I stopped burdening my mind, overloading it with information about the African countries I intend to travel through. It’s pointless.
I read a book called Bantustan, written by Uroš, Lazar and Marko, and that’s where I put a stop. Young men (young men at the time, now they’re not so young) wrote a great book, much more than just a travelogue. This book, among other things, confirmed what I have said many times before: you cannot follow someone else’s path, because that path ceases to exist the moment someone crosses it. That is exactly a detail that travel bloggers and those who feed on their reports (yes, reports, even though that word is too strong to describe the quality of their writing) don’t understand.
That’s the difference between a traveler and a tourist. A tourist goes somewhere because he wants to see or experience a specific place or a thing. A traveler goes to find something, not knowing at the beginning of the journey what he is looking for, or where to find it.
This time I will look for something in Africa. Not because Africa is the birthplace, in the anthropological sense, of modern man, not because it is insufficiently explored and geographically particularly interesting. Even though Africa is all that, my decision to visit it is, to be honest, guided by a much more prosaic reason. Due to family reasons, I will not be able to leave my village in Serbia until October. At that point autumn will start and immediately after – winter. So, if I want to travel by bike (and I do), I must head to the southern hemisphere.
Bantustan also confirmed my reasons for traveling alone. In extreme situations, after a couple of weeks of traveling together, quarrels begin over every little thing. Because little things in extreme situations cease to be so little. It can be that one can drive faster than the other, or that one wants to go around something that is 50 km to the east, and the other would prefer something that is 20 km to the west, and everything that used to tie them together at the beginning of the journey, falls apart at once. Even though it is safer to have company, that’s just the way it is. Company is not a solution to loneliness, because loneliness is not a matter of the company you are in, loneliness is within you.
I know the basic geography facts. I also know a thing or two about people, that is the tribes that I could meet. Everything else is variable on a daily or monthly basis. The rest of the things I still need to figure out are: how to get a visa for each country separately (for example, guys I mentioned failed to enter Ethiopia due to visa problems) which vaccines are mandatory and when should I get vaccinated, and what, apart from Autan and a mosquito net, should I bring so I don’t get malaria. Maybe some other issues as well, I guess I will find out by October.
In addition to these questions, a reader not infected with travel (travel, not tourism) might also ask me one more: why do I have to go anywhere, in the first place? Answer to that question probably deserves another text, although I’m not sure any text would be able to explain. But I will try to write something about this topic in the days to come, even though no one asked me.
I also ordered a couple of books by African authors, that should arrive after the holidays. The rest is getting physically prepared, getting in shape.
And that’s all that can be done, because you can’t really prepare for Africa, if you’re not in Africa.
(the separate photo is a screenshot from the WorldData.info website)
