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Individualism | Serendipity

Confessions of a Lonesome Traveler: My Darlings

8 min readDec 10, 2023

Please don’t judge…

Photograph of a young woman walking on a sidewalk past a store. She is elegantly dressed and wears bright red shoes
Red Shoe Diary Girl. ©Stephan Serfontein

The reader will accept my defense of the habit that has, for the past few years, become so ingrained in me that I feel the need to write about it. It is a legitimate question of how I have made people I briefly met, people who transiently shared space with me and who randomly crossed my path, so vital to me.

It’s far from me to blame anyone, including those close to me, for my lapses, but after many futile attempts to make my family interested in the towns and places I love to photograph, I gave up. You can tolerate teenage kids rolling their eyes when you show them a decaying farmhouse that will be gone in a few years, but only so many times. And how often do you have to be told that your interests are a little weird to make you give up and start traveling alone? I’m not blaming, but I’m just saying…

So you travel alone, at first enjoying the solitude and anonymity, and you can focus on the people and things you see. Then you need someone to point to something and say, “Look there!” Or “Taste this!” Suddenly, you are talking to the strangers you see, and before you know it, they point to something precious or let you taste something delicious, and you cannot let go…

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Stephan Serfontein
Stephan Serfontein

Written by Stephan Serfontein

I am a family man, physician, photographer, writer, traveler and cook — depending on the weather and time of the day..! Join me at https://purplerinse.com

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