Travel is Addictive. I did not know it in 1957, when at age 24 I left my native Brussels on a 125cc Vespa scooter to ride across the length of Africa to Cape Town. I had already served two years in Occupied Germany as a Belgian army sergeant. I had worked on a ship that ferried people between Belgium and its colony, the former Belgian Congo. And I had spent a couple of years working in the Congo for Sabena Airlines.
But was that travel? Not to me. Travel had to be the stuff of dreams. It had to be adventure and discovery. No plans. No preparations. Just throw a few things in a bag and go. Face what comes. Eat what you find. And sleep where you may, mostly under the stars. My budget had no allowance for hotel rooms or restaurants. That’s how I embarked on my six-month adventure. I would pay dearly for failing to worry at least about the best months to travel there. But I would learn from that lesson and do better the next time.
As a kid I dreamed of becoming an explorer. Having learned that all the white spots on the world’s maps had been filled, I cursed the fate that had brought me to the world too late. From childhood to adulthood, I despaired of ever being able to enjoy the only life I could imagine for myself. I longed for adventure, and swore that if I ever managed to live at least one memorable escapade, I would never ask anything more from life. Such an escapade seemed so farfetched anyway. And it was.
I was, after all, like my younger brother, growing up in poverty. At age fifteen I had to leave school to help my family with a salary of my own, as would my brother a year later. I went to work in a restaurant, 12 hours a day and more, sometimes without a day off for two or three weeks. One of the reasons for our poverty was that my father had been away between 1939 and 1945--one year under arms, and five years as a prisoner of war in Germany. But there were others. And without him, my family had suffered great hunger every day of the war. Now, three years after it had ended, we were still paying its price.
So I was inevitably looking into a bleak future. But I had thrived in school, and it helped me see a light at the end of the tunnel. That light was self-education. I started with the self-study of several foreign languages, which, I thought, would at least help me find work overseas, if that was all that I could ever hope for. And I devoured books on exploration, geography, history, geology, archaeology, and anthropology.
Thanks to that, I had been able to live the memorable adventure that should have kept me forever happy. I had squeezed safely through a throat-slashing Algeria at war with France. I had found my way through the sandstorms of a hellish Sahara summer. I had sloshed through the mud of one of the worst rainy seasons in years throughout West and Central Africa. Except south of the Belgian Congo, Africa had no real roads, and sand and mud and stones and deep holes had constantly made me fly over my handlebar.
At night the blood-curdling shrieks, bellows, or roars of wild animals lurking around in the moonless bush or jungle had sometimes pulled me out of my sleeping bag to ride a light-less scooter away into the night (Africa was sparsely peopled, but teeming with wildlife). And scary storms had soaked me through in my sleep, tearing down trees and setting them on fire all around me. I had lived all that, and was still unhappy.
But I had seen too much too fast, and now I needed to return for a better look and understanding. First I would have to spend time with the Tuareg nomads. How I had envied the amazing freedom with which they moved from horizon to horizon, unaffected by the tyranny of trails, while the rarity of gas stations and the fear to get lost restricted me to the straightest courses between oases. No trails, in fact, only the tracks of trucks that had gone before, and which a sandstorm could erase at any moment. I wondered why I had not sold my Vespa to buy a camel and followed the Tuareg. But now that would have to be later.
I went on that journey with the intention of writing a book on it, or at least some magazine articles. Three years earlier, as I was photographing the people of a Congolese village, I had had an epiphany. I would become a magazine photographer and writer, and as such, would be able to travel to the world’s secret corners and get paid for it. Everyone who was aware of my background found my idea preposterous. I wondered why. But it would certainly be more difficult than I imagined.
At the end of my journey, the South African and Belgian media feasted me. And the Vespa Company gave me a brand new 150cc Vespa in exchange for the battered old 125cc one. They would exhibit the latter all over the country. I basked in my glory and expected good things from it. A magazine assignment, perhaps. Instead, I learned that my writing and photography were not of publishable quality.
Having run out of money, and glory, I was back at square one--to the waiter’s life that I had thought to have forever left behind at age nineteen. It did not help, of course, that I now had a baby daughter to raise, who would soon be followed by a baby son. I had married my girl friend before accepting the Congo job three years earlier.
I spent three unsuccessful years trying to find new employment in the Congo while saving what little I could for the next step I would take. Finally, at age 27, having lost patience, I moved my family to Canada. Having always recoiled from modernity, North America had never tempted me. But to travel where I really wanted to go, I first needed the money that I could only earn there. Fifteen months later, with $800 in my pocket, I put my family on a train from Montreal to New York for yet another life episode.
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