Reporting from the midpoint of a nine-country trek through Africa.
By Chris Wallace
I associate the journey from Cape Town to Cairo with grand, doomed endeavors, made on foot or by bike. A quest undertaken by ambitious Royal Geographical Society types in search of fame and fortune—while, ultimately, scouting for empire—under the camouflage of science. Well, to hell with all of that. I can’t see that any good came of those treks. Still, I am awed by the grandeur of a mission, by the idea of a journey as some sort of opus. So in the first week of April, I set about ruining myself financially and otherwise to undertake my own three-month trip from the tail to the top of Africa—in part to engage with our romanticized image of the traveler and perhaps also to overwrite some of the khaki-clad narratives of yore.
This is, after all, what I do. Since the middle of 2020, when I got a book deal to write a biography of the late American artist Peter Beard and came to Africa to do some of the research, travel writing and photography has more or less been my day job. And one of my recurring theses on this beat is that so much of the way we travel now has been informed by the way those old Victorians saw and moved through the world. To see travel as acquisitive, extractive, for one. Going on the road for a souvenir—be it a material object, or a story, or even just a sense of the self being enriched, as the travel-pamphlet cliches like to encourage us. And so I thought I might see if I could unwind some of the stories we tell ourselves about the world, about our place in it, on a saga of my own. Maybe I’d even make some nice pictures along the way, chase down some travel stories, and possibly end up cooking up a book.
The trip got off to an auspicious start, with an upgrade to first class on the United flight, the only direct one from New York to Cape Town. And though I wish I could do as Barry Sanders did when scoring a touchdown—“act like you’ve been there before”— there’s something about getting in a lounge or the front of the bus that makes me lose my mind and act like the kid in Big, if the kid in Big drank his weight in Champagne.
In Cape Town, I thought about how seaborne travelers during the spice trade thought of the port as a place for revictualing—restocking their food and drink supplies—and decided to use that as an excuse to over-enjoy the great food and wine on hand. From Cape Town, I flew to Windhoek, Namibia, where I rented a skittish Toyota and proceeded to drive and slosh and gravel-slide into Namibian desert on a kind of mad-dash pilgrimage to see the Dune-scape wonderworld of the landscape there.
Somewhat dustier and sun-soaked for my troubles, I flew back to South Africa—Johannesburg, this time—where I met with a new suit the guys at J. Mueser in New York had made and mailed ahead for me. Suit in hand, I boarded a family-owned luxury train, the Rovos Rail, in Pretoria, bound for Victoria Falls. If you have seen any Agatha Christie adaptation, you may have a fair idea of the train cars. But you have to imagine them rocking and rolling through Zimbabwe, past baobabs and baboons on the side of the tracks, to get a sense of the wild wonder of this leg of the trip.
Then I arrived at a grand crack in the Earth, one of the natural wonders of the world—“the smoke that thunders,” as it is called in Tonga. Victoria Falls is a bit of a brain wobbler (especially for those of us who are absolutely terrified of heights). From Zambia, I drove across the border into Botswana and hopped a four-seat Cessna down to the Kalahari Desert and a spot called Jack’s Camp. This legendary former hunting lodge is situated in the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans—“the great nothing,” as one of the guides called it—and a great spot to play with the meerkats and ride around on ATVs. From Jack’s, I flew due north, into the geological marvel that is the Okavango Delta, an enormous floodplain teeming with game and some of the best safari lodges I’ve ever seen. On my last morning in Botswana, at a tented lodge called Tuludi in a mopane forest, I spent a few unbelievable hours watching a family of leopards play together and was then escorted to a gravel airstrip by at least 200 elephants. Peter Beard loved to call these sorts of sightings “the greatest show on Earth.” And I don’t disagree. I almost don’t miss getting to see The Fall Guy at home right now.
As I traveled further into the interior of the continent, the planes—and baggage allowance—shrank drastically. And it occurred to me that I brought far too much stuff, and too many bags, in part because part of the impetus for this sort of trip, for me, is to build a world and outfit myself for it. Just ask Yves Saint Laurent, or Ralph Lauren, or Kim Jones—the idea of outfitting for a safari is incredibly exciting, and so I went whole hog.
There was, of course, that J. Mueser linen suit in a mushroomy tobacco color, complete with a matching field jacket. My oldest and dearest friend, Rick Owens, made my safari suit—a plaid overshirt in the same vein as Peter Beard’s preppy version of bush attire and a pair of caramel cargo trousers—plus my basics, tees, and wash bag (the contents of which I have nearly run through now, a month and a half into the trip).
But most of the weight of my carryalls from the heritage luggage brand Ghurka has nothing to do with clothes. Instead, it’s the ’90s Nikon SLRs I insist on using and the 220-odd rolls of film I brought along, like an idiot. The one book with me was a gift, from a friend in Johannesburg, about an overland journey from the eastern edge of the Congo to the Atlantic.
And then there’s my Globe-Trotter case, which houses an Hermès poncho, to hold off the chill of early-morning game drives, and a bucket hat and scarf by same; two more safari suits, by Rick and by Stòffa; a Rick swimsuit; District Vision workout gear and sunglasses; and my beloved Jacques Marie Mage sunglasses.
Also in that case is another J. Mueser suit, in olive cotton. Because man cannot survive on bush gear alone, and sometimes one does have to look a bit smarter, whether dressing for dinner aboard the train or going out on the town in Cape Town or, eventually, Cairo. But I’m not in Cairo yet. Instead, I’m right in the thick of it, at the midpoint of the journey, wondering what all of it—the travel and the trappings, the clothing and the continent—might mean.
If, at the outset, I wanted to enter into a sort of conversation with the generation of travelers emboldened by the Royal Geographical Society, I am now thrilled to think how differently I am taking the trip than a Grogan or a Livingstone. If, at the beginning, I thought I might do my own Cape-to-Cairo trip with some of the glamour and glitz of Agatha Christie’s golden-age stories, as well as some of the gone-bamboo adventures of a Patrick Leigh Fermor, as a way to think about how those travelers’ patterns and behaviors and tastes have shaped our journeys today, maybe the halfway point in a journey is too soon to see the whole story.
Right now, I am only in the middle. The middle of the trip, the middle of this story, and the middle of Africa. Middles are a great place to be. Every good story needs one of those.
Read the original article on Esquire.
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