Writing about our own travels is no use to those who choose to run away. But we all write and travel for different reasons. Mark Twain traveled to pay off his debts, Paul Theroux traveled to pay off his novels, Evelyn Waugh traveled to appease his own neo-colonial guilt, but perhaps it's more like Bruce Chatwyn once said, and most of us travel because we can.

'Ubuntu' is a term used to describe African humanism. It means that we're all connected, all the time, no matter how far we roam, no matter how spicy we like our chicken (local flavor is crucial to good travel writing).

Travel writers often espouse universal ubuntu. They encourage us to see the world in miniature, to see our own lives as exotic. This is partly because travel is often dull and frustrating - lots of waiting in train stations, lots of misread maps -- and partly because it's half-human to wonder. But who really wants to know about other people in whom they cannot recognize themselves? Who really wants to travel for a living?

So what to do, us travelers, us writers? Travel and writing may be somewhat spiritual pursuits, but Travel Writing alone is strictly business. To travel alone is more lonesome than writing, but group travel is mostly pretend.

Perhaps we should pack it in altogether in pursuit of peace of mind? Well, funnily enough, it’s not likely to happen in this world of cheap travel and paid writing cos most of us aren’t nearly good enough at either to stop -- or we still have something half decent to say, somewhere half decent to go -- and many of us still stubbornly cling to a life where one can fund the other.

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The travel in this writing takes place in Johannesburg, or Jozi, the old, gold, abused boomtown gone bust. Jozi hits the pits hard and rises high around the edges. She’s a daylight city, a grit-and-bare-it city, and anyone’s after dark. Travel writing is not always romantic.

Jozi is where this travel writer starts, in an airport hotel with no shower. He's strung out halfway across the Indian Ocean, with a girl who was promised a holiday, and instead got me, to make two out-of-town do-gooders in transit to Limpopo, four hundred clicks north and counting.

Travel writing can both guide you by book, and book you a room for the night on Seventh Street, Melville, an oasis of urban harmony in a city under permanent siege. Melvile is an ideal South Africa that nonetheless bars its doors. There my travel partner and I eat stuffed agnolotti, and Macau salads, buy the new album from Cape Town indie darlings Rock Tock Tik (average), and wax half our legs. We watch black guys drive hot cars and kiss hot girls who walk home late alone. It’s healthy, if not safe, but promises more than big cats, big country. At least more than you’d ever read about.            

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Travel and writing each are full of chance meetings and anecdotes that will, on occasions, reveal certain truths about the state of a nation. One afternoon in Melville I picked up a hardback copy of the Best New South African Writing, (published the year I was born), and met the black as local comic co-star from soon-to-be-released MTV film, 'Bunnychow'. “Man, you should stay in Australia," he laughed. "Ain’t no black people there!”

Returning to my pension that evening, I bantered AIDS and Africa with Trish, the affable ex-British owner whose two blond daughters squawked into saliva-stained recorders and played together inside. “Here it’s the Mozambicans climbing through your window," Trish said. "In Botswana, it’s the Zimbabweans.”

Travel writing will always take you away, unexpectedly. Second time round the clock we wake at noon Melbourne time, but still in Jozi, pitch black with cats and robbers. We sit idle til Ntombi the hired help comes to collect us for a tour we never booked. Accidental tourism, and we’re glad to see her. And so we waltz down tree-lined Walton with our guide at hand, our book in bag, and pile into one of eleven mini-buses for a Taste of Africa at one-sixty rand or your money in dollars.

First stop, (fifth if we’re counting), is the Apartheid Museum, and I’m thinking, should I take Ntombi a cool drink while she waits outside in the sun? No, no, she can manage, she's seen it all before. Inside it's horrible, of course, but nonetheless important and worthwhile, but yes, we should leave soon, Ntombi will be waiting.

Soweto is suddenly all the more urgent, but when you get there, the guilt in your mouth gets covered in dust, and the 20-something migrant from the Eastern Cape takes you to her baking hot tin hut beside the river of ‘pig’s food’ where not very long ago some Zulus went to town on hundreds of screaming souls and the ‘Bang Bang Club’ got famous taking pictures.

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Travel is nothing like writing. Anyone can write, and anyone can travel. These days you can fly to Ireland from Italy for twelve bucks fifty, and blog round the world for free. But travel writing will forever be the 'middle-man' of literature, for the best travelers rarely write, and the best writers rarely travel. But we both need the other to inform our own lives, to help us to stay or to go.