The Long Way Round

January 16, 2013 marked one year since I arrived here in South Africa. I am, admittedly, a month late, but in this last year, traveling from one side of the planet to the other, I've tried to document as much as possible on video, and I've cut all those snippets of my travel together here. 

My travels took me from the economic powerhouse of Africa in Johannesburg to the red sand dunes of Sossusvlei in Namibia; deep in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (jungles which, two weeks after we left, would be invaded by rebels) and over the undulating canyons carved into the plains of Zambia by the mighty Zambezi, terminating (for now) at the Smoke that Thunders, Victoria Falls; on the beaches of Mauritius, in the middle of the Indian Ocean or Hawaii in the Pacific; and into the wonderful jumble of past, present and future in the land of the rising sun. And I made a quick jaunt to the three other places I've called home so far in my life, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

Sometimes it's better to take the shortest route to a destination, but then sometimes I prefer to revel in the journey, to be surprised by the people, the places, the mishaps, and the unexpected encounters that breathe vigor into life from taking the long way round. It's a great, big, beautiful world out there.

Homesickness

With only a few days before I left New York to celebrate Christmas in California, homesickness hit me quite suddenly. It's a disconcerting feeling, and I can’t exactly explain where I’m homesick for: I haven’t lived with my family in the Bay Area since I graduated high school, and, despite living in Los Angeles for the last five years, I never really considered it “home”.

I have an odd connection with the places I’ve lived. In high school, I wanted nothing more than to move as far away from the Bay Area as I could after I graduated. I couldn't really think of a reason why, except that I wanted something new, something exciting. And, in a stroke of self-delusion that even Bill O'Reilly would envy, I convinced myself of something that I knew to be very much untrue: that I disliked the Bay Area. So for college, I settled on Los Angeles as being a sufficient distance from home.

The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent

There's a saying attributed to Mark Twain, although that's very likely apocryphal, that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. I've been to San Francisco in the summer, and it gets cold. Really cold. Sometimes it even reaches 50°. But I've just acquired new evidence, and let me be the first to say: Mark Twain was a liar and a whore.