Going Home to Bushbuckridge: The Road and the River

On the 31st of August I did something I hadn't done in too long. We left Carltonville, drove up to Rustenburg to collect my sister, and then pointed the car east — past Pretoria, through Mbombela (Nelspruit), White River, Hazyview, Mkhuhlu, and finally Cork, home ground in Mpumalanga, right next to Bushbuckridge and Kruger National Park. That is where I was born. I don't say that in every post on this blog, but it matters today, because this trip was the first time in a while that I remembered what the dream I keep writing about actually looks like in real life.

Most of my diary entries are about the online business. Affiliate links, dashboards, Instagram posts, email sequences. But a business is supposed to buy you something. Time. Freedom. The ability to go home when you want to, without asking a boss for leave forms. So we went. Not for a conference. Not for work. Just home.

The Road Through Bova Tunnel

It's a long drive — hours and hours — but the route itself is half the story. Deep house music playing the whole way, windows down where the air gets clean, everybody in a good mood. Nobody was checking the time. Then there's that stretch of road I never get tired of: the Bova Tunnel cuts through the mountains, and when you come out the other side the whole world opens up — green hills, mist, and the kind of quiet you don't get in Johannesburg. Even the kids went quiet, for once. Looking out the windows.

My family was with me the whole way. And I kept thinking about how every long drive we've taken these last two years has been paid for by a business that most people still don't take seriously. There's no salary in what I do yet that compares to a normal job. But a car full of family, heading to the place where I was born, on a weekday, without leave forms — that's a small payment the business has already made.

The mountains around the tunnel don't care about your business plans. They were there before I was born and they'll be there long after. I find that comforting. It puts the bad months in perspective — the days AdSense says no, the days commissions don't come through, the days you wonder why you're doing any of this.

Setting the Nets in the Saringwa River

On the 8th of September we went to the Saringwa River, near Belfast, close to Cork — home ground. Back home, fishing isn't a hobby. It's food. You take nets, you read the water, you set them where the fish move, and then you do the hardest thing in both fishing and business: you leave, and you wait.

That evening we set the nets in the water and left them there overnight. One night. Anything could happen in a night. The river could move them, the fish could ignore them, someone could take them. You don't control any of it. You set your nets the best you know how, and you go home and sleep.

It struck me later how much this is exactly what I do every day on this blog. I write a post, I set my links, I publish — and then I leave it in the water overnight. And the next morning, and the next. The bonus I'm chasing is basically a net I set months ago that hasn't come up yet.

The Morning We Pulled Them Out

Morning of the 9th. We went back to the river, found the nets, and started pulling. And they were full. Fish — caught overnight while I was sleeping. I filmed it because moments like this are the whole reason I started writing this diary in the first place. Not the fish themselves, but what they represent: effort, patience, and a result you can actually hold in your hands.

Here's the video I took that morning:

The Saringwa River has good fish. I've known that since I was a boy. Some things about home never change.

What the River Taught Me This Week

I came back to Johannesburg with the same phone, the same laptop, the same unfinished AdSense review, the same 39 campaigns. Nothing about the business changed in the week I was away. And still, everything feels different — because I remembered why I'm doing it.

I was born in Bushbuckridge, next to one of the biggest game parks in the world, and I'm trying to build something from a laptop in Johannesburg so that one day the two worlds connect. A business that lets me be home more. Nets in the water, working quietly while I sleep.

There is a difference between writing about freedom and finding out what it feels like in the car with your family. I spend so much time describing the business in terms of traffic, commissions, and tools that I sometimes forget to ask what all those numbers are supposed to make possible. On that drive, the answer was not a dashboard. It was going from Carltonville to Rustenburg, collecting my sister, and carrying on toward the place where I was born. The route had a beginning and an end that made sense without any marketing plan attached to it.

I do not want to overstate what the trip proved. One journey home does not mean the business has replaced a salary or solved every cost of travel. The blog itself is evidence of how unfinished the financial side still is. But freedom does not appear all at once on a single date. There are smaller moments when you can make a choice that matters to you and notice why you made it. This was one of those moments. I can be grateful for it without pretending that the long-term goal has already been reached.

