Tour Guide, Cape Town, South Africa
| 7 mins read
"I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it." - Rosalia de Castro.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.” - Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken.
“Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.” (Always something new out of Africa) - Pliny the Elder. Historia Naturalis.
“I see a turning wheel
On a dusty track,
Caught in the void and empty space
In between there and back,
And the paradise of going somewhere
That's still so far away.
Happy, boy you bet I am,
Holding on to this mile for just as long as I can -
Heaven.” - Chris Rea, Heaven.
“Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows. For my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.” - Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses.
“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.” - Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey.
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.” - G.K. Chesterton.
“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.” - James Michener.
“The journey, not the arrival, matters.” - T. S. Eliot.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” - T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding – The Four Quartets.
“Everything in Africa bites, but the safari bug is worst of all.” - Brian Jackman.
“The Dark Continent is at once a misnomer and an awful truism. The sun never shines as brightly as it does in Africa. Unfortunately the brightest sunshine casts the darkest shadows and the miseries that lie in Africa’s umbra are the most abject in the world…… And yet. Not for nothing has this continent been confirmed as the cradle of all humankind. Not for nothing do we know that the first people on earth were Africans and that other races developed from them. Not for nothing do Africa’s misplaced citizens – the Afro-Americans and West Indians – hanker to find their roots. And not those people alone. Everyone of whatever race, nation or creed who comes to Africa feels a magnetism that cannot be ignored or explained. Because it is primeval. Because Africa is like a mother calling her children home. Old, addled and poor she may be, but the pull of the umbilicus is still there. Irresistibly.”
John Ryan, One Man’s Africa.
“(Mma Ramotswe thought......) Then there was Mr. Mandela. Everybody knew about Mr. Mandela and how he had forgiven those who had imprisoned him. They had taken away years and years of his life simply because he wanted justice. They had set him to work in a quarry and his eyes had been permanently damaged by the rock dust. But at last, when he had walked out of the prison on that breathless, luminous day, he had said nothing about revenge or even retribution. He had said that there were more important things to do than to complain about the past, and in time he had shown that he meant this by hundreds of acts of kindness towards those who had treated him so badly. That was the real African way, the tradition that was closest to the heart of Africa. We are all children of Africa, and none of us is better or more important than the other. That is what Africa could say to the world: it could remind it what it is to be human.” - Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe.
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. St. Augustine
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. Robert Louis Stevenson
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” Martin Buber
“Not all those who wander are lost.” J. R. R. Tolkien
“Don’t tell me how educated you are; tell me how much you have travelled.” Mohammed
"The gladdest moment in human life is a Departure into unknown lands; the blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood" - Sir Richard Francis Burton
"The only man I envy is the man who has not yet been to Africa - for he has so much to look forward to." Richard Mullin.
"Tourists don't know where they've been; travellers don't know where they're going." Paul Theroux.
“The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it.” ~ George Kimble
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live.” Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life : An Autobiography
“The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.” – Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel : Enlightenments from Lives on the Road
“All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And everyone else is They:
But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way,
You may end by (think of it!) looking on We
As only a sort of They!” – Rudyard Kipling, Debits and Credits
“Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!” – Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
“Now, bring me that horizon.” – Johnny Depp
“The perfect journey is never finished, the goal is always just across the next river, round the shoulder of the next mountain. There is always one more track to follow, one more mirage to explore.” – Rosita Forbes
“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” – David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
“I would love you all the day,
Every night we would kiss and play,
If with me you'd fondly stray,
Over the hills and far away.” – John Gray
“You have to taste a culture to understand it.” – Deborah Cater
“Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“You sell off the kingdom piece by piece, and trade it for a horse that will take you anywhere.” – Colin Wright, My Exile Lifestyle
“Alexander the Great slept with
'The Iliad' beneath his pillow.
Though I’ve never led an army,
I am a wanderer. I cradle
'The Odyssey' nights while the
moon is waning, as if it were
the sweet body of a woman.” – Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” - Pico Iver
“Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you.” – Nicholas Bouvier, The Way of the World
“I travel light. But not at the same speed. ” – Jarod Kintz