Sunday, 4 May 1986: Boredom and Self-Pity Aren’t Pretty

8:00 PM, Figtree Hotel, Nelspruit, eastern Transvaal

Alone again in a hotel room with a bottle of wine and my little Brother typewritter.  This is becoming a recurring pattern. 

The last couple days I’ve become bored riding around looking at tourist attractions with Louise from the South African Tourist Board (SATOUR).  After collecting me this morning at the guest house where I was staying in White River, Louise stopped to pick up a guy with no explanation as to who he was.  I guessed he was her boyfriend.  He appeared to be in his early 20s and had a very short haircut so maybe he is in the military.  They spoke Afrikaans to each other for most of the day and tended to ignore me.

It was unseasonably foggy and rainy, and we drove around looking at waterfalls and a mining town.  I got a few photos but had lost most of my enthusiasm for the tour by the end of the day.  A good tourist I am not.  As a conventional travel writer, I’d be a flop.  I have little interest in the boring stuff in the Sunday travel sections of newspapers, so I can’t imagine how I would get myself motivated to write this kind of material.  


Bridal Veil Falls near Sabie, eastern Transvaal


For me personally, this whole trip is a challenge.  The daily writing helps me maintain some semblance of sanity.  Nights are the worst as I keep having melancholy dreams about my mother who died five years ago, high school and college friends, and my ex-wife.  In the dreams, I am interacting with these people but when I wake up I remember I’ve either lost them or they are no longer part of my life.  I’m a guy without a country, without a home, without a family (except for my eccentric father in Florida), without a career.  I’m not looking for anyone to feel sorry for me.  This is simply my path, and I suppose I have no choice but to embrace it. 

 

May 1, Crocodile Motel, Nelspruit

 

What else would I do now?  Go back to the USA?  Where would I go?  To San Diego to live with my ex- (we are still on good terms) although I wonder how our lives would mesh in any meaningful way?  Back to Colorado?  Certainly I have good friends there, but I had become bored with the life I was living there.  And what the fuck am I going to do after next March, at the latest, when my South African visa expires and this little adventure ends?  I can’t imagine going back to a regular office job for any length of time.  College teaching is out as there are no good jobs given my lack of a Ph.D.  Environmental consulting work is probably out as it appears the market has dried up.  And forget going back to magazine editing, a long story that I’m not going to get into right now.  Suppose I’ll figure out something, even if it’s in Timbuktu. 

                           


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sunday, 12 October 1986: Extolling the Ex-Pat Lifestyle

Image
Gaborone, Botswana Look, it’s not that life here in Botswana is all that exciting, but there is something indescribable about living abroad.   It’s like my friend, Karen Collins from Lewistown, Montana, said recently when she was driving me back from a Monday night Hash House Harriers run out in the bush:   “People back in the States have no appreciation for the challenges of just getting by here like having to deal with getting stopped three times in one night by army roadblocks.”   Yes, the average American would be totally freaked out or pissed off by the automatic-rifle-toting Botswana Defense Force soldiers who had just stopped us and asked us to open up our packs.   We took it in stride and had a very polite, friendly interchange with the soldiers.   By the way, the reason for all the roadblocks was that we were driving not far from the South African border. The Botswana government is concerned about South African commando raids to go after ANC guerrilla fighters who are alle
Read more

Sunday, 8 June 1986: My English Hosts Take Me to a First-Rate National Park

Image
June 16, 12:30 PM, Home of Steve & Beryl, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe I decided to leave South Africa for a couple months and head north in search of warmer weather.  Instead, my first couple days in Zimbabwe were bloody cold for Africa.  It was grey, windy, and only in the low 50s F on Sunday morning in Bulawayo which is technically in the tropics at 20°S latitude.  Of course, I have to remember that Bulawayo is situated at 4000 feet above sea level.   My first Rotary Club hosts in Bulawayo, Adrian and Penny Feather, are in their early 40s and moved here from England in the mid-1970s at the height of the Rhodesian War.  After two years, they had had enough of the war and went back to England.  However, after a couple years, they realized they really wanted to be back in Rhodesia.  Only, by the time they were ready to come back in 1980, the whites under Prime Minister Ian Smith had lost the war to the African rebels.  The country had become Zimbabwe under the leadership of Prime Ministe
Read more