I blame my parents...

I love travelling... I love the feeling of stepping through the X-ray screen at security... its the gateway to new and exciting worlds. The fascination with the world beyond my garden gate began when I was very young. For as long as I can remember I recall dreaming of exploring old worlds and discovering new. I blame my parents and their love of books. Once a week on a Saturday morning, and if we were lucky on a Tuesday afternoon the family packed into our small Mazda or later the bread loaf VW Kombi...and the 6 of us went off to the local library. I often wondered whether mom and dad had read every book in the library. I remember marvelling at dad's method for choosing books for both himself and my mother. Initially I think he began with his favourite authors or in my mom's case her favourite genre... But I realised during a visit from University that he had long read all his favourites and to my fascination was working thought the shelves alphabetically. Mom had resorted to reading even the large print books, in the search for variety. I had to break a smile when mom told me that Dad now orders books through the library. There is a feud that exists between the retired police chief in the community and dad as to who gets to read the new books that arrive. I am afraid that the police chief has a "special friendship" with the head librarian, and so to dad's chagrin he has to wait a week before he can get his hands on the latest addition to the library.

I loved the travel section of our library, and used to plan my travels around the world carefully listing travel times, accommodation costs, visa requirements etc. The fact that my budget was limited to R1.50 plus 10cents for each year of my short life meant that most of my imagined travel plans considered only Africa with a tent in my backpack living off canned food and what I could catch with my fishing rod. In my last year of school when all my cohorts were planning their first year of university I had taken out every book I could find on Botswana, and was planning to escape my garden gate and run away to become a professional hunter/tour guide. When that plan was foiled once again by my parents sensibility (God bless them) I ran away to the seaside instead, and in a town a thousand kilometres away from home I plotted my great escape. I worked 16 hour days delivering bank mail in the day and pizza in the evenings. I bought a ticket to New Zealand and planned to finally escape the prison I considered myself in. I have never quite figured out what I was running from. Even though that flight never happened that year, my pursuit of freedom was established and by the following year I had travelled to China, Thailand, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland and a decade later the list continues to grow to most of continental europe and Southern Africa, the Middle East and Asia

My love for travel remains... I can imagine that the high of stepping through the boarding gate onto a plane, or train must be equivalent to the satisfaction an addict feels.... I keep coming back for more. Leave me without a stamp in my passport for more than 4 months and my spirit dies slowly in me...only to be revived by the smell of burning oil in Bangkok, the whiplash of a Tigerfish taking my bait on the Zambezi, the smell of ocre and burnt cattle dung in Zambia, the stern headmistress commanding me to 'mind the gap' in London, the smell of chestnuts roasting on the fire in a winter square in Prague....

Please excuse me while I book a flight to 'I don't give a damn where, just get me out of here........'
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