“Traveling — it leaves you speechless then turns you into a storyteller.”
Medival Moroccan scholar and author Ibn Battuta coined that phrase, as he traveled some 75,000 miles during his life — quite an accomplishment considering he lived in the 1300s.
His impactful 11 words often come to mind while I’m traveling and when I return home to share with our readers about the new places and the new people I have been fortunate to meet along the journey to either a new state, country or continenet.
For most of June, I found myself speechless as I stepped foot on a continent that had long been on my bucket list — a place that my wife and I both loved so much that we’re already planning a trip back in 2025. In fact, we like it so much that we plan on spending a few months of the year there once we’re able to retire from our day jobs in about 20 years.
Our summer sojourn took us to Africa for three weeks — one week in Kigali, Rwanda, and two weeks in Cape Town, South Africa.
The former is about 100 miles from the equator at an elevation of some 5,000 feet while the latter is located at sea level near the Cape of Good Hope — the most south-western point of the African continent. Cape Town also has mountains that are some 4,000 feet high. Mountains and the ocean — two of my favorite sights side by side.
I should probably clarify here that it was me who fell in love with Africa, as my wife Jen had been there before and long ago was amazed by the people and their culture.
Jen was in South Africa during the summer of 2006 with a small group of her friends who traveled to the city of Worcester for a mission trip — a city we were near this summer when the police stopped us on the road … a funny story I’ll share another day.
In 2008, she was back in Africa to spend a semester in Uganda and Rwanda as part of a study abroad program in collaboration with Food for the Hungry. A year later, she was back in South Africa to volunteer during the summer of 2009 in the city of Welkom. Then, after graduating from college, she taught overseas in both Venezuela and South Africa before returning home to be an elementary school teacher and school district administrator.
Many of my travels up to this point, however, have taken me to Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe and one country in Asia — adventures I have enjoyed writing about in this space during the past 17 years. Most of my journeys have been to Spanish-speaking countries, as my goal is to visit each country in which Spanish is spoken. I’m down to three: Panama, Colombia and Venezuela.
After spending just three weeks in Africa, however, I’m ready to create a new bucket list to visit more countries there.
Over the next several weeks, I look forward to sharing stories with you about our African adventure — tales about being just a few feet from a lion and three pacing lionesses who surrounded our not-so-secure vehicle while we were on a safari in South Africa to spending a day in a rural Rwandan village with a group of effervescent women who run a cooperative and shared with us a day in their lives as we worked in the fields with them, cooked with them, and make some jewelry alongside them.
We learned a great deal along the way, and tried to share as much as we could about our home, too.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Though we travel the world over the find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
Our source of beauty has become even more profound thanks to the lovely people we met and the stunning places we visited in June.
Stay tuned for several weeks of stories from Africa.
jdpeeper2@hotmail.com