The names along the road mattered to me because they showed the distance between the life I am trying to build and the place that formed me. Pretoria, Mbombela, White River, Hazyview, and Mkhuhlu were not keywords I had added for search engines. They were the way home. I was not moving from one item on a work list to the next. Each part of the route brought me closer to Cork and to memories that do not fit in an affiliate report. That is something no monthly traffic graph can describe.

Even the stretch through the Bova Tunnel has stayed with me. A tunnel gives you a brief period when all you can see is the road directly ahead; then the view widens again. I do not need to force a motivational slogan out of that. I liked the green hills and the quiet when we came through. I noticed the kids looking out. I noticed how different it felt from a day spent checking whether a post had attracted another visitor. Sometimes a change of view is enough reason to travel, even when it does not produce a lesson for a blog.

At the river, the work was much more physical than the work I do online. You cannot move a net by changing a headline, and you cannot make a fish appear by refreshing a page. We set the nets on September 8 and returned the next morning. The sequence was simple: do the part that is yours, leave the rest alone overnight, then come back and find out what happened. I am used to online tasks where a result can be checked immediately. That overnight wait asked for a different kind of patience.

Patience is not a promise that waiting will always pay. We set those nets knowing they could have come back empty, moved by the current, or been taken. The fact that they were full on September 9 was a result, not a rule about every future attempt. I think it matters to say that because the comparison with blogging can become too neat. Some posts find readers; others do not. Some links bring commissions; others sit untouched. Doing the work honestly gives a result a chance, but it does not entitle me to one.

There was also something satisfying about being able to see the result with my own eyes. Online, the same effort gets flattened into counters: impressions, clicks, conversions, and sometimes nothing at all. A dashboard can make progress feel unreal, especially when an approved amount has not yet become cash in a bank account. At the Saringwa River, I could see the nets as we pulled them out. I filmed the morning because it belonged to a different kind of record, one that starts with a place and the people there rather than a chart.

The river is not a business school, though. Fishing for food back home is not a metaphor first and a real task second. It matters on its own terms. I can talk about what it reminded me of without reducing a place I know to a lesson about affiliate links. Those fish meant something different from a conversion. They were part of going home. The fact that my work came to mind as I watched the nets does not make the river part of a marketing campaign.

That is one reason I wanted this entry to include the road and the people as well as the business. If the blog is supposed to be my diary, it has to make room for a family trip that does not exist just to sell anything. I can write about my laptop another day. On this journey the music, the route, the view after the tunnel, and the wait for the nets were the story. I was there, not monitoring everything from a screen. That is what makes this memory worth preserving even if it never earns a single click.

When I came back, my unfinished work had not vanished. There were still campaigns to manage and an AdSense process I could not hurry just by wishing. Being away did not fix those problems, and I would be dishonest to write as if a few days near Bushbuckridge had magically changed the numbers. What changed was my sense of what the numbers are for. An account balance can tell me what I can spend. It cannot tell me why going home matters so much.

The trip also made me ask a harder question about how I use the freedom I already have. It is easy to say I want a business that lets me visit home more often, then fill every spare hour with work and never go. If I build a system but never step away from it, what have I actually gained? The answer does not have to be another grand plan. Sometimes it can be as concrete as taking the road, being present with family, and letting tomorrow's dashboard wait until tomorrow.

I keep thinking about the two kinds of return in this story. On the road, returning meant reaching Cork, the place where I was born. At the river, it meant coming back to nets that had been left overnight. Online, it means coming back to work I have published and seeing what, if anything, it has done. Only the first of those returns is guaranteed when I choose to make the trip. The others are uncertain. That makes the first one more, not less, important.

I want the business to grow. I want the commissions to arrive and the long effort to count for something. But I do not have to wait for a perfect dashboard before I recognise the value of a journey I was able to take with my family. The nets came back full that morning; another morning could be different. The road is still there either way. And now, when I write about why I keep trying, I have something more specific in mind than a number: the chance to take that road home again.

I do not know which part of that journey the children will remember, or whether they will remember the tunnel, the long drive, or the morning by the water. I know what stayed with me. It was the contrast between being consumed by work and allowing myself to belong somewhere beyond it. I can work for the next commission when I return to the laptop. No amount of refreshing a dashboard would have replaced that time on the road.

That's the dream that never came through — yet. But it's getting closer, one net at a time.

Until next time,
Justice