Walt Whitman wrote: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself. / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
I often joke that I don’t need anyone else to give me a hard time – I do it myself. All I need is a mirror to declare war against my greatest enemy.
* * *
Flickering across the plane’s small TV screens are the first Batman movie, The Big Bang Theory episodes, unfathomable Bollywood hits, a golf game and the GPS map of our route; at the moment, we’re still somewhere over the Great Karoo.
Time for a gin and tonic. I had my first high-altitude G&T in August 2001, when I went to cover the Big Brother eviction in Johannesburg for the Eastern Cape edition of Die Burger. Those were the early days of reality television – to this day it’s a strange thought, to me, how the public and media made such a big thing of Ferdi and Brad’s shenanigans in the garden. “S.A. peeps into the shower”, said the headlines on the lampposts along William Moffett Avenue in Port Elizabeth.
It being the weekend of Govan Mbeki’s funeral, the flight to Johannesburg was overbooked. In a surprise move, I was upgraded to business class. As is fit and proper for a student (I was still studying at the time and freelancing for Die Burger) with one foot still firmly in the trap of late adolescence, I got going on the gin and tonics, and had ordered my third before the plane had even flown over Cradock.
And so I started chatting to the passenger next to me, who had a TopSport tog bag with him. I assumed he was a TV sports presenter and launched with great conviction into a speech about just how pathetic the SABC’s news coverage was. He mostly just listened; I didn’t exactly let him get a word in edgeways.
A month later I saw him again at the Vodacom Journalist of the Year awards ceremony in Port Elizabeth. Turns out he was Phil Molefe, the awards’ chief adjudicator, and head of news at the SABC …
* * *
The plane is not that full. I’m next to the window with two open seats next to me. There are two days of hard travelling ahead before I reach the starting point of my Camino, the little French village of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port at the foot of the Pyrenees:
•First I have to get the nine-hour flight to Doha in Qatar behind me.
•Then I’ll spend the night in the new airport terminal at Qatar, before the seven-hour flight to Paris.
•In Paris, a train and taxi ride will get me to the Gare d’Austerlitz.
•From there I’ll take an overnight train in a small compartment sleeping six people to Bayonne, near Biarritz in the south of France.
•In Bayonne, I catch a train that will stop an hour later in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port.
* * *
A scene from the film 500 Days of Summer neatly sums up one of my life’s great obstacles. The male lead pitches up at a party given by his ex-girlfriend, for whom he still has strong feelings. The screen then splits in two, with the same scene shown in both halves, but one with the title “Expectations” and the other “Reality”. In the “Expectations” screen his ex-girlfriend greets him warmly, and they walk up the stairs to the deck, laughing and chatting. In the “Reality” screen she is still friendly, but keeps him at a distance; on the deck he hears, alas, that she is engaged to someone else. The background music to both the scenes is Regina Spektor’s unsettling ballad “Hero”. “I’m the hero of the story / Don’t need to be saved.”
Here on the plane, I am confronted with two such screens. In the “Expectations” screen I lean back peacefully in my seat, order another G&T, and do whatever I feel like: watch a movie, play a silly game, watch the other passengers, catch up on some sleep, or write a few serious and sensible thoughts in my Moleskine diary about the momentous journey ahead. Meditate, even.
In the “Reality” screen, though, I’m wound up, down a night’s sleep, and can’t stop hauling myself over the coals for not filing the Slagtersnek article before I left as I’d so solemnly promised. It’s not the first time that something like this has happened, either.
Will these old patterns ever let us be?
* * *
“Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.”
– Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst
* * *
My K-Way rucksack lies deep in the bowels of the Boeing, tightly bound in Bag Wrap plastic.
Years ago, former RSG presenter Fonnie du Plooy phoned me to arrange a radio interview. When I asked Fonnie what would happen if he ever lost his diary, his calm, super-polite voice answered, “Then, Erns, I am screwed.”
If my rucksack goes missing between here and Paris, Fonnie, I too would be undeniably screwed.
* * *
I am already wearing the clothes I’m going to hike in: a K-Way fleece, a K-Way long-sleeve shirt, K-Way hiking pants (my only pair of pants: you can unzip the legs if you want to), a pair of black socks and a pair of brand-new Salomon trail running shoes. I bought them in a British size 10. I usually wear a size 9, but apparently one’s feet swell on such a long hike.
The contents of my red K-Way rucksack:
•Two mismatched K-Way trekking poles. The grey one I used in September 2006 on Kilimanjaro and the orange one in July 2013 in the Fish River Canyon.
•A K-Way Chamonix 850 Eco sleeping bag, weighing only 850 grams. The “Recommended Sleep Zone” is between 3°C and 15°C. It’s spring in Europe – I shouldn’t get cold.
•A kind of sleeping sheet, folded up compactly and stashed in a Ziploc bag. Not as warm as a sleeping bag, but you can sleep inside it. I borrowed it from my friend Sarie, who has walked the Camino before.
•A pair of waterproof K-Way pants, bought – and probably last worn – back in 2006 for climbing Kilimanjaro.
•A light waterproof jacket, with the Solo cologne logo on it. No idea where I got it.
•Thermal underwear – long-sleeve vest and pants (possibly unnecessary, because it’s not winter, but the weather can apparently change very quickly).
•A pair of grey K-Way shorts (to wear at night).
•A pair of gym/jogging pants.
•An extra pair of K-Way pants.
•A grey T-shirt with an Ons Klyntji logo (to wear at night).
•A compact, quick-drying K-Way towel.
•A hat.
•Two extra pairs of socks.
•A trump card, hopefully: three pairs of thin, ankle-length stockings to wear as a base layer when walking.
•Two extra pairs of underpants.
•Two handkerchiefs.
•Two pairs of Lycra tights – one pair is my flatmate Magriet’s old cycling tights …
•One pair of pretty worn-in Reef slip-slops.
•A black bag, another disposable plastic bag I could use as a raincoat, and seven empty Ziploc bags of various sizes.
•In a large Ziploc bag, under my clothes: two Moleskine diaries for journalling, two pens (one an ordinary Bic, the other a fancier make with the Cricket SA logo, which my uncle gave me – who knows why anybody would want to travel with such a smart pen), the compact yellow Globetrotter’s Spanish in Your Pocket (Phrase Book and Two-Way Dictionary), John Brierley’s A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino de Santiago (the bible for thousands of pilgrims every year) and his A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino Finisterre.
•A