Operation Foxbat Pt 1: Held up at Kakspruit

The panzer doesn't travel, it invades. We move across the country in a series of surprise attacks punctuated by occasional smoke-breaks, less frequent foraging parties and exceedingly rare stops for fuel - the panzer being not only brutal, but brutally efficient (have I ever told you I get 5l/100km? This is one of my favorite topics of conversation). A quick glance back while we're on the move shows all the land behind us in full retreat; this is a rout, an unstoppable blitzkrieg. Unstoppable until, that is, we strike that most cowardly of enemy defenses between the fictional towns of Kakspruit and Kakfontein, a pothole hollowed out by transport companies, corruption and ineptitude.

Pulling over at the scenic Uitkak to survey the damage, we are confronted, dear fictional reader, by a bulging side-wall. We are held up in our advance, just the opportunity the enemy forces require in order to pounce and see us off. The surrounding hills are menacing now as they ready for their next attack. Just then the bushes begin to rustle, and then they begin to emerge.We are approached by an odd assortment of pale people, claiming residence in the beautiful town of Kakspruit. They are all called Venter, and judging by their responses to our probing questions (and their lopsided malformed limbs and faces), they are all cousins. There is a station in Kakfontein, they tell us, the town spread out and blinking in the valley below. At this station we might, we are told, repair the damages to the panzer and also meet a great man who dwells there. He is some sort of trader or businessman, the agent of a great and powerful Company involved in Platinum, tenders, and extermination. "Fuck that," I say, "he sounds like a total douche."

We clamber back aboard and resolve to limp to our extraction point - from whence our invasion of Mozambique will commence in the next few days. As we pull out - slowly, carefully, trying to avoid the remaining defenses in our path - we are beset on all sides by a peculiar rising sound, a chant or cry of some kind: "Sweeeeeeeetssssss! SWEEEEEEETTTSSSSS!" We begin to make out the edges of dark human forms in the vast dark knowable (we have GPS and quite good map books) wilderness around us. In their midst is a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman. She walks in measured steps, draped in striped ANC emblazoned cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. It is the ex-MEC for Transport, Mapula Mokaba-Phukwana. The potholes are clearly her handiwork. As we get up to speed she and her retinue begin to fall back - slowly at first, but soon enough they are in full retreat.

I glance down at Kakfontein one last time and feel certain that for at least one day a year - perhaps one in ten years - this view must be very beautiful. I can see why they chose this spot to waylay us - this was a desperate gamble intended to make us stay, perhaps to dilute the Venter stock a little or perhaps just to document their inspiring lives. We pass the location near the bottom of the pass, populated by those people marked out by dark complexions, worldliness, genetic diversity and properly formed limbs for a life of labour and repression in the great man's mines. We are moving so fast now that we can just barely make out and occasional "sweeeeets!" to our left or right. The enemy's centre crumbles, folds and falls back. The line cannot hold. We race on to victory.

Have a picture 2: Jari Temple, Himachal Pradesh

This shot was taken at a village called Jari, which is located just inside the beautiful Parvati Valley in Himichal Pradesh, North-eastern India. The building pictured here is the village temple, which houses the local deity - there are twelve of these from the major villages that are gathered at the annual Mela. Village temples like these are some of the most beautiful buildings to be found in villages in this region. In general, the traditional local architecture in incredibly beautiful, and the temples represent the most exquisite examples of the style. If you're lucky enough you might even see one being refitted - the timber portions of these structures are regularly replaced due to the extreme climate, which is hard on everything. I saw this once or twice and was astounded each time by the workmanship and the detail of the wood carvings around doors, on pillars, on joins in the masonry; every possible surface is crammed with the products of what I can only describe as an art of devotion. It is an incredible thing to behold. Jari is a great spot to recuperate from the hardships of real travel in this part of the world: jarring, nerve-wracking bus rides and stomach trouble, for example. It's also a great stepping-off point for trekking and exploring the rest of the valley - which I highly recommend. It is well connected with bus routes in and out of the valley, and is surrounded on all sides by lush green mountain slopes just begging to be explored. Accommodation is cheap!

