How do you do this? The only things I know about the continent are from:
- Watching The Gods Must be Crazy at 8 years old, remembering only laughing the off-colour jokes throughout when the poor guy time-travelled between the real jungles of Southern Africa and the concrete ones of my hometown Hong Kong
- Reading The #1 Ladies Detective Agency as it was the only book around our live-aboard, completely oblivious to the historic and cultural details of Botswana, because I was also completely oblivious to the narrative taking place there.
- Stumbling across recipes for chicken yassa and babotie online - these were probably my most successful (delicious) endeavours in connecting with Africa.
- Sending my customers to Accra, Port Harcourt and Durban - but again, this only required me to get Google to spell their names properly and give me heir airport codes, so I reaped but the most superficial knowledge from my pitiful experience
So really, I'm at 0. Nobody counts going to Egypt (especially not when you were there as a toddler) and Morocco as having been to Africa, and they're likely right. With this weekend's research, I conclude the following:
- I'll likely have to camp for the amount of time I'm wanting to spend bummingg around the continent. I don't have to love it, but if I don't learn how to keep myself comfortable in this sort of environment, I'll end up the female version of Karl Pilkington. Nobody wants that.
- Nowhere unstable, unsafe or lacking in essential services. Outhouses or long-drop WCs are fine, living sans electricity and where there's any sort of health outbreak isn't.
- Equally, while I'd love to look long-term and get to know popular destinations on this continent, I'm really only doing SA because of airline routing, and can't see the appeal of jostling with 70 other 4WDs to see a lion from a kilometre away camouflaged in bush.
- On a related note, I know it can't be true but the more I research the more I get the impression that I must be the only person wanting to travel Africa extensively without being very bothered about wildlife at all. I mean, it'd be great to see the stuff they shoot in Dynasties, but I've never been and can't see myself becoming any sort of nature buff, and while I'm sure that the safari experience in Sri Lanka is leagues behind anything I'd see in Africa, I still can't get very enthused about seeing more (and rarer) wildlife.
- No, what's really the appeal for me, is the people, food and culture of Africa. The music, the art, the fruits I've never seen, and the tribal traditions. The social changes, their ways of solving problems, the sense of humour. I enjoy the dirty, grittiness of big cities, and I feel much more at ease finding my way through a stall-fronts and urban debris than I do trying to use bushes as landmarks.
Where do I go from here? See next posts for a few leads that have been playing on my mind