Journeying

Taking a break is a great idea. Ditching the comfort zone and driving a hire car into the Andes is a breathtaking way to do it, assuming you can breathe at all at 4000 metres… which I found I could.

Maybe you can’t make it to the Andes. Why not exchange the keyboard for a pen and paper, a tango salon for MALBA, the contact lenses for glasses: just find a way to see things in a fresh light? I did all that stuff too: pushed my boundaries a tiny bit.

Up in the Andes, in San Antonio de los Cobres, I met a woman. At first she wanted to sell me ‘llamitas’: tiny llamas made of wool wrapped round a frame. We ended up sitting on a dusty pavement for half an hour talking about life in Buenos Aires versus ‘living in the clouds’. She told me that she’d never left her town in the mountains. What a beautiful woman: she had deep laugh lines all around her eyes. “People from Buenos Aires are better because they have nice clothes and money to buy my llamitas,” she said – but I haven’t seen laugh lines like that for a while.

The air above these high lands is clean, thin and dry. The earth has a layer of dust like grey flour. Plants struggle to grow. A man with dogs chased me from taking a photograph of his flock of llamas even though they were half a kilometre away, grazing peacefully and completely untroubled. The space is harsh and overwhelmingly vast, once you step outside the town limits… if you ever do.

In Purmamarca, Jujuy, C. had us marching around the few siesta-silent streets in search of real machine ground coffee which, in La Regina, I confess I was grateful to find. In the city of Salta the Friday night milonga was in an intriguing attic room with a gorgeous Plaza view but it was not quite the Buenos Aires tango experience that can make my heart skip a beat. The roads to Los Cobres aren’t entirely tarmac, and it’s a long hard drive to the nearest city. Before my holiday, I was beginning to fantasise about shacking up with C. in a ‘cottage in the country’. My journeying reminded me who I really am.

I’ve been a person who has often cried to leave travel destinations: the  plains of Mongolia, the mountains of New Zealand, the rice paddies of Cambodia. My feet have always felt lighter going than coming back. This time, no.

At last I believe I have found my home. Thing is, it was inside me all the time.

There is one great truth on this planet: whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it’s because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It’s your mission on earth.

Source: The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho, who also says this and offers us this.

Wherever you journey in 2009, may discovery of dreams be yours.

See photos of my days in the Andes