Trying to bash everything out in the first blog post usually fails to do justice to the number of things swimming around in your head. With writing about a journey, what we have read is often worse; people trying to make a blinding first impression when all they really want is to get whichever poor soul is reading as hooked into their adventure as much as they are. Here, we are taking our first few tentative steps into the wild chaos that is travel writing, the camaraderie of being on a journey together – the ups and downs, the laughter and the cursing, and the discovery of other like-minded journeymen. We hope we will tell it like it is, and that you will read it as such.
We are two friends, Tom Perkins and Matt Chennells, both recent graduates from the University of Cape Town who have decided to forgo the proverbial rat race and dive into a world that we have studied, that we have grown up in but which we know so little about. Tom, a self proclaimed “˜ideas man’, grew up in the UK and decided, almost on a whim, to come to South Africa to study. He makes up for his somewhat relaxed attitude towards planning by bringing to the team his sheer enthusiasm and zest for life. Matt, a stubborn sentimentalist with a penchant for wearing clothes well into disrepair, loves to explore the world and contributes towards an already explosive duo an infectious persistence of energy.
Together, we will cycle from Tom’s house outside London to Matt’s house outside Cape Town, leaving at the end of July on a journey that will take around a year and a half to complete. It will see us pedal through parts of Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and down, in, out and across Africa. Our trip is not a race, and its purpose is two-fold: the first is for our own mental, spiritual and physical growth; and the second, arguably more important, reason is to raise money and awareness for an initiative that aims to develop a music and youth centre in a very poor area in Cape Town. We hope that some of the goodwill we receive on our adventure will flow through us to this project.
The pictures here are from a previous smaller escapade in Greece and we hope that our travel albums will grow with new and ridiculously cool memories. Every traveller gives a different account of their experiences on the road and bundling them here into a coherent idea is almost impossible. So, over the next year and a half, we invite you to join us as we talk, whine, moan, shout and laugh our way from North to South. In a fit of foresight, we ask you to forgive us our grumblings, bear with us through our epiphanies and come and join us on our own lesser travelled roads.
Dum Vivimus Vivamus
“˜Whilst we live, let us truly live’
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