Tentative steps into a vast world

There are two days in my life that I remember with fierce clarity: the day I left for my 49 day tour of Europe, and the day I returned from it. The person who embarked on that journey and the one who touched down on African soil shared a common disposition: they were both nervous. Apart from that, they had nothing in common.

Travelling can do that to you, will do that to you, and there isn’t much you can do to withstand it. You can only make transition easier, by opening yourself up to whatever culture you visit and keeping narrow-mindedness to a minimum. Experience everything, immerse yourself in every opportunity, no matter how strange or fantastic, and you’ll come away a better person.

I left South Africa, where I had lived for 21 years, with the intention of visiting my brother in London on the 16th of June 2013. Since I was there, I decided that, countries being so much more accessible than they are in Africa, I would explore a bit.

I spent time in Berlin, Krakow, Gdynia, Poznan, Amsterdam, Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and Bath. It was lengthy, but I do feel a lingering guilt that I could have squeezed in more, applied myself a further, and seen an additional city or three. However, the experience of it, an African kid who has never travelled north of Mzanzi, suddenly plunged into a melting pot of cultures and cities only glimpsed on TV or the internet, was enough to eclipse any doubts I may have had.

How do you compartmentalise the moments that define you? The experiences that photographs can’t do justice to, because the memory you made yourself is just that much more vivid? I can speak at length about the pub-culture I frequented in London, about the antiquated, almost baroque architecture that defined some of the buildings, the hive-like buzz of the big city life, but unless you’ve stood among that rush, you won’t understand the sheer size of it all. I can tell my friends – and do – of the graffiti which covered almost every building in Krakow, and how some of it was so beautiful and moving that looking at it was more a visceral experience than a visual one. I can vouch for the uneasy solitude that accompanies standing in the centre of the Jewish monument in Berlin, that quiet sense of chaos all of those leaning blocks seem to exude.

I can tell you how my life changed and how stepping off the plane at Johannesburg I was a different person entirely. But unless you walked where I walked, saw what I saw and did what I did, you would never know.