The opening section of Getting Under Sail

Please comment if you’re interested. Any feedback (good/bad/unrelated/brutal) would be grand

December 10 2007

I have been told by many of my fellow New Zealanders that my upcoming trip through Africa is foolhardy, unplanned, dangerous, crazy – a whole host of frightening adjectives which seemed to connote violent death at the hands of strangers. But people telling you you’re crazy and actually feeling it are two different things. I don’t think travelling through Africa is particularly unusual, but I do have a paucity of funds, only one lock and key, and a complete absence of foresight. Not that the people who warned my travelling companions and me of our impending deaths knew that, they just thought that since I was going to Africa I was going to die. A cheery sentiment; it’d be like taking bets on a friend when he gets a motorbike as to when he’d die in a crash. I was tempted to be belligerent and ask “what’s the capital of Mauritania? Oh you don’t know? How do you know I’ll die there then?” But I wasn’t sure if I’d believe my own confidence. And my friend is still alive in spite of his motorbike. But now as middle age claws its way towards me, with my partial departure from the cloistered world of education, there seemed no better time to procrastinate facing that mysterious concept of the real world, and to explore the world for the sake of exploring.

It was my initial idea to go to Libya, to take photos of photos of Gaddafi, to travel over from Egypt, but apparently entry is limited to those with a tour guide. That required two things: money and organisation, both of which were too much effort to try and organise beforehand. I wanted to go somewhere like Ethiopia or Mali, so I booked my flights into Cairo. I didn’t want to follow the banality of a European cruise ship where rigorous day planning (often done months in advance) and queasy bellies ambush the concept of independent and improvised travel. Most of my friends, for some mysterious reason, take that option. I could go to that continent, Europe, with children, and again, with a much augmented cheque account. The idea of an organised tour group where you get driven to photo opportunities didn’t appeal either. The rest of my friends take that option. I must have some pretty boring friends. Maybe I had a romantic fixation with Kerouac, (not Sal, I was in love with the narrator), but I just wanted to do something that was totally unlike me. To no longer just talk about seeing the world, but to put down the binoculars and to pick up the microscope. But it wasn’t totally unlike me, because I couldn’t do it alone.  

I had to convince similar, or at least unwitting, individuals. I found two, and two only, whom I’ve known since I was ten. We share the type of comfortable familiarity which means most conversations involve a restatement of nostalgic nothings and the coruscations of youth. “Remember” is the most common verb in our conversations, and is usually preceded by “do you” if we weren’t being grammatically lazy.

Other friends had the problem of gainful employment – and those who didn’t, hadn’t figured how to conjure up money out of nothing yet (short of social welfare or money trading). Most, however, weren’t interested as they were saving for their OE to London in three years time where they would look for flats with New Zealanders and spend their time subsisting with other New Zealanders and talk about how great it was getting out of New Zealand. One of the foolish romantics I convinced had a similar outlook in life to me, or at least was similarly cowardly. He used his comfortable middle class position to protest the exploitation of workers, his ultimate aim in life was to become a bus driver in order to damn the Man who demanded a use of his university education. He was a self-confessed hippie, albeit one with short hair and lacking his own swarm of flies. For him the trip was him getting back in touch with his African roots he left behind with the Missing Link and Lucy.

It was he who came up with the idea of some sort of directional plan, a two month trip from Morocco to Ghana on the road. We’d have to travel through Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, the Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin and Togo to get there. I was concerned as to whether we’d get there in time, and whether we were actually going to see anything with such a claustrophobic time-frame. But it appealed to my sense of repressed adventure.

Conveniently, and dangerously, the other person was the complete opposite, a much more conservative chap whose life had reached its stasis with a car, a career and a house. He was evidence of the weird friend groupings of high school, of the veers in outward directions friends go following the rigours of adolescence, and the choices you make with your educational paths. I wonder if I’d have been friends with him if I’d met him now, without that trail of bread crumbs. He was invited on the assumption that he wouldn’t come. More for politeness. But he decided to embark on our adventure, and we didn’t have the heart to tell him ‘actually we don’t want you here’. I half-heartedly thought that it’d open his eyes, but in secret, I was concerned about the personality clash that ensues from the stress and vagaries of travel. The two lived together anyway (though also with a landlord/tenant hierarchy), so there must be some sort of mutual tolerance. But I still don’t know what the other with his ideological edifices was feeling travelling with someone who didn’t know what ideology was. But since he was coming we didn’t want to scare him off either, so we didn’t tell him the plan. We simply told him to book a flight from Cairo to Morocco, which he refused to do because he thought we could get something cheaper on standby than our $400 tickets, but agreed to do so once we had already bought ours. I should also say that the other two are disgracefully cheap. I don’t usually trust cheap people as they value money too much. But in this case it was probably a good thing. I didn’t have much money, and the last thing I wanted to be doing while travelling is to look for comfortable lodging. I might as well have stayed in Wellington.

I wanted to name the two after some symbolic Papua New Guinean city, but the only city I knew after Port Moresby was Rabaul. They had boring names, James and John, so boring that I have decided to invent names to go with them: “Ivan”, the intransigent Das Kapital sewing, soy milk drinking one (though he’s neither lactose intolerant, nor vegan) and Mitya, the mortgage paying one whose idea of a worldview is spouting off his recently deceased lawyer father’s opinions. I’m being facetious with the naming – lazy, unimaginative even – nor is there any sort of allegorical reason to do so, simply I was reading The Brothers Karamazov at the start of the trip, and those names seemed like they’d do (I am not the godly Alyosha). At least I had more imagination than their parents.

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