All posts by Claire

About Claire

Wandering (and wondering) development professional and aspiring aid worker. Contact me on anticipationofwonder[at]gmail[dot]com

Have visa, will panic

Admin, Adventures, Travelling in Europe, ,

I like travel well-planned, long-anticipated travel. I’m not particularly good at spontaneous. More than that, I find the build up, the waiting, the anticipation a wonderful part of the process. I’m already starting to plan a trip with a friend in Spring of 2015. So the last couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. No, tornado would be a better term.

A last-minute decision (both internally and from the people funding the trip) about attendance at a conference is great. At least, it’s great in theory. It’s a little more stressful if the conference is in Europe and you’re travelling on a South African passport. The colleague I’ll be travelling with has a US passport, as well as an EU one. I’m jealous. The thing that probably frustrates me most about South Africa is that we need visas for so many places. Perhaps not a frustration with South Africa as much as a frustration with the whole system. Until this probably can be solved, it’s visas required, so I headed off to the Netherlands consulate in Durban. According to reliable information, from friends who have tried it and write ups on travel blogs to the consulate website itself, you should apply for a Schengen visa at least three weeks before you travel. I had ten days. Cutting it fine. And so very far from the long, gentle build up to travel that I prefer.

The absolute minimum time the visa would take to come through was five working days. There was nothing I could do about it in the meantime. Luckily for me, I had little time to worry about it. Things at work have been crazy. At the beginning of this year, I had a seriously, almost overwhelmingly, stressful January. At the end of January, I breathed a sigh of relief and looked forward to things calming down. They didn’t. And since August, they’ve just gotten more and more chaotic. This week they ramped up to a whole new level of ridiculous.

And then, on Wednesday, I went back to the consulate, quite ready to be told that my application had been too late. In fact, hoping in a way that it wouldn’t come through so that I could take a few days to breathe. Instead, I was given a visa for longer than I’d originally expected. This is great. I know: it’s a great opportunity. But just thinking about it made me tired. The urge to travel overcame the exhaustion and I changed my ticket and arranged leave and rearranged my life to have at least a few extra days to explore Europe. Europe. This is my first trip to Europe. The shadow over so much of the history of my country, of Africa, of my heritage. I’m still not sure how I feel about Europe. I hope I can make the time to figure it out. I feel like it is important.

In the last couple of days, stress levels remained at peak, so that by Friday afternoon I still hadn’t done anything about planning the non-business part of my trip. In between stressing about work, I managed to find a few moments to panic about the fact that I needed to do something about bookings or plans or something. But there just wasn’t time. This is why I like long periods of planning and thinking and learning something about the place I’m going. Not this time. Instead, panic. Have visa, will panic.

I’m less stressed about it now. I’m heading up to Johannesburg today (Saturday). That means I have a whole Saturday night to finish all the work and finally make plans. Or perhaps it’s just because the packing – my least favourite part of travel – is done. I’m even beginning to get a little bit excited. Just a trip to Johannesburg, a weekend, high-stress public events and a particularly long Monday to go before I get to travel again.

Morning Through A Mosquito Net

drc, Ideas, Why

We woke up to the sound of drumming. We learned later it was a church group practicing. It was early. I remember so clearly. The taste of the air. The sounds. The way the light fell. The dusty ground. The bucket showers. Perhaps it was the fear, the excitement. Every sense heightened.

 

Kisenyi morning

 

It’s been an exhausting month. Not a good month. Too much work. Too many deadlines. Not enough time to breathe. Not enough people. My kind of people. But this morning I opened my flickr account and it brought up this photograph.

 

Kisenyi morning 2

 

I have friends who have long, rambling, sometimes heated discussions about why. One of the regular topics is travel. Why travel? What is it for? What urge drives the wanderings of 21st century nomads and why should we travel? There are lots of reasons. Some days I think I travel to remember. A perfect autumn day cycling with friends in Gyeongju, South Korea. Anapji Pond, a 7th century Asian pleasure garden. Fierce summer thunderstorms in Windhoek and Gaborone. The smell of dark fir trees on a chilled morning in the dry season in Eldoret, Kenya. Morning through a mosquito net in the small lakeside town of Kisenyi, DRC.

Memories of travel are a precious reminder that there is more than ordinary. It’s October. The year is drawing to a close. Adverts are beginning to tend towards Christmas. Memories of travel hover. An incentive, a reminder to carve the time out of a stressful, over-stretched, overworked month to make plans, to move on, towards something more than ordinary.

 

Kisenyi 3   kisenyi 4

 

Kisenyi is a beautiful small town on the shores of Lake Albert in the DRC. If you ever have the chance to travel in that part of the world, visit. Do it quickly, before the oil-companies lay waste to this beautiful corner of Africa in their quest to get at the oil that lies beneath the lake. 

So Much Water, So Little Sky

Regrets, seasons, South Africa

Four years ago and many, many miles away, I wrote a blog post about missing the sky. Living in a crowded Korean city for a year, I missed the sky often and a lot. Missed open spaces. I talked, in that blogpost, about a quote from Dana Snyman’s book On the Back Roads, 

“Maybe it’s because today most of us are confined to life in the cooped-up spaces of the cities. It’s great to know there’s open space out there where you can just drive, and drive, and drive. Open spaces allow you to dream dreams of freedom.”

Today feels very much like that missing-the-sky time. Before I went overseas, I lived in Johannesburg and Cape Town and the Eastern Cape and travelled to odd corners of South Africa, from Port Shepstone to Vredendal, East London to Tzaneen. Almost every place I went shared one taken-for-granted characteristic: wide open spaces with plenty of sky.

Then I came back to South Africa and instead of finding my way back to my beloved wide open spaces, I moved to a place almost as green and crowded and claustrophobic as Korea. Instead a place to dream dreams of freedom, I discovered a totally different face of South Africa. Every time I’ve tried to explain the difference, people seem confused. After all, it’s still South Africa. It’s part of the same country. Just because it’s green? Just because it gets plenty of rain? It should still feel like home. It doesn’t.

The clouds are lying low again today. Yesterday morning the mist was like soup, think and cold. The mist lifted later, turning the day into a hot, humid weight upon the air. I like hot. I love hot. Tropical rain forests in December. New Year’s humidity in Mozambique. Glorious, terrifying, summer storms in Windhoek. The way the air smells and tastes before a thunderstorm in Grahamstown or Joburg or Queestown. This isn’t like that. It’s warmth without sunshine. For two days now, the clouds have sat, low and brooding, while the humidity and the heat built up and built up and sat. The hot air is heavy with the almost overpowering scents of flowers. It’s spring. Everything is green. Everything is always green. Steep green hills and deep green valleys and grey, green rivers.

I never knew there was a place in South Africa with so much water and so little sky.