Alex的故事:Secret Waterfall,Go2旅行伦敦微信公众号文章

So here I am, on the back of a pick-up truck, driving past cattle, logging camps and endless green hills.

On my left sat the Australian sisters and right a rather restless labordor. Pitor, a local here at Hogsback, is taking us to the Secret Waterfall. He had lost a flaming Lamborghini race to us the night before at a pub and this, was his settlement.

Two months ago, I walked into my boss’s office and gave her my resignation letter. Walking out of that giant concrete felt as good as I imagined.

Upon till then, life has been a walking the line exercise. Getting straight A’s, getting into a top university and getting a respectable job. Next on the line will be a promotion, a financially and socially suited husband, a large sub-ubarian house, a family car, occasional holidays at a club-med beach resort and if I dare to venture out slightly, a labrador. The very thought of living such a banal life, knowning exactly where the path leads, suffocates me. It was time to get out.

A month later, with a 60L backpack and a pair of accidentally “stolen” flip-flop, I embarked on a journey to travel across South Africa. Truth to be told, South Africa was an accident. The original plan was to ascent Kilimanjaro with a couple of friends, embrace the first beam of light of 2014, smile, take a selfie for Facebook, descent, and straight back to London.

However as a soon-to-be-broke soul searcher whose parents do not live in Chelsea, I was “forced” to stay longer until the flight ticket return to normal after New Year holidays. The idea of travelling in another African country was born out of boredom. I threw a dart and it landed on South Africa.

Equally, Hogsback, a remote village in the middle of Eastern Cape was marked onto my journey planner out of a random conversation. When a Greg Kinnear lookalike Israeli who lives in New York and spent a good part of the year surfing in Portugal gives you travelling tips, you take it.

I met the Australian sisters at a backpacker in Hogsback. The backpacker was a beautifully decorated wooden cottage located in the heart of a forest, surrounded by tree houses. The sisters invited me to join them for a walk in the village after dinner. We wandered into a pub where some locals were hanging out. Conversations started naturally with Blacklabel (a local beer instrumental to many of my adventures in South Africa). The rest of the night was a blur. Only the next day I received a call from Pitor.

So here I am, on the back of a pick up truck, driving past cattle, logging camps and endless green hills, on the way to Secret Waterfall.

According to Pitor, Secret Waterfall was a well kept secret among the locals. It is named in an unoriginal way and no one really bothered to give it a poetic twist. It wasn’t needed. Few visits Hogsback and even fewer would have the fortune to know about Secret Waterfall.

Pitor parked the truck in front of the mouth of a green hill. Without saying too much, he led us up into the fields. We climbed for more than an hour and the only living creatures be seen along the way were the Nguni cattles. Thoughts of tomorrow’s headlines being “Gullible tourist found dead in deep woods” flashed across my mind. I started to regret not paying enough attention in that KunFu class 5 years ago. The whole thing suddenly seemed like a tremendously stupid idea, though it felt remarkably natural intuitively.

We stopped in front of a pile of bushes and ducked through a wire fence around it. Soon after, a cunningly hidden waterfall started to reveal itself. As we followed the gentle stream cascading down the rocky outcrops, we came to the cliff side of the mountain. The world suddenly opened up and we were all in awe by what is presented in front of us.

It was a perfect time to arrive. The sun has just started to set. The stunning orb was slowly making its way towards a blurred horizon. The sky was dyed with a beautiful mix of of ruby, tangerine and orange. Everything was peaceful and a sense of ease lingered in the breeze that gently brushes our skin.

We sat down at the edge of the cinnamon-coloured cliffs. With our feet dangling freely in the air, we gazed unwaveringly at the valley that was below us. The endless green was covered by the gentle rays of the gold, radiating out warmth and hope.

With me were three strangers who I had just met yesterday and we all know very little about each other. Yet it did not seem to matter in the slightest. Such is the power of serendipity. When you summon the courage to follow your heart, life will not fail at shoeing you with the magic it is capable of.

Life two month ago felt a distant memory. Lost were the noise of the city traffic, light of night Soho and cage of the social security.

Most of time, we get so blindly busy with life and its milestones, we hardly ever stop and question ourselves if those milestones were a true reflection of our heart or are they simply an apathetic submission to Dogma.

And when we do stop and pause for a moment to ask ourselves those important questions, the answer could quite often turn out to be a meaningless void. Most of us simply do not know what we want in life.

To figure it out is no simple task, it often takes months, even years. The process is usually excruciatingly frustrating and discouraging. It certainly is easier, much easier to just ignore the void and answer simply to societal expectations.

So why should we even bother going through this agony then?

Because there exists a version of life where laughter is genuinely from the heart, work is an outlet of one’s creativity and passionate energy, where the essence of YOU is acknowledged and nurtured.

It may not be the easiest version of life, but it is certainly the most beautiful one.

Be it a money-loving banker, a thrill-seeking explorer or a knowledge-thirsted academia. What it is does not matter, the only important thing is the act of consciously choosing for yourself and the only really important thing about that is to make it genuine and quintessentially YOU.

As the sun sinks slowly behind the horizon, we start to take our leave. I looked back half way from the field, even from behind the trees, I felt it staring back me. I still would not claim that I understood fully the meaning of this encounter, but it felt like a beginning, a beginning of Secret Waterfalls.