A priest from Chimanimani once told me that God made Africa first, while he still had imagination and courage.
-Author Alexandra Fuller, while hiking the bush of Zambia.
Now that campaign season is finished with I'm moving on, at least for a few months. My plan is to head to Africa for a cross-continent trip starting in Cairo. It's a trip that I've been wanting to take for years and one that I've been planning for ages - being so close to lift-off is a hell of a feeling. I've never done anything like this, and the anticipation is ridiculous.
This is a great time to travel cross-continent in Africa because, with the exception of fighting in the eastern DRC and tension along the Eritrean-Djibouti border, the path provides open borders and war-free zones that typically haven't been there in the past. Starting in Egypt, I'm going to go up the Nile River across the Sudanese border and to Khartoum. From here, I'll split from the river and explore some of Sudan before continuing onwards to Ethiopia. After a slight detour to Somaliland, Kenya is up next. Then it's a Uganda-Rwanda-Burundi circuit, along with the Democratic Republic of Congo if the Kivu regions are safe and the fighting has died down. Tanzania is right after that, with that the Spice Islands (Zanzibar, Pemba, and Mafia Islands). After this I'm going SW to Zambia, Zimbabwe, and finally South Africa. I'm going to touch into Lesotho if my knees are still up for some climbing, as the Drakensburg Mountains are stunning and form a border with South Africa.
At this point I'm guessing I'll have some time to evaluate my options. There's a strong possibility that after five or so months I'll be tired of traveling and will want to come home. If not, then I'm going to head up north once again and go to Mozambique via Swaziland and up into Malawi. There's also a chance of exploring the Katanga province of the DRC or a source-to-sea trip of the Zambezi river with someone I met at Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree online forum.
As I mentioned, this trip is one I've salivated over for years, and this means that I'm going to try to pack as much into it as possible. There is so much to do along the way - so many mountains, deserts, lakes, volcanoes, beaches, rainforests - that even now, right before I leave, I have a difficult time wrapping my head around what is in store for me. That's part of the draw, of course; the unknowns in Africa are numerous. It's what got me when I was in Africa earlier, and it's what pumps me up so much to go back there for so long. The diversity of life and landscape that one experiences within Africa is enough to stun even the most experienced of travelers. Exploring some of the recently-opened areas of Sudan, climbing the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda, hiking the overland border crossing between Western Ethiopia and Kenya, and trekking through swaths of South Africa's Wild Coast are at the top of my list, but there are plenty more not far behind those.
The beginning quote from Alexandra Fuller pretty well sums it up for me. From when I was very young through my first trip to Africa and continuing to now, the continent of Africa has always struck me not as the Dark Continent but as an Unknown Continent. It encompasses the geological and geographical extremes of our world, the best and worst of humanity, and a sense of mystery that has has always shrouded it from outsiders. Even today there are entire regions of the continent which have yet to see white skin and presumably will wait decades before they do. Think about that - today, more than a hundred years after Henry Morton Stanley died and with satellites mapping out corners around the globe, there are still places in Africa you can try to get to where the sum total of information known about the climate, vegetation, people, disease, rivers, villages, and dangers is: Unknown.
But for me, those places are not on my itinerary, because my guess is that they are unknown for good reasons. My plans are for the next rung up on the ladder; places that have been searched and trekked but then forgotten or relegated. When a 50 year civil war ends as it recently did in South Sudan, that means two things. 1) It is safe for the first time in ages. 2) Few outsiders have any idea what lies there and it is just waiting to be rediscovered. Same with a desert border crossing which has seen only a handful of travelers in the last decade. Or world-class Neolithic paintings that are hidden in the cave systems of Somaliland. There are endless possibilities in Africa. Presumably the same can be said for every other continent, but for some reason it's Africa that has always held the most allure and it's Africa that I've been unable to get out of my mind since I flew out of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on my way back home some 30 months ago.
Truthfully, I don't know what I am going to feel up for once I'm over there. I have already learned that things never quite work out the way one expects them to over there, so I don't really have too many specific plans except to get down to South Africa by late April. Other than that, I might have a lot of adventures, or I might just end up spending most of my time in hostels. I'll try to post at least once or twice per country.
As something of a parting toast, I'd like to offer my favorite toast, courtesy of Edward Abbey.
"May your trails be crooked, windy, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds."
Cheers, everyone. Good luck with your school, with campaigning, your families, jobs, and travels over the coming months. I hope that you keep me up-to-date on what's happening with you when I'm away. Keep well!
