The tour buses on Robben Island have large stenciled letters "the journey is never long when freedom is the destination". I often ponder that quote and have come to suspect that it may also apply to chasing dreams.
It was a distance of more than 12,000 km from my home in Canada to Robben Island. I went from a North American winter in February to an African summer in the space of 20 hours. Stepping into the Johannesburg airport in late February was a quite a shock to the system. Before I left Ottawa I had been skating on the canal, feet gliding over ice as the sun went down. Taking a break from packing up all my stuff. At that point, besides the packing I was just waiting for my student visa to arrive. It seems like only yesterday I set out on the journey, that I left my job as a wildlife technician for Environment Canada in Sackville, New Brunswick. Now, I have already been in South Africa for 6 monthes. I am a University of Cape Town MSc student researching African Penguin, an endemic species of southern Africa, recently listed on the IUCN Red List as Endangered. Let me tell you about the penguin research on Robben Island and the occasional glimpses of life on the mainland.
