The Adventures of Dyan Belonje
Every club has that one member who has done a little bit of everything. I seem to have accidentally become that person.
My career started quite sensibly enough. I trained and worked as a Medical Technologist in Microbiology and Clinical Pathology, which sounds very serious—and it was. I worked in laboratories including State Labs, Conradie Hospital, NHLS, PathCare, Lancet and UCT. At one point the journey even took me all the way to Australia to work with Healthscope.
But somewhere along the way, curiosity kept nudging me out the door.
I moved into Sales and Marketing at Pfizer, which meant a great deal of travelling—around South Africa and to places like Thailand, Malaysia, Mauritius and London. Occasionally there were awards, and those awards had a wonderful side effect: they involved travel. One of them sent me to South America for a month, where I ended up deep in the Amazon learning about Andean cosmology and participating in rituals with local shamans. Not exactly the usual corporate team-building exercise!
While working, I studied through UNISA and completed a BA in Psychology and Anthropology, followed by an Honours in Psychology..
The next chapter involved working as a Project and Lab Manager with WitsHealth Consortium, managing vaccine and PrEP studies across eight clinical trial sites in Cape Town. At the same time I worked on a malaria vaccine project that stretched across seven African countries. The job involved training, auditing laboratories and helping sites reach FDA standards. It also involved a great deal of travel—often into forests and malaria regions that most tourists never see.
So while many people collect fridge magnets, I collected experiences.
Whenever there was a gap between projects—or whenever an opportunity appeared—I was off travelling.
Back in 1988 I backpacked across Europe for five months on the princely budget of R1500. The following year I returned to London for a lab job that evaporated when they discovered I was a white South African during the sanctions era. So instead of working, I climbed Mount Snowdon in Wales, Ben Nevis in Scotland, hitchhiked across Turkey, and eventually found myself working in a zoo on a kibbutz in Israel.
Later adventures included five months backpacking across North America, exploring nearly every U.S. state and many national parks.
In 2002 my brother and I decided that a perfectly reasonable holiday would be hiking in Nepal from Jiri to Lukla and then up to Everest Base Camp—with no sherpas and only a guidebook for navigation.
In 2011 I visited Egypt during the Arab Spring. Because tourism had collapsed, it meant incredible experiences—like floating in a hot air balloon over Luxor during a full moon and sitting alone in the Red Pyramid of Dahshur. Not many people can say they had an entire pyramid to themselves.
Despite all the travelling, Africa remains my favourite continent, and South Africa my favourite country. I love exploring it on solo road trips—to places like the Tankwa Karoo, Mountain Zebra Park, the Kgalagadi and Addo. Every trip seems to produce its own small adventure.
In 2019 I opened a health and healing practice, where I work with energy balancing, massage, reflexology, counselling, astrology and yoga teaching.
When I’m not doing that, you’ll usually find me hiking or scrambling on Table Mountain, climbing at City Rock, or heading out somewhere wild. I’m a member of the Mountain Club of South Africa and always looking for the next ridge, trail or horizon.
My philosophy is fairly simple:
Make each day count. Find joy. Walk with elephants, swim with dolphins, and if possible… run with cheetahs.
A small final connection to this club: my parents, Judy and Peter Belonje, were members of PROBUS for several years. So perhaps you could say I’ve finally followed in the family footsteps—although hopefully with slightly fewer laboratory stories and slightly more travel tales.
And that, more or less, is how a microbiologist accidentally became a lifelong explorer.
