"So many of our dreams at first seem
impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the
will, they soon become inevitable."
- Christopher Reeve
There's a place called Uelen on the eastern coast of Siberia. You will probably not find it listed on most world maps. Nor are you likely to find Cape Thompson which lies on the west coast of Alaska.
Some 240 kilometres separate Uelen from Cape Thompson. They are also 24 hours apart in time, each on one side of the international date line. Almost halfway between them, about 30km from either coast, lie the islands of Big Diomede and Little Diomede.
During winter, you could walk across the three kilometres that separate these islands, but are unlikely to find much company apart from the polar bears who are the masters of this terrain. You are quite likely to be stopped well before you get there - even in this post-Cold War era, because Big Diomede is owned by Russia while Little Diomede is United States territory.
This is the Bering Strait, an ecologically magnificent stretch of sea which - some say - was once bridged by land linking the old world with the new. Others go even further, suggesting that the ancestors of North America's original inhabitants - the "Indians" of Christopher Columbus - were one of the lost tribes of Israel who found their way across the freezing desolation to a new promised land.
Is this really true? It doesn't really matter. This is the stuff of legend and dreams.
I have lots of dreams. Here's one of them. Someday, someone is going to build a bridge across the Bering Strait - three segments from Alaska across to Little Diomede, Little Diomede across to Big Diomede, and Big Diomede across to Siberia.
And when that bridge opens to the public, I plan to drive all the way from Cape Town to Rio Grande, the last outpost of civilisation just southeast of Punta Arenas at the bottom of South America.
Crazy, you say? Think again.
Most people do not appreciate the enormity of Jay Naidoo's trip from the top of Africa down to her southern tip. Those of us who travel regularly to Europe may wonder what the fuss is all about. You strap yourself into a wide-bodied jet in Cape Town at bedtime and wake up the following morning in Frankfurt or London or Zurich. Africa's 11 or so thousand kilometres have silently passed beneath you in the darkness.
That darkness hides beauty amid terror, starvation amid plenty, bloody war amid nature's tranquillity - our continent, terra incognita.
Every holiday season, our thronging masses fling themselves into cars and minibuses and head off - lemming-like - in pursuit of pleasure. But we stop at Beit Bridge. We do not take into account the possibility of a week in Dar es Salaam, only 48 hours away from Durban by road. Or north from there to Kenya.
This trip was not about Jay Naidoo and his sponsors having a joy ride. This was about South Africa's finally beginning to embrace the responsibility that comes with being the technological superpower of the continent.
Telecommunications - or the lack thereof - hold this continent hostage. Countless leaders across the continent have held their countryfolk hostage through control of telephones and television because access to these provides access to knowledge, and access to knowledge opens up access to power. Across Africa today, there are people who will remember the entourage that briefly entered their lives, bringing with them strange devices which opened up views of worlds they never knew existed.
And if among those thousands touched by Naidoo's Odyssey there are a few who will use those dreams to reshape their destiny, perhaps I'll be able to finally make it across to Rio Grande.