Final destination….
After having spend the night at Lima airport getting as much as 3 hour of sleep I am now waiting to board my plane for home. Some of you may wonder why I have chosen to leave South America almost ten days before expected. You have the right to and I have the right to have my reasons. That sounded hard but the truth is it is complicated, well not so complicated that you are not entitled to an explanation. Since I left San Pedro de Atacama I have gone from one disease to the other, and funny enough the runs have escaped me all the way. The mixture of feeling ill when travelling in high altitudes (2000 - 5000 meters) is a hard challenge. Everyone has their limits but if I was travelling for many months more I would definitely have stayed and worked it out. Being ten days from my departure and having to choose the next destination after Machu Picchu all I could think about was the summer, family and friends in my home country. I can honestly say that at the time I made the decision, and now for that matter, if I could choose anywhere in the world I wanted to go the answer would have been the same.
A funny thing happens when you travel. A funny and very healthy thing. You get to see your country in a new perspective, with new energy and new understanding. I am reading a book at the moment which many of you propably know from the motion picture “The Motorcycle Diaries” by Ernesto ”Che” Guevara. In one passage he describes his longing for his own country, Argentina, and knows then that he for would return. In the same moment he reflects on the truth of his future return and puts it like this: “… Perhaps one day, tired of circling the world, I´ll return to Argentina and settle in the Andean Lakes, if not indefinitely the at least for a pause while I shift from one understanding of the world to another.” And that is what it is all about is it not? To understand the world!
My understanding of my own travelling I have to owe to all the amazing people that I have met. Not only during my stay in South America but all the way through life. It is a funny thing to look back and try to put oneself in the same state of mind as I were just a year ago. Everything changes, new impressions inflicts new perspective and new perspective sets new goals and rocks values in a sense only the receptor can begin to understand. Because what is understanding anyway? How do we decide how the world should look like? Can we even begin the thought of judgement when everything seems to be contradictory in some kind of sense?
Sitting here at Lima airport many reflections goes through my mind. I will leave the rest up to you but before i sign off i have to say a big thanks to all the people I have met during the last three months. All my friends in Santiago, Chile, I will never for get you and I sincerely hope that our roads will cross someday again in the future. For the people that I only met for a few days, or even just a few hours, you have all been part of shaping my travelling and I am trying to remember everything we have talked about. Nothing is said or experienced in vain but what it all comes down to is change. As my brother has put it in one of his posts; we now stand before the changing of the guards. Kasper, my dear brother, is leaving 6 months for St. Gallen in Switzerland and I hope that he will experience the same amount of perspective and impressions that I have. I will miss him dearly as he has missed me!
All my thoughts, luck and love goes to all of you out there in the world. If you have a bad experience or run into an unexpected situtation just remember to go into the next experience with an even more open mind and you will see how small the problems of the past are.
Thank you for following my blog.
Jakob Olsen
