Voyager joie de vivre: travel seris, #2

By Abbas QriquaS

In Jozi to Addis Aida, a Stewardess at Ethiopian Airlines and part-time fashion designer meets a business class passenger on flight E387 from ORTI to Bole International, Adis Ababa.  The passenger is on a travel assignment doing a story on Ethiopia for a prestegious international travel magazine. She flirts, then they are courting and finally got engaged to this man. In the course of their courtship Aida gets recruited for a Cadet Pilot Programme run by the airliner, she is told the programme begins shortly in Toulouse, France just a few months after they met. Based on the training programme she realises that she will have no time for anything beside. This realisation forces her to evaluate whether she can do one and sacrifice the rest, the idea of loosing any of the three drives her insane. She decides she wants to do all three - keep her romantic relationship going, her fashion desidn and this training all at the same time. For her side hustle she employs Nonz as Head Designer to baby seat the start-up boutique and give her free rein to run the business. For her Bae, she thinks she can juggle the two balls and straddle both lanes - Toulouse and Joburg simultaneously. An innocuous flirt between Nonz and QS develops into a serious love relationship that refuses to be kept secret. Jozi to Addis is at once a travelogue and an epic romantic poem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abba QriquaS
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224357321

Abbas QriquaS

Abba Qriquas has the following collection to his name: Fiction Hello series Travel series The world temporarily closed Current affairs Betrayed, broken & corrupted Twilight at dawn Free humanity free the earth 1632 centennial series Biography Ek is 'n Qriqua YA Inspiration Soaring eagle Letters for my sons The kingdom series Book 1 Book 2 Book 3 Book 4

Book preview

Voyager joie de vivre  Jozi to Addis Ababa - travelling series book 2

Abba QriquaS

Copyright © Abba QriquaS

The characters and events in this novel are fictitious, if an actual place it is used fictitiously any resemblance to real persons living or dead is not intended but coincidental.

The right of Abba QriquaS to be identified as the author of Joie de Vivre a travel series has been asserted. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Acknowledgement

I am thankful to the Publishers of Semlata In-flight Magazine for the permission to use their information for this book. Https://issuu.com/selamtamagazine/docs/selamta. I am also thankful to the Ethiopian Tours Agency for access to their data site. These sources enabled me to appreciate Ethiopian tourism landscape and its centuries culture with intelligent insights. My shout out to Sammy-Wong from Unsplashed for supplying cover image.

Jozi to Addis

CONTENTS

About the Novel

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

The frontier

I hear people boast about the fact solo travel can be a life-changing experience. That it is possible to find the motif, power, and the freedom across the landscape of cultural artefacts. And so, having recently invented myself Travel Writer, I am to prove it for myself.

Travel writing is going to be a transcript of my youthful experiences. And so, in my maiden voyage, I am going to travel like a student. Tentative but without caution. I call this adventure sweet escape because travel is the art of escape. Escaping myself. It happens in time; it waxes and wanes, gathers, and vanishes. Time, inscribed upon a brisk syntax and jaunty prosody, hasten every writing forward, but the world arrests with every word I write.

And so, as I dip my toes into new frontiers, I present myself to the world hoping to make new and meaningful connections with the citizens of the earth. A pilgrim who goes on a journey hoping to encounter God in a novel way. One of the lessons of travelling is to find peace amid its storms.

Away from my usual environment, at the mercy of the road or the weather or the host, I am given the opportunity to see the world with new eyes: to receive welcome, learning to listen, learning too that the journey, provision, and destination are given to me only for a moment for in them I own nothing. This is faith in action.

To appreciate the detail, I may have to use a mix of inquirer and analytic eye; avoid my tendency to muse in other people's quirks and idiosyncrasies. Restrain myself from analysing their quirkiness too much.

Travel provides a unique opportunity to experience new things. To leave behind the intensity of my work and family pandemonium and settle into the quieter days of travel.

Travelling is as much a state of mind as it is a physical action. Yes, travelling is like flirting with life. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. One alters the past to form the future but there is no real significance to the pattern, which finally appears and resists all further change.

Excerpt that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuses to be consumed. Certain things can be remembered exactly as they were merely occasionally discoloured by time, like forgotten 50 cent coins in the pocket of an old suit. Most of the details though, have long since been rearranged to others of them forward.

As far as writing about my experience is concerned, I consider myself a novice writer, careless with details, and take much of what I see as common knowledge, supposing those who read the story have themselves been there before.

Most travel writers try to give their narration gravitas through a formal language. I don’t, I write in the present voice, even when I am writing in the past because I do not want to pretend, writing in the now means I am dealing with issues of today in their historical context giving the predominant impression that I am writing as if only for myself, in service of my memories.

