On Tuesday night I’m scheduled to board an Airbus 346 airplane and, some 24 hours of flight-time later, be delivered into the Capetown International Airport. There, my friend Ethan and I are set to pick up a car and drive a few hours north to our home for the next two months, Rocklands, South Africa. We’re staying in the town of Clanwilliam which is a short drive from the climbing. The house we’ve rented for the first part of the trip is a renovated farmhouse on a private vineyard. Other than the basic details, I don’t know quite what to expect. Almost everything I know about Africa I’ve learned from either a National Geographic or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darnkess.
Other than being an amazing opportunity to climb in one of the premier bouldering destinations of the world, this trip is also my first trip off of the North American continent. That is, I’ve been to Canada. Once. With finals having just ended yesterday, the gravity of the trip is finally setting in. I’m going to Africa – and that is fucking insane. There is a lot to know before you got to a place as exotic as Africa. What do you do in a stampede, for instance. Or, are giraffes aggressive animals? I have absolutely no idea.
Fears aside, I am looking forward to the relative periods of solitude and downtime that long trips afford. That’s where this blog comes in. I hope to have some storytelling to do during the next two months and when I do – I will tell it here. Incidentally, my gear to book ratio is something like 1:5 – so I’ll probably spout off about books a bit. Since you can’t really quote an author in real life without sounding like a pompous tool I will do it on the internet. Here’s a bit from ol’ Joey Conrad when we were out drinking the other night and I asked him to describe the musical contributions of the 1990s:
..and then from the depths of the woods went out such a tremulous and prolonged wail of mournful fear and utter despair as may be imagined to follow the flight of the last hope from the earth.
More quote dropping to come – next time from 9 hours into the future.
I look forward to reading updates buddy.