Traversa Quotes

“And new physical problems are arising almost daily. I'm getting problems from a painful trapped nerve in my shoulder, where my rucksack strap has been pinching it, and I can't straighten my arm above shoulder level - soon I will be limping like Richard III. By now my back is covered with eczema, the result of a perpetually sodden shirt and rucksack pressed against it day after day in this heat. In one place my pack has rubbed a painful hole in my skin through the eczema; carrying my rucksack was unpleasant before, but now it is purgatory. This eczema must be partly due to eating bad food for so long - I never had this problem at home. I'm expecting my teeth and hair to start falling out before long, and I've got more or less a permanent acid indigestion from eating so much junk. Week after week I've lived on lukewarm Coca-Cola, stale buns and doughnuts, slurps, green bananas, powdered milk and far too many cigarettes. With all the rubbishy food and sugar soft drinks I've been consuming, I'll see the east coast through a hypoglycaemic haze.”
― Fran Sandham, Traversa

“Back in Zambia, that horrible long stretch between Sesheke and Livingstone without food did me a lot of good. Since then I've been pleased just to have some food on my plate, any food will do. Every meal set before me fills me with eager anticipation. It's no great disaster if my maize porridge arrives stone-cold, grey and dingy-looking, or if it's reheated and gets flopped in my bowl steaming like old underwear drying on a radiator.”
― Fran Sandham, Traversa

“While crocodiles kill hundreds of people in Africa each year, the local people have learnt to live with the danger and often bathe in crocodile areas. This strikes me as reckless - yet if the people here were to visit London or New York they might wonder how people could possibly live with so much dangerous traffic careening around and all the cancerous pollution choking the air.”
― Fran Sandham, Traversa

“Children can be so inventive with so little; in dozens of villages I see kids playing enthusiastic games of football with balls made from a scrunched-up polythene sheet tied with string, while other children trundle little cars and aeroplanes made with tin cans and bits of rubbish, or race down the road with a hoop and stick straight out of Dickens. While these children have almost nothing in terms of possessions, I can't help but thinking they're still healthier and happier than so many kids back in England, hunched for hours over bloodthirsty computer games and internet chatrooms.”
― Fran Sandham, Traversa

“Often I prefer gloomy and overcast days in Africa to the more usual more dazzling ones; I like it when the sun has lost a little of its fierceness, when everything is cool and pleasant, when the air itself seems to hold some trace of magic and mystery.”
― Fran Sandham, Traversa

“After dark I walk beside the plateau back towards the Okakarara Road (...) the full moon tonight is huge, an incredible globe of cool molten yellow, almost close enough to touch, shining over the open bushland like a giant floodlight.”
― Fran Sandham, Traversa

“I follow the road south in darkness, the slight ocean breeze cool and refreshing, the moon on my left, the muted roar of the Benguela Current to my right; dead ahead, the Southern Cross hangs lopsided in a sky the colour of Indian ink. The stars tonight are extraordinarily clear; the Bushman call the Milky Way 'The Backbone of the Night'. An aeroplane in the night sky floats past, a lonely firefly exiled to outer space because of its abnormal size.”
― Fran Sandham, Traversa