Category Archives: Experiences

Feeling a connection to home

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I am drawn to the seashore at sunset as a moth is to a flame. I could never live inland; after more than 48 hours in a landlocked city I get edgy and the nearest river or lake becomes a magnet.

When I am standing on a beach, watching the sun dip below the horizon (and never seeing the green flash!), I get a strong sense that the water before me is the same water that’s lapping on the sands at the beach down the road from my home. And it’s the same water I stood before in Fiji, California, Thailand, Tahiti and numerous other places. No matter where in the world I am, if I can be down by the shore as the sun is setting, I feel at home.

Italy. Never anything less than 'bella'.

Capri, Italy, 2002

“Pinch me” moments

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I love, love, LOVE those moments when you’re in another country and it hits you: “I’M IN PARIS!” – or New York, or on a glacier, or 35,000 feet above Turkey and making a phone call from my plane seat, or….

I adore the goosebumps I get when in front of me, for the first time, is something so iconic, it feels totally unreal. It looks just like it does in all those photos! Whether my travel companions find my excitement and enthusiasm endearing or annoying, I don’t know – but I hope I never lose it. My stomach is feeling all squirmy just thinking about these moments, right now :-)

The first of many images in this category: Cairo, Egypt, 2010.

Glimpsing the Pyramids for the first time. I'M IN CAIRO!

Understanding history

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I detested history as a subject at school and gave it up as soon as I could. Never saw the point of knowing in which year things happened (plus we had to study the Afrikaner Groot Trek every year – yawn). It’s corny to say that history comes alive when you visit historical places, but it’s true. Few places on earth must be as moving to visit as the former concentration camps (now museums) in Germany.

Lifeless yet deeply moving.

Dachau was a moving, sobering stop on a coach-camping-sightseeing-and-drinking tour of Europe in 1996 – and the kind of place everyone should visit once in their lifetime in order to comprehend the human capacity for inhumanity. On a similar tour the following year we stopped at Auschwitz, where I stayed in the car park. Visiting a second concentration camp was just too much – learning that history lesson once was enough.

I’ll never forget the atmosphere at Dachau. Tangibly awful: such sadness, such evil. Strangely, there is almost no life there. Not a bird, not an ant. Only ghosts.  (Dachau, Germany, 1996)

Perfect light off the tourist trail

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Looks a little like that game where you see how many wooden blocks you can pile up before it tumbles...

Is there anything better than getting lost while wandering around in a new city? I spent a day walking around Cairo before joining a small group tour of Egypt and my North American tourmates were horrified that I’d been exploring what can only be described as a crazy, noisy, exhilarating, crowded and heavy-on-the-culture-shock metropolis on my own. Not once though did I feel unsafe, and exploring local neighbourhoods and stumbling upon a building like this was one of the many memorable moments.

This apartment block stood separate from the others, bathed in sunlight that struggled through the city’s modern smog and ancient dust.  (Egypt, 2010)