Afflicted with a severe form of nostalgia, we longingly looked at our pictures from the trip of our lifetimes, and noticed a lot of them which were worthy of publishing but did not have that luck. Here they are, in our third episode of Unpublished, spanning seven months of our life, from New Zealand to the USA to Central America.
The end of our journey inescapably looms on the horizon. The clock is ticking and becomes louder every day, as we make our way south through Chile. Only two weeks after our scorching explorations of the Atacama Desert, we could not find ourselves in a more different landscape: we had to unpack all our cold weather gear to snowshoe in the winter wonderland.
There is something timeless, something grander than the human notion of time, something beyond reach of the comprehension of mere animals in the crushing silence and vast expanse of the desert.
The stillness of everything — rocks, salt, lakes, even grass unmoving in the immobile air — is contagious. It gets at you. It starts with a nudging feeling, poking inside your mind, telling you something is abnormal in the surrounding environment. There is no sound at all, no chirping birds, no rustling leaves, no scurrying rodents. You slow down, and then you stop cycling altogether, as if moving in such a fixed landscape were insulting it.
That moment is the one you begin realizing the immensity, the infinite age, of the place you find yourself in.
Flu had not seen the ocean for ages.
I must admit that I had got quite used to it during this round-the-world trip, enjoying very different seascapes over the past 16 months and, therefore, somewhere on the way, forgetting that for Swiss people being close to the ocean was quite extraordinary. Hence, visiting the Ecuadorian coast was very high on Flu’s to-do-list for her holidays and she would not be disappointed. José and I, for our part, were equally excited about stopping on the Pacific coast, for we had heard that humpback whales frequented the waters in summer and chances at observing those impressive cetaceans were high.
Aterrizado. Landed.
Soviel verrät mir der Bildschirm am Flughafen von Quito. Flurinas Flugzeug ist sicher gelandet, sie ist bereits auf ecuadorianischem Boden und sehr bald werde ich sie endlich in die Arme schliessen können. José und ich begeben uns vor die Türe der Arribos internacionales/International arrivals und warten gespannt. Jedes Mal wenn die Türe aufgeht steht mein Herz still. Aber nein — es ist nur der Pilot. Und der Passagier aus der Business Class. Und das Kind, das von einer Stewardess begleitet wird. Und und und. Hat Flu vielleicht ihr Gepäck nicht bekommen? Oder ist etwas beim Zoll schief gelaufen (schliesslich wusste ich, dass sie Käse für uns im Gepäck hatte)? Blöde Fragen beginnt man sich zu stellen, vollkommen unrealistisch.
Die Zeit vergeht langsam, zu langsam, wenn man etwas mit so viel Vorfreude erwartet.
Aber dann endlich ging die Schiebetüre auf und da kam sie heraus, wackeren Schrittes, ihren liebsten Rucksack tragend und mit dem grössten Lachen auf dem Gesicht, das ich je bei ihr gesehen habe.
High up in the Andes, small Quichua village, freezing evening;
I don’t even have to cut wood to survive.
Were you afraid that we had given up our blog? Not at all (though the idea of it occured to Jose from the very first days of its existence…) and we are sorry for the lack of updating and publishing posts. We were just relaxing like this cute sloth we spotted near Isla de Bastimentos in Panama. I guess we were merely taking a huge breath in Central America before flying to South America and starting the last three months of our trip, beginning with Ecuador together with my sister Flurina. So again, I apologise in advance if we will not be frequently publishing during the next three weeks.
We are just busy travelling, enjoying life, and soak in every minute of this special time of our lives.
