One November afternoon my friend Victor Hugo showed up at my house and told me about Maputo map. I said exactly: "In my house Azores years I have hung a map in which I pointed out some routes I wanted to do for the world. It is time to make the first. ¿Te Vienés?”. I looked at him, I knew what we were talking about because we had been dreaming about that option for years, exactly from the first nights we met in which we drank some sunrise at his hotel in Vilanculos, and I answered: When?
We handled space and time with a certain disdain
Victor told me about driving down from Lisbon to Maputo. So I took out a bottle of wine, I put it on the table in my garden and we began to imagine a trip. "We can go east or west, we can catch a ferry in Marseille and get to Tunis, we can cross through Tarifa and descend through Mauritania, we can ... and it was all maps. We handled space and time with a certain disdain, as if the balloon belonged to us and we could shape it to our liking.
We dreamed, and in the euphoria of dreams, every objective seemed little to us. Almost when we were looking at Cape Town, the end of the trip, a sad grimace was drawn on our faces. Alone? And almost unconsciously we begin to fold the map, always the map, to see if there were shortcuts to Antarctica or, at least, if we would be able to get there by balloon. I remember we did two accounts. How many kilometers will we do and how many bottles of wine do we need for the desert nights of the trip?? (without the questions necessarily being in this order). There are few things more pleasant than a wine under the thunderous silence of the planet, dark, without speech or hearing.
Victor then decided the route, how everything victor decides, asking, things of those who are generous for ethics and not for aesthetics. Do you think we go through Egypt?, I asked. And to me that route, that for the most part I know her by patches, I wanted less, which in this case does not mean less but a pinch less than a lot. Do not doubt, however, because there was nothing to doubt, and I said yes without hesitation.
We have a date and a place to go, let's forget the rest
And then we returned to the map and began in the following days to exchange some emails with ideas and wishes, and we talk to some embassies and we worry about some conflicts that we will go through. We did all that until in one call we solved everything with the easy way of being oneself. "I think it is better not to have a plan, let's not decide anything. Let the journey take us. We have a date and a place to go, let's forget the rest ", proposed it. And the, that at this point we are the same, she said yes with a tone of voice to respond to something that she had already forgotten. To travel like this there is only one mandatory condition: trust on everybody else.
Then, with the foundations already clear by demolition, is when we start the now in present trip. We leave today from Madrid, where Victor came yesterday with Leandro, a Portuguese whose heart does not fit in his ample chest and the third member of this route, towards Barcelona. There we spent two nights selling our African expeditions and saying goodbye to this Iberian thing that unites us all by osmosis.
Then everything will be a map, everything will be under your honesty and yoke. There will be nothing, there will be only an immense sense of freedom. It will be Francia and Italia, the balkans, Greece, Turkey and who knows if a ship to Cyprus and Egypt or Israel, and then the desert that in that area they called Sudan, and then Ethiopia and Kenya and Tanzania. ¿Point? Maybe it's Uganda and Rwanda and Burundi. ¿Point?, it may be for malawi. And the 17 April we will be in Victoria Falls picking up our group of travelers with whom we will visit Botswana and who will join us in a piece of that map. And then maybe Zambia and Mozambique come and finally South Africa, maybe in a second part, and that Cape of Good Hope where my Portuguese friends will be able to boast that theirs were the first to bend the back of Africa to continue sailing to infinity.
A ver, Where do you say we go down to Patagonia?
But the best will be, because it has already happened, that Victor will remind me as we drive along a European or African highway that on the map on his wall there is another line that leads to Vladivostok and from there to Alaska to go down to Tierra del Fuego. Then i will explain, like I did other times, that the Panamericana is in my vital genetic obligation. And there will be no choice but to speed up a bit until you stumble upon a roadside bar or a sudden night that takes us nowhere. At that moment we will spread a map on a flat surface while holding a glass of wine with the other hand, We will feel the emotion that only that piece of paper generates where the countries are painted in colors, and i will tell you: "Let's see, Where do you say we go down to Patagonia?
Our journey begins, begins a route through two continents that if all goes well will end in the shade of an acacia
