April 8, 2010

Traveling and Staying Put


So: Peru is a nice place. Nice and nice and nice. The pace is so right, one, and the food makes a lady HAPPY happy (plantains! fruit! chicha!--except when, through some sort of mix-up, she ends up eating a chicken head). The culture sets my mind awhirl with questions and interest and enthusiasm (for example: the cameras I brought down needed to have smoke run through them to clean them out for local use). I dug all the homemade stuff, the farms, the huge shard of salt we used to make food, the sharing of drinks, the motorbike rides, the power outs that brought people out into the streets...i dug the game of trying to guess what the inside of each fruit would look like, and the game of mixing fruits into juice.

Now I'm back, and things that I've told people recently include: "I'm going to stay in the country for a year;" "I just applied to teach in Spain;" "I'm not itching to travel... I want to root in;" "let's go on a road trip just you and me."

The pictures from Cold Splinters are making me want to get out of town and into a tent. I want dewy mornings with cowboy coffee. I want to wake up staring out the tent and I want fireflies.

This one makes me crave the sticky jubilant tiredness of a road trip, the tunes and the snacks, the lazy limbs and the firing mind, the running around and the spacing out.

I'm also fiending for a motorcycle. Maybe small trips will help me fix a compromise between flitting around all the time and sitting still.

Anyway, thanks to Cold Splinters for helping fuel my wanderlust and shape my summer plans.