“Traveling — it leaves you speechless then turns you into a storyteller.”
Medieval Moroccan scholar and author Ibn Battuta coined that phrase, as he traveled some 75,000 miles during his life — quite an undertaking considering he lived in the 1300s.
I used his 11 impactful words to begin this travel series back in August when I started writing about the three-week odyssey that my wife and I made to Africa this summer — one week in Rwanda and two weeks in South Africa.
I found myself speechless more times than I can count during the 21 days we spent exploring two lovely African countries because of the beautiful landscapes we saw and the effervescent people we met.
From spending a day in a rural village with a group of four vivacious women who run a cooperative to searching for lions, elephants, rhinos, buffalo and leopards during a daylong safari at Akagera National Park, Rwanda is a place I’m eager to visit again soon.
And from hiking in 50 mph winds up and over a mountain in Cape Town so that we could visit the Cape of Good Hope (the southwestern-most tip of Africa) to watching penguins play on the beach, our experiences in South Africa are ones that will forever remain with me.
Those adventures inspired this 10-part series, and I hope that the stories that I have narrated each week since August have let you experience vicariously our sojourn.
I have never been very good, however, at vicarious adventures — having an experience through someone else’s stories, narratives and tales. I’m even worse at living vicariously when it involves travel. Instead, I find myself wanting to visit the place that a friend or colleague has told me about.
I had long listened to my wife talk about her experiences living and studying in various places around Africa, and each account left me a bit more curious and a lot more eager to see with my own eyes a new place. Traveling around Rwanda and South Africa certainly filled my cup this summer and left me eager for a refill.
Jen and I decided while we were still in Africa that we were going to return in a couple of years — in 2025, we hoped. That plan changed in September, however, when I woke her up on a Saturday morning and said let’s go back to Cape Town in July 2024.
I’m sure by now that you know her answer was an unequivocal yes after telling me I better not be joking. She didn’t know that I had been monitoring airfares for a couple of weeks and that Google suggested we needed to buy now because ticket prices were so low.
I can only think of a few places I have visited during my 43 years that had such an impact on me that would make me want to spend 15 hours in a tight-fitting airplane economy seat.
Africa is one of those places.
Don’t take my word, though. Do some research; Google is a great place to start. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to plan a trip to one of the many idyllic places in Africa.
Such a sojourn will change you. How? That’s for you to figure out, as the beauty of travel is that it impacts us all in a unique way.
For me, one of the most powerful days was when we visited the genocide memorial in Kigali, Rwanda, as I wrote about earlier this summer. As you enter the memorial there is a sign with the word Ubumuntu. It means humanity — goodness, generosity and kindness. A person who has Ubumuntu is someone who has greatness of heart.
Greatness of heart — three simple words that when put together convey one of the most beautiful expressions of language I have ever heard to describe a person’s character and what we should strive to be like in our everyday lives.
I think of that word every day as I reflect on what it means to be human — to be good, to be generous and to be kind. That message is one I hope that we can all get behind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
I’ll continue to try to carry Ubumuntu with me at home and on my travels.
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