I love travelling locally — the Western Cape Winelands and the Kruger National Park being firm favourites. I get PTSD from travelling internationally. My bag is always overweight, I always worry about the possibility of missing the flight and then I’m constipated for four days after returning. When I land back in SA, I always think to myself, ‘I don’t know why I paid that much just to want to be back home [chuckles].

Now, nature, as I am only too aware, has her enthusiasts, but on the whole, I am not to be counted among them. To put it bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.

I am not the type of person who wants to go back to the land I am the type who wants to got back to the hotel.

If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari again.

There are a lot of wine exports from Cape Town that don't come to America but go everywhere else. It's just lovely to drive through the wine farms. Come for the wine tastings, eat good food, go to the beach and see the penguins and seals

He made two or three peculiar observations; as when shewn the botanical garden, 'Is not EVERY garden a botanical garden?

After Gordon’s Bay, I was into veld, snaking towards Koeëlbaai on the R44, the prettiest road in South Africa. The way, now, was open, free of traffic, buildings, humans. My spirits lifted. On the left were towering cliffs, the fynbos was green and I rolled down the window to let in the fragrance. Far below waves crashed against granite boulders, their booming sound reaching me moments after each detonation. I was self-consciously taking it all in, relishing it, this road that would be mine for many weeks to come.

The world is full of places to which I want to return

But then again, Cape Town is an old lover. There are good days and bad days. Mostly, I think, I have made my peace. On the stormy days – perhaps a Cape Times report on gangland rape, or Sol Kerzner’s promise of a Noddyland hotel for the Waterfront, will trigger my unfaithfulness – Potchefstroom and Perth look suddenly greener. On the good days – maybe a school of Heaviside’s dolphins playing outside my window, full-moonrise from Signal Hill or a spring morning so unutterably blue it demands to be drunk, not written about – life here seems unrepeatable anywhere else in the world. As in all relationships, the dialogue is never over.

I imagined that when I retired from teaching, I would live mainly in South Africa, but in the meantime the promise of liberation has been hollowed out and I’m not attracted to the pathologies of historical colonialism that persist. Still, I do spend a couple of months every year in the Cape and return to the north with great reluctance.

At the sight of the Neckar slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I had a strong sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently worth our blood and our lives. Never before had I felt its charm so clearly. I had good and serious thoughts, and for the first time I sensed that this war was more than just a great adventure.

I had been six years at sea, but had only seen Melbourne and Sydney, very good places, charming places in their way — but Bankok!

Over the last thirty years, I don't think I have ever visited Ottawa and not taken a stroll around the buildings for a gawk. If you find yourself in the nation's capital on a fine, brisk day, I recommend you walk across the Alexandria Bridge over the Ottawa River to Quebec. From there, you will get the greatest view: the back of the buildings, even more magnificent than the front, and they jut out dramatically over the river's escarpment. Also, from this angle you see the beauty that is the Parliamentary Library.
I feel about these buildings the way some people feel about sunsets. The way Justin Trudeau feels about mirrors. I can gaze at them all day.

One of the real benefits of any travel is gaining some perspective. You see things from different points of view. That came home to me in a variety of ways: politically, economically, seeing what was going on in other states.