The Motorcycle Diaries

Have you read The Motorcycle Diaries?

I bought it ages ago

(well, the end of November)

Because my sister and cousin and I 

made big plans to motorcycle 

across South America 

in approximately the year 2017.

But I just started reading it yesterday 

- the timing was perfect - 

and I absolutely love it.  

Confession: I cried while reading the introduction.

Let me give you a few of these beautiful phrases that made me smile so hard my stomach burst:

"...he filled his whole life with youthfulness and matured his youth without diluting it"

"...with the sole purpose of getting to know the world..."

"our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner..."

"having the spirit of a dreamer.."

"never to give up until we had realized our dream"

"the enormity of our endeavor escaped us in those moments; all we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers.."

"i felt myself lifted definitvely away on the winds of adventure towards worlds i envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations i imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be"

"an expedition has two points, the point of departure and the point of arrival. if your intention is to make the second theoretical point coincide with the actual point of arrival, don't think about the means - because the journey is a virtual space that finishes when it finishes, and there are as manymeans ars there are different ways of "finishing." that is to say, the means are endless."

"...when in reality we had only just begun..."

And a picture of some of Che's observations of life, of injustice, that pricked my heart, pinched my mind:

"...we will see whether some day, some miner will take up his pick in pleasure and go to poison his lungs with a conscious joy."

"...the need to build schools that would orient individuals within their own world, enable them to play a useful role within it..."

"the need to change fundamentally the present system of education, which, on the rare occasion it does offer Indians education (according only to white man's criteria) simply fills them with shame and resentment, rendering them unable to help their fellow Indians and at the severe disadvantage of having to fight within a hostile white society which refuses to accept them..."

"The semi-indigenous features of the curator, his eyes shining with enthusiasm and his faith in the future, constituted one more treasure of the museum, but a living museum, proof of a race still fighting for its identity."

Oh. Oh. Oh.

Tourists...Finally!

And we had a day of rest.
A sweltering day of rest, swimming through the incredible Delhi heat and humidity.  Seriously, I think I lost 5 pounds in water weight it was just that hot.
We had a day of rest, but that doesn't mean our work was done! It was time to do the tourist thing; we took our guests on the Delhi tourist route: Dilly Haat and the India Gate.  Despite the heat, it was absolutely incredible to have a break from hotels and high schools and to be a part of life again.  To see beautiful things, touch beautiful fabrics, gaze upon antiques and chat up shopkeepers.  To hear birds, to peoplewatch, to eat real food, to stand beneath the India Gate.  It is wonderful being alive, isn't it?

Driving through Delhi

Phew!  The last few weeks I have been traveling like a crazy person - Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi - and my poor little camera has been used for work purposes only.  Today we were stuck in traffic (and more traffic and more traffic) so I took the opportunity to snap a few shots out the window.  I just love India.  Is Delhi my favorite? No.  But I love that life is so vibrant.  Even amidst the traffic.

Traveling

I’ve always said it, but today it remains true: I love to travel, but hate traveling. And that is especially true in India….it is just so exhausting! I think that a lot of the wearying of traveling here comes from not speaking the language, not knowing if you will have a clean toilet, not being familiar with your surroundings and, consequently, not being exactly sure which stop is yours.

On the last day of any journey, one is always tired and filled with contradicting feelings – sad to leave, but excited to get home. As I sat on the bus today, the fatigue and emotion hit me like a brick. I couldn’t wait to get back to Visthar, but unfortunately there were two bus rides and potentially either an autorickshaw ride or long walk in between me and home sweet home…home sweet home where I couldn’t wait to take a bucket shower and climb under my mosquito net.

That is the hard part about traveling when abroad: you aren’t really going home. I remember when I lived in Spain and we would return home from a weekend in Paris or an excursion to Andalucia…and nobody would be there to meet us at the airport or bus station. Instead of being picked up and welcomed home, we’d watch everybody else’s joyful reunions and then continue to the next mode of transportation, eventually trudging ourselves home, weighed down with the heaviness of our backpacks and the loneliness of our hearts. Our host families would be happy to see us, but it was never like reuniting with our real families would be. And I think that the anticipation of this feeling is what drained me even more today. I wish I could tell you that the stress was unnecessary, but that would not be true. We jumped from transport to transport, and trudged the last stretch of road to Visthar. Some of the girls were out with the cows, and it was fun to be greeted and hugged by them [also just a bit overwhelming to the weary travelers]. My bucket shower was lukewarm [which was very welcome when compared to the icy baths we stopped taking in Kerala], and it was so nice to crash onto my bed at 930…but as I fell asleep, I couldn’t help thinking how wonderful it will be to be welcomed home by my friends and family in December, to crawl into my own bed with flannel sheets, and to fall asleep holding Baby Abby J

P.S. happy one year anniversary Jess and Scott!!!!!