Contrasting angles of Plettenberg Bay, South Africa with my travel bug awakened
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Time is limited currently with a major life event occurring this week. Change is as good as a holiday apparently. Access to wifi is thus also limited. Therefore I pen this momentary thought to share with you and record on my blockchain database for posterity.
About 20 years ago I went traveling up the continent of Africa, from the far southern coast at Cape Town, all the way up to Lusaka, Zambia. It was a two day trip by bus which seemed quite efficient.
There I attended a large international outdoor electronic music festival put on during a total solar eclipse which was visible in that past of the world. I had lots of fun, as you can imagine, camping out and enjoying 5 days of electronic dance music, psy trance to be specific. DJs from all over the world played through the night.
After the festival, I traveled south, spending two weeks in Zimbabwe camping by a river without even the need for a tent, despite it being mid winter. The experience was just epic. And it got better. Thereafter, having joined up with a band of merry rainbow travelers, we all made our way to the south coast of Africa and landed at a place called Transkei.
Here we spent another month camping out under the stars on the beach near a fresh water waterfall. The band of about 50 international travelers included Canadians, Swedish, Lebanese American, Israeli, European and of course some South African compatriots. What a happy rainbow family we were, all of it basically free.
The magic hat was passed around and one could donate according to your means to the communal collection for food supplies, which we picked up ever week from the nearby village.
The Transkei region is so remote and rural, with local Xhosa Bantu African tribes people still living in huts with their cattle. There were modern houses in the town of course but this was the homeland of the ancestral Xhosa native tribes, of which Nelson Mandela is the most famous son.
It was such a carefree lifestyle, cooking on the fire, eating simply and sharing resources. We would occasionally even see cattle with big horns roaming past along the white sandy beach, a truly surreal sight.
Once that was over and I returned to my home region, I was so in love with travel that I only wanted to collect more money and resume the travel lifestyle indefinitely. However, one thing led to the next and I ended up staying relatively local without traveling much after that for several years.
And so that travel bug was put on hold. I had to earn money and basically survive. Since I was in such a beautiful coastal region on the southern shores of Africa, it was almost as good as travel. Life by the sea can feel like a holiday sometimes.
That was over 20 years ago. Fortunately I experienced a little month of paradise about five years ago on a holiday trip touring the islands and beached of Thailand. That obviously revived my appreciation for the life of a constant traveler or digital nomad, as we like to call ourselves nowadays.
And so now, after years of being fairly stationary, I am on the road again, just along the coast of Africa. So it’s just a small taste of travel and new destinations. Nevertheless, I will continue to post my travel adventures with epic landscape photos in the months to come.
If that goes well, then perhaps some more international travel adventures can arise in the coming months or years. I am keeping my vision alive of seeing more of our beautiful planet. Let’s see where the road takes us. The world is our oyster and the sky is the limit so let me describe my journey as it unfolds in coming blog posts. See you on the way.
(photos my own)
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