Rest and Good People

I have been fortunate in life to spend alot of time around people who are very good at what they do, this didn't change during my stay with the Lees family in Jacobsbaai. Laura Lees is the aunt of a friend of mine (Marisa, a very good tattoo artist!) in Joburg and was kind enough to let me stay with her and her family for two nights while i took a rest day. She and her husband Dennis make their living off of pottery and painting respectively. It's encouraging for me as a young musician and photographer to see people who pursue their passion enough to make a living off of it. They seem to have passed that passion on to Vincent, Dennis' 18 year old son who is deadly on a drum kit! I had planned to get alot done on my first rest day but i enjoyed the company so much that between jamming sessions with Vincent, talking sense with Laura and Dennis, and talking nonsense with Jessica and Benjamin (the youngest members of the family, Jess in Grade 1 and Ben in Preschool), I got pretty much nothing done!

Setting out on day 6 my feet were still sore and the wind was howling, but had i stayed any longer in I don't think i would ever have left! So i said my goodbyes and left for Paternoster. After a long day of uphills, headwinds and narrow roads, i arrived in the small fishing village. I got in touch with a booking agent named Marina (www.stayinpaternoster.co.za) who has let me stay in one of the houses she rents virtually free of charge(I'm just covering the cost of the maid to clean up after i leave)! The timing couldn't have been better as I had just received a phone call from my uncle in Cape Town that there was a massive storm on its way that emergency services were on standby for.

This is now the third day in the house waiting for the storms to pass. There have been some bad ones but not as bad as I expected. I think they unleashed alot of their power in Cape Town where there has been alot of flooding my dad tells me. The rest is welcome as i covered more ground than expected in the first few days so i'm still on schedule. Also my feet and legs are doing well for the rest. The gait required to pull Olive along is quite different to carrying a backpack, so despite being very fit my legs are taking strain getting used to it. Besides resting I've been making some jewelry to sell and working on some new songs. I've also been putting some thought to how i want to theme my exhibition. I took my first photos just before i entered Jacobsbaai of some landscapes behind fences. I've been trying to think of how my walk affects the way i see things and one of the thing i've noticed is that because of pulling the cart and essentially becoming quadrupedal, fences have become far greater obstacles. Where as normally one could just hop over a fence to get away from the road and find somewhere safe to sleep, I've had to find open gates or areas that aren't fenced to sleep in on the first three nights. I started to become quite animalistic in the way i viewed things but now that I've been in houses the past few nights, I can feel the onset of the neuroses of modern living. I think too much thinking though, might just prevent me from intuitively discovering what I should be photographing. I like how Lukas Zpira likens the constant justification of our actions to a dog fighting to defend piece of meat, and so I hope that when I find what I should be photographing, the images will be strong enough in concept and aesthetics to stand without the need for explanation.

Tomorrow I'll start walking to (and hopefully past) Stompneus Bay over 20km of dirt road. These few days have and will involve a more convoluted path than expected but it is a very pretty part of the coast. My quota for each week is 150km which i covered last week and shouldn't have any problem covering this week... Weather permitting...