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.

“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.

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

Timing and perspective shape everything we see.