Letters Home
Cath Connell is the creative director and founder of Leaf, and a self-confessed paperphile. I am perched on a rock overlooking Victoria Falls, the Zimbabwean side. Writing. Writing for hours. I look up and see that the sun is starting to set. The golden light shines through the spray of the Falls and creates a sunset haze all of its own. I switch focus, from the letter paper on my lap, and pull out my camera… In what seems a lifetime ago, (17 years – surely that’s a lifetime), I travelled overland for four months through Africa, from Cape Town to Nairobi. It was my first trip overseas. Rather than keep a personal diary, I decided to journal my journey by sending letters home. This was a big adventure, and I knew my family and friends wanted to share the experience. This was before Facebook, Hotmail, blogs and digital photography – in a time when, errands such as grocery shopping, going to the bank and making a phone call, were adventurous enough. It was the perfect solution. Writing for an audience gave me a sense of purpose, and brought out the storyteller in me, far more than writing a journal ever has (although with my parents reading, I didn’t always include everything!) My mum became my partner in what developed into a substantial project. On the other side of the world, I wrote long, languid letters, full of characters, places, wildlife encounters, experiences, thoughts, on the back of an overland truck, you have a lot of time to think when travelling. Around a campfire at night, taking advantage of the better light, you have a lot of time to write. In Africa, life slows to snail’s pace. You always have time. Every week or two, when we hit a town or city with a reliable enough postage service, I would post the letter home to my parents. Back home, they would pore over the news, attempt to interpret my handwriting and complain about the poor quality of the paper. Then Mum typed them up, printed copies and posted them out to a list of 20 or so friends. The letters took on a life of their own. They offered tiny breaks in busy lives, as my friends curled up with a cuppa to read them. They were shared with other friends in cafes and homes. I heard one couple sat up in bed, taking turns to read the letters aloud. They captured history. My travels were at a time of great change and turbulence in Africa. I wrote about South Africa, filled with excitement and hope immediately after the election of Mandela; about Zimbabwe at a time when it was flourishing and (relatively) safe for travellers; of a Uganda filled with UN peacekeepers and aid workers, post the Malawi massacres; of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) in a state of political turmoil, on the verge of a civil war. They shared stories. From the hilarity of taking 18 people and a truck to the Bulawayo Drive-In, to hanging out with NZ Air Force guys, who the next morning would fly food aid into Goma, where they would face thousands of refugees dealing with homelessness, cholera and horrendous memories. They captured memories of my own – of Early Morning Opera in the dogbox (the seat above the cab) and encounters with gorillas; of camping in the open in the Serengeti (with not a fence in sight) with hyenas metres from our tents; of discovering cardamom cake and escaping dodgy hotel employees in Zanzibar. I lament the loss of letters home. The immediacy of an email, text, tweet, Facebook post or Flickr album has replaced them today as a travel document. Even postcards are sent electronically. No longer do we have written language to create our own mental pictures – we allow the pictures to do it all for us. Letters capture moments in time and place; the experience of our friend’s journey, not only through the destinations travelled but also within. Instant media captures mere snapshots – snapshots that disappear among the chaos of our normal life; emails to ignore, photos you just don’t get around to viewing and news streams that are gone from our awareness as soon as they fall off the bottom of the page. Sure, these new technologies offer a “Come travel with me” approach, but it’s as a tourist, not a traveller. As every true traveller knows, there is a BIG difference! www.leafjournals.com
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