Traveling Toward My Current Self

Intersections between genetics and geography

People sometimes talk about “the trip of a lifetime”. I have been fortunate, I’ve had many of these. (The trips, not the people.) You have probably already seen stories and pictures from some of these journeys. Today, however, I’m writing about the somewhat complicated way in which I have become who I am.

Or at least how it all started. The first steps to becoming the Ron Smit that I am today.

OK, I’m sure that you all know where babies come from, I’m not going back that far.

Perhaps, if you look at a few snapshots from my life, then you may understand how I have turned out to be the way I am. We are not only a result of the building blocks in our DNA, we are certainly also a product of our experiences.

Back in the mid-50’s, before my arrival on the planet, my parents decided to emigrate from The Netherlands to South Africa. Many years later I asked my mom about their motivation for that move, presumably not an easy step to take. I expected answers that would involve employment opportunities, the stagnant economy in Europe, and so on. However, she responded with “I don’t know, it was an adventure!”

So they boarded a ship to Cape Town, took a train to Johannesburg, and started looking for work there. That is where my brother and I were born in and why I have a foot and a heart on two continents.

When I was about 5 years old, my parents decided to return to The Netherlands, and my earliest travel memories are from that time. We sailed from Cape Town on the “Oranjefontein“, one of the Holland-Afrika Line ocean liners. This particular vessel had had quite an eventful life, also during wartime, but in our days it was a mixed freighter/passenger ship. If one looks at scanned brochures, illustrating life on the various “-fontein” ships, it looks like we might have enjoyed a First Class trip, but our own experience was not so glamorous.

My own memories include the slamming of my finger in a 4-inch-thick bulkhead door (and subsequent removal of a fingernail) and waiters sprinkling salt on the dining room floor to stop them from sliding between tables while we passed through high seas in the Bay of Biscay. I also remember the canvas swimming pool (filled with sea water) that was occasionally erected on the afterdeck for us lower-class passengers. First Class passengers had a permanent pool on a forward deck.

On one occasion, we kids were briefly allowed on a visit to the bridge, where we could hold onto the wheel (no violent turning allowed!) and peer into a darkened hood to look at the radar scan around the ship.

My “enhanced” memories (assisted by my parents’ photographs) include festivities when we crossed over the equator, which required everybody (even kids like us) to dress up as something.

So my brother and I became dwarves with cotton-wool beards, crinkle paper coats and pointed hats. My brother, a couple of years younger than I, was highly annoyed by the cotton-wool that kept getting into his mouth. The adults spent the day in the court of Neptunus, one of the seamen dressed up (or rather, down) as the Roman god of the seas and with first-time equator-crossers having to grovel before being thrown into the pool. These are the things you miss when you cross the equator in an aircraft.

I can unfortunately remember very little from that first stay in Holland. Some images remain of the staircase into my grandparents’ apartment in The Hague, where the front door was opened by pulling on a string from upstairs. I remember the short walk around the corner to a nearby kindergarten.

And there was one instance when we went picnicking for the day somewhere on the Veluwe (a nature reserve), but where I managed to sit down on a nest of red ants. I vividly remember the result, which must have been hilarious for anybody watching.

Maybe my parents also had “ants in their pants” as the saying goes, since after 7 months in The Netherlands, we boarded ship again and returned to South Africa. I know that they had been disappointed that nothing much had changed in the 6 years or so that they’d been away from Europe. My dad could literally get his old job back at the bus company where he had worked before emigrating, and the same mechanics were still working alongside him.

In South Africa, however, he’d become a foreman at a Volvo truck dealership in Johannesburg. Returning to South Africa, therefore, was a return to growth potential. And they hadn’t yet had enough of all the open space in the country.

I don’t think they were indecisive, I’m sure they were already feeling torn between two countries — family in one, friends and opportunities and open space in another.

A feeling that my own family and I still experience today.

Many years earlier, when he was barely old enough, my father had joined the Dutch marines (“mariniers“) and spent a stint in Indonesia (then called the Dutch East Indies), where he served as a diesel mechanic, servicing and maintaining bulldozers and other pieces of heavy equipment used in the building of bridges. He often referred to this time away from home. I don’t think that he was particularly happy in a military situation, but he did enjoy the adventure and the freedom away from home, he told us.

On my mother’s side, I had an uncle who also served there, as well as an uncle who worked on passenger ships between Amsterdam and New York. Their youngest brother qualified as an engineer and sailed the seven seas for years in various Shell tankers. So I probably do have the yearning to travel built into my genes.

Growing up in South Africa, I can remember many trips and travels to different parts of the country. Annual trips of a few weeks to Cape Town, during December, and shorter visits (usually during the southern hemisphere winter) to the Kruger National Park, the Eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga), the Drakensberg mountains, or the seaside at Durban.

We were always camping, initially with a borrowed tent, but later with a fold-out caravan that my father built from scratch. I can still remember them sewing the heavy canvas tent for it, with a very manual sewing machine and thick needles. I think we used that caravan once before we sold it.

Later on, we had a Slipstream caravan, which was also a pop-up, but with a solid roof. That Slipstream was our temporary home for many holidays. We towed it all over the country behind a series of different Volvo’s. It’s the combination that features in the header image of this story. My dad was issued a “new” company car every two years or so, a hand-me-down when his boss got a new model.

So while I may have inherited my travel urges genetically, I certainly also caught the “travel bug” by being shown so many parts of the country that I grew up in. It’s one of the greatest gifts that my parents could have given me, opening my eyes to how things are different, away from home.

My parents are unfortunately no longer with us. But I am convinced that they would have enjoyed sharing in our travels, or in the resulting stories. In a way, I’m also traveling for them.

I was inspired to write this, by our fellow writer and editor, Anne Bonfert, when she wrote about visiting Transylvania to find more than her roots. Do read her story too!

If you are interested in reading more about my various travels, you are very welcome to sample from this list: