Lone Rucksack

Sunny Cape Town days over the sea in the Western Cape of South Africa, Table Mountain in the distance and Robben Island just offshore. Rolling out of bed early and memorizing radio calls and doing slow flight with flaps and managing speed and the feeling of enough hours in the logbook to enjoy every second of being in the air.

The Cederberg was inhabited by the San (Bushmen), and the Khoikhoi people — hunter-gatherers who created ancient rock art decorating the undersides of boulders and caves over 2,000 years ago.

A weekend in the Cederberg Wilderness Reserve surrounded by grape vines and sunshine and warm, sandy rocks was as surreal as it was beautiful; sitting in the sunshine among friends and ancient civilizations as neighbors.

Six days in Tivat, Montenegro just isn’t enough time. The sparkling water, the tiny roads along the sea where umbrellas and beach beds line the shore, the flashes of fish as they dart into the dancing grass on the sea floor.

There’s no better guide than and the past five days have been a blur of kittens and sunshine and business ideas and evil plans.

The plane landed in Turkey in the dark— an 11 hour overnight flight from Cape Town that ended at 4 AM in Istanbul, with 12 hours to go until the next flight to Montenegro. A little old man in a blue taxi drove me into the heart of the city, old cobblestone roads winding into the distance pocketed with tiny yellow lights illuminating still open bars, short round stools and miniature tables at the edges with the scent of cigarette smoke in the air.

After a few hours of sleep in a small hotel, I walked for hours around the city in the hot sun under the gaze of enormous mosques and stone architecture, swarms of hopeful birds waiting for fish on the river, wandering through markets that smelled of peach and saffron and apricots, sipping fresh pomegranate juice.

I woke at the edges of dawn, the sound of waves soft then sharp as I pulled back the tent flap, the salt spray slapping rocks in the distance. Coffee in hand made with hot water from an early morning delivery outside my tent, I scrambled across the beach, the sound of shells scraping and screeching against rocks beneath my feet.

The drive from the N7 to the sea was an hour stretch of dirt road on which I drove entirely too fast, swerving around ruts in the road and skidding through patches of sand, keeping an eye on the odometer for the elusive sharp left to the camp. The whole trip was a blackout zone, no signal, just me and the bright white sun and flowers and the road… bright plumes of orange dust swirling into the air the only sign anyone had been there at all.

“Our lives are defined by opportunities. Even the ones we miss.”
—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Namaqua National Park in the Northern Cape of South Africa is the most biodiverse arid flora region in the world and more than 1/3 of the estimated 3,500 plant species are found nowhere else on earth. The long dusty road to and from the coast was peppered with blooms and windmills, and when I entered the park I drove across packed orange earth that wound around meadows through little streams with the white blue sky over head and the hillsides carpeted in bright orange blooms. Every now and again black beetles the size of my fist scuttled across the road, and Springbok leapt through the flowers in the distance.

“Art brings beauty and meaning into our lives. Beauty is a sense of totality, or wholeness. It has been said that a dark age is characterized by mass amnesia, in which our consciousness thickens and we forget our art. Then, after a while, we even forget what has been lost.”
― Sakyong Mipham, The Lost Art of Good Conversation

I was lucky to catch the wildflower season here on the West coast in South Africa, a tiny window between the August rains and hot September sun. Staying in Namaqua National Park on the coast was spectacular, the sound of the waves outside the tent at night, and exploring the coastline during the day.

Cape Town magic in the mountains remembering sunnier days on the 13 Peaks Challenge.

“What you do makes you who you are....”
―Traci Chee

Moments from the challenge with

“I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.”
―Fyodor Dostoevsky

Day One of the challenge: Signal Hill to Lions Head, descending then ascending again to Kloof Corner, across the front of Table Mountain on the Contour path where we passed under waterfalls and ended our time at the Platteklip gorge path, then headed down to Tafelburg road. The best adventure partners on the mountain in and a new trail-name: Mr. Dassie.

“At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.”
―Charles Baxter

Timing and perspective shape everything we see.