Will will travel – looking back
May 21, 2023 Leave a comment
C’est pour toi, mon amour
I started WWT with a blog post after my visit to Abbaye de Lerins with Claudie on the 17.6.2012. My niece Dawn had been kind enough to set up the blog perhaps never knowing what it would mean to me in the years to come. It became a forum for me to explore my experiences, thoughts, feelings and opinions. On the 23rd of August that year I examined the issue of people destroying monuments after political change. From September of that year I began with my Korean blogs, having spent a year in South Korea from July, 2007 to July, 2008. I took joy in writing about my South African experiences. It was fun to boast that it was writing from three continents!
I also wrote retrospectively and placed images about my travel in 1972 when I travelled through Europe, a trip that had a profound effect on my life. My ten years in Provence too, has in many ways changed much in my life. This has come to a sad end, but memories through my posts and images remain vivid. There are more than 450 posts.
Since I returned to South Africa in early November, 2021, the posts in WWT have been less on travel and more on my personal interests. I still sift through photographs and the reminiscing brings on fresh writing. My photographs, of course, all tell their own stories. I’d rather not say how many thousands of them there are!
Looking back, I feel dazed. Did I really see that? do that? experience that? Being told about the world (see education) is one thing. Living the reality is something else. It has been inspiring to me, to say the least. To touch the marble blocks that were laid for Augustus’ triumphal monument at La Turbie near Monaco and to realise that Mary and Joseph were young people when this was done (6 B.C.); to view the Eiffel Tower from Trocadero and to realise that this is exactly the spot where Adolf Hitler stood … these are inexpressible moments and my blog posts celebrate a generous range of such times.
That it has been possible at all, amazes me – apart from my first trip in Europe, the Korean education authorities and Claudie herself have made possible what I could never have afforded on my own. Claudie’s role is not limited to money; she is the love that colours all experience.
The blog posts on WWT remain a very special record of my experiences and promote wonder for me, rare in the modern world.
© Will
www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com
Bridgewater, Somerset West
May, 2023
My drawing and photographics, published by RotsWolk Publishers.
Will Will Travel 