Samaipata, Bolivia
The scenery crawls by, almost as slow as the hours do. One week stretched thin over two thousand four hundred kilometers, necessary because of what momentarily feels like a misplaced ecological conscience. I can sense the airplanes flying above my head, arriving in Florianopolis in three comfortable hours.
My cheek is pressed against the unsanitary window, I feel like a bored child.
Hours and thoughts melt into one another. I notice my mentality swings between two poles while traveling, two opposite ways of seeing the world that I consciously navigate. It has become a game, and both points of view have their moments, their stories to tell.
The first is the curious, zero-abstraction pole. Everything is different, everything is new. I have already mentioned there is no normality here, the smallest, mundane activity carries the unknown. Everything is exotic: from basic human interactions to how public transport works; from the time people eat to what they believe in. In this mode, everything is stimulating, exhilarating. It is what leads me to what I call the traveler's high.
Iguaçu, Brazil
My thoughts are interrupted by the military police patrolling the boarder. We all climb out and are handed our bags. “Narco-control” are words that are spoken more than once. They line us up in the sun, they line our bags up in the dirt. We are not to touch them. It is forty-five degrees in the low plains of Paraguay. My shadow is shy, it does not wonder off more than twenty centimeters from my feet. I watch the men empty my bag on the concrete. The irrational part of me thinks that my humid laundry will dry instantly in this heat. The rational part worries about drugs that might have been sneaked in one of my pockets. The irrational part hopes they have AC in prison.
Quick questioning, stamp, good to go. At the time, I did not know this was the first of three similar random checkpoints.
The second pole requires a slight abstraction. It takes a step back and allows you to notice everything is exactly the same. People live, eat, work, seek happiness, drive on roads and eat at tables, they interact, help each other, hate each other, love each other. They built a home or seek adventure, or seek adventure within their home. They have aspirations, problems, hobbies. They meet up with friends, talk about the weather and politics, sex, projects and worries. There is something beautiful in noticing how similar humans are, how – once we stop clinging to the practical details – we all work in the same way. In this mode, I connect. It is what allows me to see the abyss of cultural, educational and financial difference as an interesting but not so relevant gap.
These two poles are a powerful tool. One can make your home feel unexpected, every person can become a slight difference worth paying attention to. The other, conversely, can make you feel at home in the most unexpected places.
Floripa, Brazil