African heart
somewhere in the middle of nowhere
Was it the feeling to be lost and that maps didn’t mean much
Was it the enigma of arrival

I don’t know, but
in Flatdog, Zambia
at a most indefinite crossing of space and time
neither at the beginning, the middle or the end of our journey
in a moment of day that was neither morning or afternoon
in a sleep that was neither consciousness or unconsciousness
in a place that was neither an oasis nor the wilderness
There it stung me:
a door was opened wide
into the magic of childhood
(Don’t ask me to reminisce a story
I just remember the feeling
like having danced with a devil)

The wave washed over me
like a long rapture.

When I woke up,
It felt like
I had slept for several days.

Life is elsewhere...

Zambia from west to east: I must have dreamt the last part of the trip ‘cause we were crawling over giant stones, in thick forest trails, in the middle of night and didn’t know whether we were lost.

Anxiety creeps in aboard. in those moments, the natural bravado that prevails among three Europeans gone for an African adventure always leaves way to a feeling of inadequateness.

We are inadequate, because this isn’t our jungle. Our jungles are corporate, they are urban, they are sport contests, the are school and university exams, they are controlled and they have parameters and boundaries. We have been programmed since our early childhood to survive these kinds of trials.

We saw “Into the Wild” yesterday. There is an emotional climax in the movie, which is when all Chris McCandless’ youthfulness, optimism and playfulness utterly and completely vanishes when he realises that this is no longer a game: he is trapped into the wild and he is going to die.

At that moment, one cannot help thinking how shallow and inadequate his idealistic visions of freedom – of leaving society for the uncorrupted world of nature - now sound, however empathetic one feels towards them.

Dreamers cannot bear much reality. They want adventures, but not too much. They want revolutions, but someone else has to carry them out for them, etc. That’s what Kundera called the “bloody smile of innocence” ( “Life is elsewhere”).

en route to zambia (?)

“…there were times we regretted
the summer palaces on slopes, the terraces
and the silken girls bringing sherbet
then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women
and the night fires going out and the lack of shelters
and the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
and the villages dirty and charging high prices:
a hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
sleeping in snatches,
with the voices singing in our ears, saying
that this was all folly…”

TS Eliot from the journey of the Magi

drizzle an light shower in Vic Falls

Vic falls before and beyond the tipping point

There is no denying that Vic Falls is beautiful.

There is also no denying that it reached a tipping point of popularity a few years ago and that as a result it was maybe changed forever: it is on every list of the “100 places you need to see before you die”.

A few years still, I had experienced the wild side of Vic Falls. You would meet elephants and buffalo herds while strolling on the river banks of the Zambezi river.

It is these memories that I am trying to preserve now.

Beyond the tipping point? it’s only downhill I am afraid. Prepare for the hordes of Chinese and Japanese tourists that, as I write, are partaking in the most cynical auctioning process since the 19th century “scramble for Africa”.

Everything is for sale in our world, especially Africa.

Infamous baboon

It is one of those things that you have to laugh about, yet to this day, I cant help resenting the little bastard that cost me a brand spanking new lens.

As that soulless little bastard, I will call “it”, grabbed my camera lens, as “it” climbed to the top of the tree, as “it” was gnawing at my immaculate lens with its bad teeth and rotten monkey breath, as “it” eventually dropped it from the 5-storey high tree, as my lens fell on a rock and was bent to unusable state, I swear I could have shot the little bastard, in traditional African hunting fashion.

(baboon in Vic Falls)

I was one of them

The Livingstone backpackers’ hostel where we stayed was like all backpackers’ places around the world.

The same usual crowds hang out there, the same hippies, the same Australians, the same wannabe Rastaferians, the so-called adventurers which are often the bored and self-escaping youth of the Western world, carrying with them all the symbols and paraphernalia of their newly-found and temporary freedom: Arabic shawls, rings, tattoos, Jamaican dreadlocks, Moleskine diaries, Jamaican music, ganja, and a certain air of obsequious introspection and self-contentment. (Back in their home, you will find them dying a little death in corporate suits and boardrooms. Still they’ll remember, they’ll remember the respite).

Let’s not fool myself: I was one of them (although of the skeptical kind)

Blessed be those nights

To cross the border from Botswana to Zambia, you need to be ferried across. Somehow, I remember good feelings aboard, an exhilarating sense of adventure as we basked in the evening dusk.

Botswana and its silences, its introspections, its deserts was behind us. Another loud, twittering world was beckoning now: the world of the black man.

The border post was full of incompetent officials, frenetic passport stamping, of for-ever-stuck, for-ever-moaning and for–ever-bribing truck drivers, and of our first malaria mosquitoes.

We arrived late at night in Livingstone, and tiptoed our way through the badly-lit, derelict town.

Set down this, o traveler:

arrive at night in an unknown tropical city, lie down in an unknown bed into an unknown room, get your mind intoxicated by the surrounding Mystery and gently fall into a heavy, magical sleep until the early dawn, when you will pop your head outside before the mist has settled down and the human ants have started their toil.

o traveler: blessed be those nights.

Buck for sale

River sand

When you get closer to the Zambian border, life in the river almost imperceptibly changes.

In the glittering pools where the early morning sun has fallen, the shadows of goats and women have risen from the river sand, that same sand which elephants were dusting themselves with just moments ago.

To me, it is that seamless blending in of different realms and materials - dust, trees, human, animal life, river beds, villages- that defines the mystique of this place: the dying image of a primitive freedom.

sequences de la course

African village

Going through the north of Botswana, we crossed villages and great river-beds like that of the Chobe river.

For the first time, you get a taste of what awaits you up north, in the heart of Africa. The first true African kraals, the mud huts and their thatched roofs, a first distillation of Africa and its people.

Travel moods

A fire, the blue hour and the smell of roasting maize. The sun-drenched day coming to a close over dusty faces.

(Was it me or Joce or Nicola who sulked that evening? Cant remember: we took turns)

I shall always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

crossing the river

It ‘s only a few moments later that we spotted the big Nile crocodile on the river bank.