10 Magazine USA: From Cape Town to Cairo

Instagram: @chriswallace4

chriswallace4.com

Following in the footsteps of his heroes, a well-traveled journalist embarks on a 12-week trek through Africa.

I must have been 11 or 12 when I first came across the diaries of the London-born photographer Dan Eldon, compiled during his teenage road trips across the African continent. And the image, the emotion, that his jottings, photographs, doodles, wonderings, and rhapsodies created in my brain was probably the most joyous and inspiring I’d known to that point. And even the book’s title, from Eldon’s continued refrain, The Journey Is the Destination, created a profound resonance within me about who I wanted to become and how I hoped to find my way there.

It was also the appetite stirred by Eldon’s work that led me to the American artist Peter Beard, about whom I recently wrote the book Twentieth-Century Man. And, in researching that book, going down rabbit holes on the adventures of the U.K.’s Royal Geographical Society crowd, as well as the Hemingways and Teddy Roosevelts of it all, I became worried about the ways in which we travel today, how our patterns are still informed by the journeys made by colonialists and madmen, hunters, explorers, and pillagers alike.

a view of the Nile from the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan, Egypt, where Agatha Christie wrote and set 456 part of Death on the Nile

a leopard at Singita Sabi Sand, eastern South Africa

A view of Grumeti Game Reserve from Singita Sasakwa Lodge, northern Tanzania

Lion’s Head mountain and Clifton beaches, Cape Town, South Africa

Two young boys checking their fish traps on the Nile

A boat-refueling depot on the Nile

It was with all of this in mind that, in early April, I set out on my own foolhardy expedition, from Cape Town to Cairo, the very journey that has enchanted and beguiled travelers forever. I wasn’t so blinkered to think that I was doing so without ambition—the idea that I might return home with material for a book, say, or at least some sort of story to tell. But my idea was to see if there might be another way to see the world, the way that Eldon might—to see, to love, to leave, to enjoy the journey itself as the destination.

All told, I covered nine countries in about twelve weeks, encountering all manner of people, places, and things: from very cosmopolitan culinary tours of Cape Town to road tripping the Namib Desert, riding a train through Zimbabwe, safari-ing through South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Kenya, and Tanzania, and cruising the Nile on a two-sail dahabiya. On the days I found myself worrying that I was not getting material that I might later sell in the magazine marketplace, I tried to create a kind of mantra, a way to receive my time just as it was, not wishing for it to be otherwise, assuring myself that every place and time in which I found myself, each of those destinations, was the very reason for the journey itself. I tried to do as I imagined Eldon would have, which sometimes worked, to a point.

Following the path of Eldon’s own 1989 road trip through Southern and Eastern Africa—and expanding on it somewhat—I think I came as close as is possible to successfully finding my way to my expressed destination. But what I’ve found, on returning home, to myself, is that the physical journey is only the beginning of the trip. The journey of the pictures, memories, and realizations made along the way has only begun.