4am thoughts

The metal bench wrenches my backbone, it´s dividers contorting my body into a new uncomfortable position every five minutes. Any sleep during my overnight stay at the airport has become a lost cause.

So my mind wanders, again. To the same related topics that have irked me the past few days. I start questioning whether all of it is for something like this,

or this.

Or maybe neither. Doubt parades around everything. I catch a glimpse of the 20 yr. old backpacker in me. Shit, the last thing I want.

Argentina and Chile were amazing...but lacking some of the intrigue and novelty that I´m holding out hope Bolivia and Peru will soon provide. But even then, the big picture, does it add up? This is not about South America anymore, is it?

Not sure where I´ll be next Monday. The plan says Bolivia. My air ticket says Bolivia. My friends are going to Bolivia. It´s obviously Bolivia.

¨A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is the desire to hold on to it: to possess it and give it weight in our lives. There is an urge to say ´I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.´ But beauty is fugitive, it is frequently found in places to which we may never return or else it results from a rare conjunction of season, light, and weather. How then to process it, how to hold on to the floating train (the sinking car), the halva-like bricks (the crumbled toilet) or the English valley (or the granite peaks)?¨ - The Art of Travel, p.218

¨We meet people who have crossed deserts, floated on icecaps and cut their way through jungles - and yet whose souls we would search in vain for evidence of what they have witnessed.¨ - Ibid, p.254