My childhood bestie was a reluctant traveller. Until now

The good news? My childhood bestie has a passport. The bad news? It’s lapsed. I’ve asked Tracey to be my plus-one on a trip; surprisingly, she’s agreed. Friends for more than 40 years, we embody the “opposites attract” credo. As we wafted through high school in 1980s Johannesburg, waiting for the final bell to ring, she showed no interest in travel. It was all I thought about. Eating our anchovy-paste sandwiches in the playground, I’d look out for planes coming and going from the nearby airport. Overseas travel was limited by expense and apartheid-era sanctions; those airborne visitations whet my appetite for the world beyond.

There was that one jaunt we plotted, a 1000-kilometre road trip to an interprovincial university. Alas, our youthful wanderlust was curtailed; we ended up at tertiary institutions closer to home. Decades later, I live halfway across the world and have visited every continent. Tracey has uprooted too, settling in the town of George in Western Cape. Now an opportunity has arisen to take that long-deferred, long-distance trip.

“Two questions,” I WhatsApp from Sydney. “Do you have a passport, and are you free?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “Yes to both!” she says.

Age is bringing out the adventurer in this homebody, it seems. A minute later my phone pings.

“My passport expired yesterday,” she says.

But she’s a hustler, my friend. The day before our departure she collects her new document from Home Affairs. She takes the Gautrain from Johannesburg to our meeting point in Pretoria.

“Which station should I get off at?” she texts en route. “You’re well-versed, not like your anxious non-traveller friend.”

But Tracey has, in fact, travelled to neighbouring countries; she’s urbane as a jet-setter, comfortable sipping champagne with foreign guests on our luxury train journey and probing our guides with questions that impress her journalist bestie. It feels like the final school bell has only just rung as we board the Rovos Rail luxury train and set north for Zimbabwe.

“Our anchovy sarnie days are far behind us,” she says.

At Musina, her new passport gets its first stamp; a second follows when we cross the border at Beitbridge, Zimbabwe. Zambia’s imprimatur will be added when we take the bridge from Victoria Falls to Livingstone. Along the way our twosome doubles when we strike up a friendship with Bostonians Alison and Steve. They expand our world anew with stories of their travels during dinners and drinks and game drives in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. Tracey reverts to type only when I open our compartment curtains at dawn and cajole her into the observation car.

“I told you when we were lying on the playground looking at clouds that you could go out and see the world one day and I’d stay home,” she grumbles.

But soon she’s admiring the clouds billowing above the approaching waterfalls; she’s rejoicing at the possibility that lies ahead.

“I’m going to return with my girls,” she says, as the Zambezi’s spray wreathes a halo around our heads. “And after that? Maybe I’ll visit Vietnam.”

Too soon we head off in different directions – me to Lake Kariba, Tracey home to George.

“Where are we going next?” she messages. “My offer still stands: I can be your assistant. You’re getting on in years, and you did say I ask pertinent questions.”

Weeks blur into months. Tracey takes a road trip down South Africa’s Cape West Coast; I travel to Europe and the US.

“If you see Alison and Steve, tell them we’ll come for a visit,” she texts.

Eight months after cementing our travel-buddy status, another opportunity arises: a city-to-bushveld gallivant in our homeland.

“Are you free?” I WhatsApp from Sydney.

“Let me know what to pack,” she says.

The writer was a guest of Rovos Rail. See rovos.com