Our Journey

It seems like I have spent my whole life  chasing those things that have stretched the limits of my imagination and those of my pocket.  The idea of giving up a comfortable life entrenched in security is something that not everyone can understand nor accept. But then when I left South Africa at the start of my journey hitching through Africa some found this hard to understand and accept. After having completed the journey those same people are filled with admiration and awe. Now that we have started a new stage of our life long journey we find mostly one of two reactions. "You're crazy" or "I wish I could do that but..". Somehow it seems that life is just a repetition and its only the stage set that changes.

Well we are not the sort of people that like to talk about what we could do although we also do a lot of that but rather like to go and get things done. It made sense to us to at least try this new approach to life and the way we were living it. After all this talking of living differently and that we had both had our fill of the stress of the civilized world we packed or bags and headed for the hills. The hills were in our case not much more than a small plot of land in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands and with a half container of all our worldly possessions and the lump sum of our savings account we decided to try this new way of living as near as it can be to self-sufficiency. Its not that either of us know anything about this way of life but somehow the romantic notion of a slow pace where tomorrow waits for what has not been done today seems to attract us.

Self-sufficiency is not the return to an idealized past though, where people with primitive utensils worked hard every day to just eke out an existence. Rather it is an attempt to a new and better life where we can share our time with each other rather than the deadly traps a nine to five job lay where life on the weekend is on offer. Self-sufficiency is  not a step backwards to a lesser lifestyle rather its an attempt to a better life-style where we can eat healthy food and live in a beautiful environment. Also its about achieving something for ourselves and that in itself is more satisfying than anything else.