The elegist in me wants to itemise every inch of the world I see, as though to erect a sturdy, wall-like counterfactual against the moment that cannot admit. This is true, in part because I have an underdeveloped writing ability.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the writing must ride on the travel’s own melting, which simultaneously moves forward and disappears, delighting in its speed and despairing of its brevity. It is possible to encounter fragile environments when travelling that have resisted change and come across moments where time seems to stand still.

As a writer I think of myself as a reconstruction artist who always seek to feel the magical moment and often find the thing and paint it with words. A written word is proof that humans can create magic.

When I have seen something and want to follow its details, a story arises and demands to be written. The story tells me how I should write it. I am the conduit between the observable and the hidden, between the downtown world of gossip and the uptown world of well-heeled travellers, folks with money who experience what I can only imagine.

Across the millennia, authors have spoken silently yet clearly inside the reader’s head. Writing is the greatest of human inventions binding people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Because of the inevitable pull of the future, many everyday experiences like reading have become invitations to the past and a link to the future. The writer reframes the imagery and portrait into a mixture of colour, touch and feel. Written words break the shackles of time. In the photos you can see the formulaic nature of accommodated tourism, something that detracts from the experience itself. 

People in the high-toned literary circles consider me weird, and I consider them cadavers long after their time.

The act of journeying from a known place to one unknown is like a gesture inscribed in space vanishing as it is made. Transit periods are extraordinary combinations of things coming together, not least the position and surrounding influences of the most influential events around a person.

There is a moment when it really begins, sometimes it happens as you leave house, sometimes it is a long way from home. You go from one place to the next, and on to somewhere else again all at the same time. The world you are moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided anymore.

Already behind you, there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down to yesterday are full of different people now and crosswinds, none of them know who you are. At the time of transition everything takes on a symbolic weight and power.

Dust covers over your footprints; the marks of your fingers are wiped off the handle you touched. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely evaporated. Things happen once only and never are repeated, never return excerpt in memory.

It is so in the memory of things that one moment life looks like a drudgery of emptiness in space and time that seems standing still between you and wilderness, the next, a passeggiata of lights like glitter.

It was Alan Paton who said, ‘all roads to leads to Johannesburg. If the crops fail, there is work in Johannesburg, if there are taxes to be paid, there is work in Joburg. If the farm is too small to be divided further, some must go and work in Joburg. If there is a child to be born, that child must be born in Joburg.’

History, heritage, food, and fashion none will escape my eyes. From skyscrapers to the inner-city, from hinterland of the valleys below to the shoreline. From Jozi, Addis here I come.

The magic in the picture

Someone once asked, ‘why don’t you take pictures of the places travelled, splash photos on your website with a line describing each.  After all, a picture speaks thousand words.’ They demand from me. I suppose I could do that, and I agree that pictures must tell the story themselves. Photos are the embroidery to the story I am incapable of articulating in words. Magic is that thing in a photograph that can be named in words that transform into images of the mind, and everybody knows that memories live in images.

A photographer discloses an idea as a happened event through an image. An image transfixes you to a time in history. To be clear, photography is an amazing craft. As it relates to memory photography is great, it unveils it all. In fact, as a Photographic Essayist I supply my content to television houses and print publications. I produce long-form projects.

However, I believe the richness of the experience lies in combining the imagery of a written word (today, the written can simultaneously be a spoken word thanks to technology) to a photo.

The photographs that we treasure have magic in them because they are of the mind. Being conscious of the taken moment, knowing the feeling, and recognising that something is important reflects the magic within ourselves. To do this, to work magic, the magician must train herself to work the tools that transform the base idea into the splendour of luminescence.

As a medium, photography has been the perfect tool in this world. Behind the lens, the photographer is rendered invisible, leaving only their subjects on display. The act of making an image — camera held between photographer and subject — is as much a literal barrier as it is metaphorical. The distance it creates provides the illusion of objectivity. A photographer reflects a moment as it is produces. An evidentiary object, a ‘truthful’ representation.

This act of looking is also an act of possessing, marking the moment as the photographer sees it, and making it available for consumption by others. The tangible and portable nature of the resulting photograph enables effective spreading of the ideas and values it props up. Yet, what is ultimately seen is informed by perspective, which is inherently personal and subject to prejudice and bias.

Photography has always been a principal medium for recording images of the world in which photos document the travel as much as the place. Today, I look at photos that were taken during the last century by photographers and photos taken of small moments of joy in the lives of everyday people. I hope that what I see in these photos is an honest recording of history. Well, almost.

Most people are busy or feel pushed to get from one place to next, no time to stop, no time to look at something that catches our eye. That is modern life. We might be the only people photographing objects that others do not see. Street photography teaches us to see. 

