innocence, essence of travel

«Men for dangerous trip are sought. Meager salary. Extreme cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Return is not guaranteed. Honor and recognition in case of success ».

There was a time when traveling unknown land was a matter of explorers or mercenaries. Some, even, They were both. Then, Before this era of summary judgments of intentions of everything and everyone, In the dark corners of the maps was the glory. If there is a verse that evokes my passion for the trip, it is that announcement that Irish Ernest Shackleton published on the tabloids to get crew that accompanied him in his "conquest" of Antarctica: «Men for dangerous trip are sought. Meager salary. Extreme cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Return is not guaranteed. Honor and recognition in case of success ».

The subsequent victorious defeat of the British, White land dreamer like the retinas of distant men, It is a life teaching rather than surviving adversities. Will, It goes and if there is luck it becomes. The goal is not to arrive, The goal is to go.

By Javier Reverte, friend, traveler and writer, I learned to love Africa without seeing her, If not even imagine it. His "the dream of Africa" ​​I suppose that it hooked me because it reflects a certain innocence without which it is possible to survive the genuine trip (Without surprise everything is less trip). Does not count the adventures of a seasoned correspondent, nor that of an explorer of the nineteenth century looking for snowy mountains irrigated by elephants, It tells the normal trip of one guy who reaches the other side of the world and is lost in it.

True trips are those that enter poverty, violence and disease of peoples

So simple that the 90 percent of those who were never there feel identified with the revertee path made text and the 10 percent remaining, Those who already know those lands, They probably feel that the work goes on tiptoe for reality, the one that dictates that true trips are those that enter poverty, violence and disease of the peoples as if denouncing and route were the same thing. From Reverte I understood that he writes books to travel and not that he travels to write books. The nuance is important.

One of the first defeats of the routes, Maybe the most painful, It is the slow final of the surprise and the inexorable beginning of the judgments. So hard, so cruel, that the waters of all the rivers of the later languish with the mere mention of the memory of that day in which you lost yourself for the Amazon.

And everything is yesterday without understanding, As explained that jewel of Hermann Hesse called Siddhartha, that life is that river that we always call with the same name without understanding that every second its water flows and makes it different. The best travelers I know are those capable of reaching the places always manufacturing a first time.

De Ryszard Kapuscinnski, The Polish teacher whose work and controversies generates some doubts, It is not worth in a travel or journalistic chronicle inventing anything (It doesn't worth at least for me), I read a good part of his works with passion. I think what has remained in memory is when in his "trips with herodotus" explains how it became a correspondent.

A few weeks later it flew to Rome and from there to Asia that, then, It was something that hadn't even trembled

DICE Ryszard, Polish, that he passed near the border of the Czech Republic and that when he asked about traveling to other places as a journalist, he only passed to the other side of the fence, To meet those neighbors that he observed from his wounded world. That was the whole universe that he, With the steel curtain preventing men and ideas from traveling, I wanted to meet. A few weeks later it flew to Rome and from there to Asia that, then, It was something that hadn't even trembled. His editor understood that his trip should be somewhat longer than crossing a border.

Then the world was only chosen and their eyes became a whole. A Henry Morton Stanley, The British journalist and explorer, Your New York Herald editor, James Gordon Bennett Jr, proposed in 1968 In Paris, go looking for the lost David Livingstone to Africa leaving some orders before they did not make the way so direct: He had to go to Egypt before the inauguration of the Suez Canal and make chronicles of the country, Then go to Crimea to make war chronicles, Then reach the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea passing through Baghdad and then I will go to write from Persepolis to finally reach India and embark from Bombay on the way to Zanzíbar where it arrived in January of 1971. Is there a single option to receive a commission today?

From Africa I read a lot to stumble upon a livingstone´s tribe book, de Stephen Taylor, that it was exactly the story that I was thinking of telling: that of the Western White that I stumbled so many times and that it always seemed to me that many survived in a limbo in which they did not belong to anything or anyone.

Drew a land that smelled like fruit , Wet earth and the mortuary breath of ghosts.

In America, My referents were first verses by García Márquez in which I drew a land that smelled like fruit , Wet earth and the mortuary breath of ghosts. From the Colombian I scrutinized almost everything and in my imaginary universe there are always blue dog eyes waiting for me. Then I read Rulfo, Benedetti, Vargas Llosa…. And in Mexico I faced "the wild detectives" of Bolaño, that, Forgive the heresy, It bores me sovereignly, to the magical realism of Elena Garro and her "the memories of the future" and the until now more inspiring travel work that I have read in recent years, «Quick breeze palm trees, A trip to Yucatan », by Juan Villoro who may have been a revealing memory: In innocence is the essence of the trip.

Villoro writes with a huge sense of humor the chronicle of a type of DF that goes to the distant and quiet Yucatan, Where life passes without disturbing absences, land of their grandparents. And everything describes with the surprising look of the traveler, without seeking to report anything other than life. It does not try to execute the chiefs, nor reveal the Maya, nor condemn the Spanish conquerors, nor surprise themselves with the lack of drug traffickers. It tells life, without, Without another sense other than the trip. It reminds me of that purity of reverte and its dream of Africa.

Go without thinking about what you expect when you return, Travel with the illusion of enjoyment, have the calm of the amateur who writes without thinking about the image that his readers will make of him. We professionalize trips, Let's sublim the narrator about the narrated and the only option was to kill purity, raising suffering and telling and traveling on the planet like the one that overcomes a gymkana.

Happy New Year, in 2017 More VAP.

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