Hakuna Matata; What a Wonderful Phrase!

And so it is. Yet for most of us, it is one that will eternally be associated with an amusing overweight warthog and nothing more. Venture to East Africa however and you may struggle to complete a conversation without it, for it is here that the Swahili phrase originated. Spend a little more time, and you will come to realise that it reflects an entire attitude to life, one difficult to find in a Western world increasingly obsessed with political correctness. For me, it also captures in two small words, a certain idea about travel.

For some the appeal of travelling lies in visions of the Pyramids and the Colosseum; for others the Great Barrier Reef and Niagara Falls and for many the opportunity to lie on an sunkissed beach with an attractive waiter serving ice cold cocktails.

Don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t turn down a cruise on the Nile either. Yet travelling can be so much more than ploughing through a list of top tourist destinations. For me, the joy is not grand or luxurious but wonderfully uncomplicated. My dream destination simply does not exist. To travel is to discover the unknown: I would purely like to wake up one morning, throw my rule book in the bin and set off down the road with no map, no guide book and no clue where I’m headed.

Let’s return to our undisclosed spot in Africa, where there exists not only no worries, but no time. Here, the sun is your watch. It is a strange concept for the European, whose life is ruled by timetables and an alarm clock, to get his head around. Try asking the driver in Tanzania what time his bus will leave and you may find his only response is laughter. The bus will leave when it is full. Moreover, it is only full when it becomes quite impossible to squeeze in (or attach to the outside) another woman, child, basket, melon or chicken.
Before setting off down the road then, throw away your rule book and your watch.

And if you were to believe the German I was marooned with at a deserted train station, you can also leave behind your itinerary and your bank account. Forgetting the former will certainly make your trip more interesting, and forgetting the latter may lead you to discover in a forgotten cheese sandwich a type of happiness you did not know existed.

Take my German friend for example (let’s call him Fritz). Finding ourselves, two complete strangers, marooned on a station platform in the middle of the Norweigan mountains, with no idea when the next train would turn up, Fritz was utterly unphased. This was probably because he had left his home in Freiburg intending to return from travelling Europe within the month and had still found no reason to ten years on. When his money ran out, he had collected a number of old drainpipes, built himself a 3m high didgeridoo and busked for a living. It certainly gave us something to do while waiting for the next train. Incidentally, this arrived at 4am and was going in entirely the wrong direction. I didn’t care, I got on it anyway.

Now, I’m not recommending you abandon your exams and depart immediately for Mongolia, but sitting on a train last summer heading for a destination unknown I found myself feeling surprisingly carefree. Asking myself why, I realised I had discovered what travelling means to me: it means no worries.

Emma Howard

Tags: Africa, Norway, Tanzania, travel