South African Diary

As I was packing my bag to go to the opposite side of the world for the first time, I was faced with cognitive dissonance. I craved to encounter a different world, yet feared realizing how small the Earth is. If you take a flight for 11 and a half hours at some point at the depth of 10k under your seat there will be Sahara and Congo, jungles and savanna. You will pass the equator – that mystical place where the length of the day hardly ever varies. Yet you will not feel anything particular. The clouds will be the same cotton wool white, and the skies above the wing of your plane will be the same color of blue. And when you will finally land, mountains will be the same rocks and the greenery will be the same kind of grass. You will land in an airport that will be just another familiar hangar.

I tried not to have any expectations for the trip.

South Africa sounds impressive. You imagine penguins running around on the white sand beaches or the cliffs of the Cape of Good Hope. Inadvertently my imagination tended to legends – The Flying Dutchmen unable to come ashore, and first sailors hundreds of years ago worn out by months of searching, and their ecstatic roars when they finally saw the land curving in the direction of the East.

All the stories I envisioned involved water. I had never seen the open ocean before and I expected the quintessence of Africa to be just that – cool ocean breeze against my face, determined not to let me pass any further out there into the endless southern horizons that beyond hundreds of miles of nothing more than water were hiding the icy spikes of Antarctica. A notion that might represent the biggest paradox for a northern soul like me that was used to see the south only as an embodiment of everything sunny and warm. In these stories, I was standing on the edge of a cliff bent on embracing it all, and the world became huge and boundless.

My first encounter with the ocean was pure euphoria.

At first, I could only catch glimpses of its sky-blue waters appearing amid mountain roads bending their way towards our destination. Later, when its massive and cold waves hit me with its salty touch for the first time. And finally, when we got to a wild beach with the whitest sand and I could play in its water to my heart’s desire ecstatically jumping into each new wave.

Water is very cold in the Atlantic here. It’s far colder than the Baltic Sea water that I’m used to – and it’s a northern sea, mind you, with waters that already can hardly be called warm. Here if I stopped to take a breath in-between jumping into the waves after just a couple of seconds my feet and legs began to burn from the cold. But I guess the chemistry behind euphoria is somehow tied to the feeling of cold, or pain, or overcoming oneself. Therefore, with each icy cold wave, I was catching happiness.

Later during that trip on a boat ride towards the Cape of Good Hope, the first mate told us that the cape was in actuality a meeting point of two currents - the cold Atlantic, carrying Antarctic waters, and the warm Indian.

Even later, on one of the last days, we took a stop and swam on the eastern side of the cape, and the water was really warm there. Emerald green and salty. The waves were even higher, but that excitement was gone. Maybe euphoria is indeed impossible without a least the slightest hint of discomfort.

Seeing the ocean left a deep mark on me, but it wasn’t Africa.

It was a nice feeling coming back from a swim, but deep down I knew that the world must have been full of other places where you could experience a similar kind of enjoyment. Stories about beaches in Australia, Hawaii, Bali, or Florida came to my mind. And the list is probably far longer.

I got a glimpse of what seems to me to be the quintessence of Africa a couple of days later when we took a trip inland to one of the reservations to observe the wildlife in a (somewhat) natural habitat.

No, it wasn’t antelopes kicking up dust as they swept across the African semi-desert. Only two cars passing along an endless dirt road in the middle of barrens, and a lone green sign stating that the closest settlement was in 50 miles. Somewhere out there, in the middle of the heat, dust, and emptiness, I realized that I had never witnessed anything like this and that I will go on a myriad of new journeys, and probably won’t experience it ever again. Not this particular wildland or being in a place where there’s hardly anything around 30 km in any direction, but its distinctive character and the singularity of the experience.

Back there for a moment, it felt as if time became a tangible fourth dimension, and out there it had a completely different value.

I’ve always envisioned Africa as primal in a sense.

And she is. Not in the negative sense of being primitive. Rather as in "being hardly touched – primal and distinctively unique". It was there, in the middle of nowhere on the way to nowhere, that I had an awakening. In Africa, the mountains are the same kind of stones as in other parts of the Earth, the greenery is the same kind of plants, and the dust is the same sand, but if you keep hitting the road long enough their combination can become unique. At that moment, 11 and a half hours of torment in an airplane seat on the way to the other side of the world became completely justified and not as scary.

Because even in such a small world that feels very much alike wherever you may go, if you are keen on keeping searching long enough it will not cease to amaze you with its uniqueness. As counter-intuitive as it is.

originally published on January 24, 2017