A note from the road
...while the dust briefly settles
Welcome to NE Where, a weekly travel-focussed journal for curious people. This piece (which is one from an assignment Mark and I undertook a few years ago) is free for everyone today, but it will be archived in the coming week. For less than $1 a week paying subscribers also have unlimited access to NE Where’s growing archive, which is packed with inspiration and ideas for an unforgettable trip to Bali, stories about exceptional women, and other tales about interesting people and places. Thank you for joining me on this journey!
Dear NE-One
It’s Monday and I’m a day late with dropping you a line but still, I wonder, how was your week, last week? Mine was manic, in that beyond-my-control sort of way, but as I write to you now it feels as if the dust has settled just a little.
I’ve been trying to licence our vehicle, you see. It’s a long and boring story, the short version of which is this: the wonderful old 1998 Land Cruiser we’ve just bought cannot be licenced for another three weeks at least, despite my very best efforts (including a tearful episode – only partly acted out – at our third visit to the police vehicle clearance office). So with our Cruiser parked up at home, on Saturday morning Mark and I set off almost a week late on what will be a five-week road trip in a vehicle we’ve borrowed. That whole thing about how you can’t choose your family? I’d choose mine over and over again, in a heartbeat.
So that vehicle debacle – the one that had me waking at 3am all of last week in order to fit in a day’s work before dealing with red tape and admin – is linked to where I am right now, which is out on the open road somewhere deep in South Africa’s rural Eastern Cape. Here’s why:
For the past two or three months I’ve been working on Lonely Planet’s new guide to Bali. I’m not quite finished – it’s just over a week until deadline, so I’ve been wrapping up all that comes with completing a mammoth assignment like this. Chasing up experts, tying up last-minute details, writing the final paragraphs, and editing all the bits and pieces that make up a 40-odd thousand word manuscript. It might not sound like a lot, but it’s been about 10 solid weeks of experiencing experiences, finding those experiences, planning routes, driving routes, moving from town to town, finding places to stay, checking out restaurants and guesthouses, dipping into cultural nuances. That sort of thing.
And now I’m doing it all over again, this time in South Africa and Lesotho. Coming up: five weeks on the road as we explore the Eastern Cape and Free State (Mark’s coming along for the ride, and will be writing his Spain book as we travel). We then head home for Christmas, before hitting the road again as we traverse Mpumalanga and Lesotho through January and February.
In the coming weeks I’ll share photos with you from this trip. We’ll be covering a few thousand kilometres, and if you’d like to come along (virtually), I’d love to have you. I’ll post a few images on Instagram stories, and in the coming weeks I’ll share some with you here. I also have – waiting for me to edit – a piece for Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives, and I hope to find a few hours in the coming weeks to work on that. I chatted with a remarkable Moroccan woman who’s cycling solo anticlockwise around Africa, from her home in Casablanca to Kilimanjaro, which she aims to climb. I’m so looking forward to sharing her story.
Until next week