Have a picture 1: Fort of São João, Ibo Island

This shot was taken in one of the creepiest places I've ever been to in my life: Ibo Island, located just off the Northern Mozambican town of Pemba in the Quirimbas archipelago. The structure I'm in/on is an ancient Portuguese fort (São João), built atop a far older Arab one, which was used by traders and slavers on the coast of East Africa for centuries. During the time of Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique it was used to house, torture and kill political prisoners, an extreme Robben Island of sorts. No hard labour, no sunlight (glaring or otherwise), just damp, dark starving isolation punctuated with brutality and the occasional dragging out into the light of a fellow prisoner to be broken and killed, then dumped into the ocean or left on the exposed beach to rot. I love this shot because of the dollar sign some asshole smeared on the inside of the minaret-like watch-post. That and the rusting cannons propped up between the parapets, useless yet somehow still menacing. There is a violence to it, in other words, but it is a violence inextricably linked with commerce, possession and oversight. The idea that the same structure could serve many different purposes all related, finally, to the same old thing is a fascinating one I think. The town is renowned for its silver-work, and the silver used by the smiths comes mostly from old Portuguese coins found along the islands beaches and mangrove-lined waterways. There is fresh water on the island, brought up from the coral bones of the place by a series of wells. The water, though, is distinctly salty, and this, I think, is the reason behind the madness I often caught glimpses of lurking behind the gazes of many of the local inhabitants - the salt and the centuries of violence and death, perhaps. Djinns stalk the streets of the town at night - as they do much of this part of the East African coast. While I was there, one was caught by a local Imam and burnt in a jar on the soccer field. It was a one-armed, one-legged slapping-djinn, which would hop up behind lonely walkers of the night and strike them a blow to the side of their heads. A fairly harmless djinn, then, but so long as it was abroad, few dared venture out or walk home by themselves. Spooky place, as I've said.

The Death of Travel

Many years ago on a beach in India near a town called Gokarna, I witnessed a scuzzy, dread-locked Englishman launch into a tirade against an apparently innocent fellow-beach-goer for the heinous crime of Being a Tourist.

It sounded like this: "You facking tourist FACK! How dare you?!"

Now, while this might at first seem a little pots and kettles, there was a more to the exchange than that. You see, this other chap had actually made a serious error: he had dared to inquire as to the whereabouts of the facilities. This question so incensed his companion for a very simple reason: he had just revealed himself to be that most despicable of things to India's travelling riff-raff (worse even than a stingy front-desk manager or a salesman who refuses to haggle) - a tourist. Only a tourist would ask after the bogs on a remote beach in Karnataka. A traveler would never ask such a question. A traveler would simply relieve themselves in the most convenient and least obtrusive manner available - which in the case of a beach is pretty fucking obvious.

This same dread-locked individual later tried to convince me that the sound of a boat-engine under water was actually a dolphin attempting to communicate with me (while I was relieving myself, incidentally), so maybe we can take his view on the situation a little less seriously. The point, though, is that there is a terrible yawning gulf between real travel and clicky-snap production-line instagram-braggy tourism. The fact that most real travelers tend to be odoriferous Eurotrash need not detract from my next claim either, which is that travel is infinitely superior to mere tourism.

Unfortunately, in the eternal battle between tourism and travel, which is fought in never-ending cycles of trail-blazing, normalizing, commercializing, and fucking off somewhere else, tourism is winning. Travelers, real travelers, are losing out, and the places they've inadvertently helped open up to package tours, touts, pimps, drug dealers and all of the other horrible things that go along with them are one by one becoming all but overrun by that lowest form of humanity, the snooty camera-laden here-today-gone-tomorrow tourist.

This is bad.

This is bad for a number of reasons, the first of which is obvious and totally beside the point: travel as an experience is superior, and tourists, by being tourists and not travelers, are actually losing out. This does not, to be clear, trouble me overmuch. The real problem is that there are people and places which are traveler friendly, and, one-by-one, they're being overrun.

Take Botswana, for example. I live there right now. This is my idea of travel. I like to live and work in a place for a good long time, settle into its rhythms, really get intimate with the people, see the sights and hear the sounds properly. This is what uptight French intellectuals refer to as the longue durée - when they're talking about something completely different, that is. But the idea holds true nonetheless - it means something like long-view, and to me that's the only way to really get to know a place properly. If I get to see fewer places as a result, that's fine by me because I've seen what I've seen properly. So I live in Botswana, which has just been named Lonely Planet's Destination of 2016.

Botswana was kind of traveler-averse to begin with. It is expensive to be here and to do things here. Things like eat, for example. It is easy to get a visa, but back-packers are few and far between, and there is not much of a "scene"as a result. Long-stay travelers like myself have a really hard time because work-permits are really difficult to come by. The sad thing about this is that Botswana is a country that is really worth traveling in. For a start, it's huge, and there are so many things to see that a seven-day whistle-stop safari just doesn't cut it. Sadly, that seems to be the only thing going at the moment aside from the occasional lonely self-drive and the many wagon-trains coming out of the South.

This is also bad. Bad for the tourists. Bad for the businesses set up to offer a little more than a three-day all-inclusive package deal, and ultimately, I think, bad for the environment because all of these fuckers demand flushing toilets.

Full circle - the end.

No but seriously, please, despite what lonely planet says, and despite the fact that you want a Victoria Falls Selfie, a Delta selfie, an elephant selfie and a Namibian selfie despite only having a week to do it in, please don't whistle-stop Botswana. The truth is that at the end of it you won't really have been there. Thanks.