How often have you come across a photograph of a man or a woman, an unknown person who is laughing at something out of frame, a glass on a table next to a half full bottle of wine? And asked yourself who is this person, why are they laughing and what are they celebrating? To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability, precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographers testify to time’s relentless melt.

A photo elicits emotions. You began to engage and ask questions only a photo can answer. A photo is for cheer and joy to reflect many states about your life because joy is something, we all seek. To be a good photographer is to be a thinking person. Your main tool is your brain.

If I am thinking about what I am doing but feeling it, filling my mind with its colours, shadows and so on, I will end up with either good shots worth keeping, or I will end up with shots that teaches me more about what I am trying to get in the photo. I learn by doing.

There are people who hate using their brains because it requires introspection and patience especially when you discover that you are just as capable of being an idiot as the next person. The real thinker knows that mistakes are inevitable when working with a rough stone that is not yet ready for the building work.

All the technical equipment in the world will not make anyone great photographer. Time and patience, enjoyment of the process and journey, and the ability to see deeply into your own environment and interact with it, is the path that leads to great photographs.

At the time of taking a photo the photographer should already have decided at the attempt to save that moment and hoping that it went right, that the result will be satisfactory of that moment, and this has a lot to do with being conscious in the moment.

I just sort them out by learning to see properly. That takes time. Patience and practice, then I will improve and notice how I always go for a certain lens length, a 35 mm, a 105 mm, or a nice wide angle on 18mms of street view as I march through town with a camera and two lenses in my bag.

Photography allows me to frame the moment that I have considered deeply and capture it so that I can go back and take another look. This allows me to ponder my own ability to see things correctly without exaggeration.

School taught me I must be objective; my inner man says I must be subjective and commit to something. It is about understanding and feeling that a photograph might, if nothing else, inform me and change and that it is important to be committed to something.

To ask questions about why I thought the object in the photo was worth keeping. Maybe, I even get to point where I ask, ‘what on earth was I thinking?’ when I realise that my momentary stopping and focusing was probably a stupid idea, at that time.

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Taking photos changes my view of the world. A perspective is a mentality and the person involved in looking makes decisions about what is important to them based on their biases. For some reason, you saw something interesting, the little-gem, and took a shot that turned out to be interesting. Then during the after-shot workflow process you decided to change what you saw.

I have a tough time just looking at things. The world is an ever-changing fast flowing place. To stop and look, is hard. When I have an interesting shot and can remember the reason why I stopped to photograph it, I should accept the decisions that I made at that moment, the framing decisions, and the feeling about it, and keep it. It is when I sit down at the computer screen and see the photo that seemed so interesting that I allow a new judgement to kick in. My mind becomes objective and critical about the shot taken.

The new thought is a piggyback idea of why I took the shot. I start to judge my own ability to decide about what is a good photo and what is not. I then begin to experiment with the controls in the software and try and bend the world into my own biased opinion of what I saw. At that point, I am in danger of becoming fiction maker. Have the selfies not done enough of this? The point of this is nonfiction work.

Some people have travelled the world to discover the true meaning in a photo that they have found. Others have travelled to distant places in search of a meaningful photograph. Regardless of the reason, there is a responsibility involved about what I decide is a worthy moment for memory and how much thought I put into framing the shot and adjusting the colour and light.

All these things will affect the outcome. The moment is fleeting and my chance for a great shot, whether it be a wedding photoshoot, a portrait, or a major public event, is a matter of skill. How skilful are I am with my thoughts? How often have I taken a shot knowing it will not be up to scratch, but I have the backup of Photoshop to make up for my laziness?

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Time has come for me to head off to the horn of Afrika. Ethiopia beckons. A country that provides an exciting opportunity for a photographer to document centuries-old traditions, colourful festivals, ancient African civilizations, amazing nature, and exciting wildlife not found in our safari wildlife.

Because of the unique photographic opportunity Ethiopia provides, traveling to this enclave is like doing multiple countries in one trip. I am set. Good to go. I have my travel essentials all sorted. EOS M50 mirrorless camera, iPad Pro, cash, passport, credit card, anti-hypertensive medicine. Bon voyage son of the soil!

Addis Ababa

At Greenstone Mall, Tessa Groenewald, Pentravel Consultant hands me a brochure with a well written advertorial. ‘Travel to Ethiopia and discover a beautiful country, barely touched by modern society.

It is an adventure like no other. Ethiopia an inexhaustible source of wonder for travellers, a sprawling country with an ancient African civilization, colourful festivals, breath-taking landscapes, diverse culture, and amazingly friendly people. There are many reasons to visit this fascinating country.’ I thought not bad for starters.

Passport holders traveling to Ethiopia from South Africa travel visa free. However, I thought it is safe to get an e-visa just in case rules have changed. I was surprised to find the country’s online application process so friendly and efficient. I completed my