Cape Town - After more than five years of reporting on global sporting news on Al Jazeera, Robin Adams is coming back home.
After working as a Golden Arrow bus driver and presenting on eNCA, he packed up his family and moved to Doha, capital of Qatar, where he worked on the international news network from 2011.
Now he is ready to come back home and relax and says he is looking forward to just taking it easy and “catching up on sleep”.
Despite dreaming about being a bus driver since he was three years old, he spent most of his career as a journalist and said he was blessed to have been able to work for an international news network.
“I was a bus driver between 2001 and 2003. It was lovely, that was without a doubt my best job ever because I am still friends with my old passengers and bus drivers I used work with and we still catch up.”
Adams said he went to study journalism after his mother said he was not going to sit and do nothing after high school while waiting to get his permit to drive a bus, which he could only get at 21.
He said he had fallen in love with journalism and was grateful to have reported on sport to a global audience.
“It has been an amazing five-and-a-half years. I got to speak to people from all over and was getting e-mails and messages from people from across the world. I didn’t realise the power of being international. It was a big deal for me.”
Adams said that although he he had learnt a lot, he just wanted to come home and relax and had no immediate plans of getting back to work.
“I realised I need to come home now. I am not in any rush to get into anything at the moment. I will spend a lot of time sleeping and enjoying my mom’s cooking and spending time with my friends and families with no rush to have to go into a job.”
His colleagues said he had brought an infectious energy into the newsroom as well as a bit of South Africa.
Fellow sports present Joanna Gasiorowska said she would miss Adams bringing them rooibos tea and homemade biltong.
“He is so proud of his roots and being South African. He always tells us stories of when he was a bus driver and I ended up considering him a really good friend. He introduced us to rooibos tea and we always have him bring us back some because we are all into it now. I will miss his infectious enthusiasm.”
She added that she had thought Adams would be around for a lot longer and regarded him as “one of the best”.
Jane Dutton, Al Jazeera senior presenter and Adams’s “TV wife” said his leaving was a loss to them but a gain for those he was coming back to.
“I am very sad to see him going; it will be a big loss for us. He has boundless energy and I like how quickly we became friends.”
Dutton, who is also from South Africa, added that she would miss being able to chat to Adams in Afrikaans.
Cape Argus