It's now been more than five years since I returned from my first great voyage, my around the world trip. It often feels like it was much further than that, mostly because of how much my perspective on traveling has changed.

During that trip, I visited 28 countries. Of those 28, I spent more than a month in six. Of those six, none was an unexpected as Malaysia. I knew, beforehand, that I'd spend time in Spain, Italy, Turkey, and…

Never have I traveled to a place so unprepared.

I barely touched any guidebooks. Nor did I look up information online. Few of my friends had ever been to South Africa, and none that I knew of had been to Botswana. I'd been traveling long enough to not trust the media, or unverified word of mouth.

What little I knew came indirectly. Last summer, in Indonesia, at the sparse, overpriced bookstores, I found several cheap copies of Nelson Mandela's biography,…

Afrikaners (including the Boer subgroup) are a Germanic ethnic group in Southern Africa descended from Dutch (including Flemish), French and German settlers whose native tongue isAfrikaans: a Germanic language which derives primarily from 17th century Dutch, and a variety of other languages. Mainly Christian, Afrikaners developed in much the same way as the New England colonies in North America. The original South African Boer republics were founded on the principles of the Dutch…