Hanging Stars and Dropping Rain

Dave said to me during his first trip to South America "It's crazy to think that tomorrow I'm going to be back in Canada and this world is still going to exist. Like this isn't all just an elaborate play for me to see that disappears when I'm gone."

Dave says ludicrous things like "Um, there's a jaguar on your back!" or "See that mountain peak? That's where I was born." but I'm with him on this one. It is crazy! This world is crazy! It is crazy to even think that the world goes on without you. Does it? Even when you're not there to see feel hear smell taste it? A tree falls in the forest. No it doesn't. What goes on behind the scenes when I'm not paying attention? Are there elves behind the scenes hanging stars in the sky and dropping rain? Do they set up a fake elaborate ploy of a world and then scurry away moments before I wake up? How hard they must work when I travel.

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Thousands of centuries before the Colca river was even named, it began cutting a canyon of red rock. This was happening all along and I never knew until Sunday? And now it's 3,400 metres deep? As if. And until the Amazon dries up, it'll keep cutting away? Even when I'm not around to verify? What if no one is around to verify? Unbelievable. But it's beautiful.


Machu Picchu was unknown to the modern world for so long, hidden in cloud forest, a secret paused in time until Hiram Bingham's chance discovery in 1911. And suddenly it goes from being non-existent to a must see miracle. Millions of tourists come to seek a glimpse of the past, to breathe the same misted cloud-forest air, touch the same stone that once an Inca sat upon. You would have seen it in my expression, having difficulty imagining the hard-to-imagine scene as it would have unfolded 500 years ago, even in the face of all this concrete (stone) evidence. "This ground I'm walking on? This same stone? Real actual people?" No way. Something this outlandish belongs in a hollywood movie, fairy tale.



Or the jungle. That was definitely an elaborate ploy, headed by our guide, Juan 'Loop' Carlos. The smell of green. The afternoon rains that turns everything into a slurry undefined mess. Hearing and feeling jungle activity transition from aloof daytime mode to aloof nighttime secrecy with all the animals, people, trees, flowering and breathing and breeding, rivers, air, clouds, all adjusted to the seasons, metered in rhythms, synchronized and humming wet green and brown on a million different frequencies. Um, I live in Lima. As if a world like this exists.

And this guy, a caiman, is a descendent of the dinosaurs? Dinosaurs?? As if. As if I dropped this guy at the exact same time the light went out on the canoe.

As if these guys grow to 6 meters. How? When? No way.



As if he'd harm a soul.

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The only one world I know is the one inside my head. My brain is wired so that I, me!, hear that car honking, ME taste this food, I see, I feel, my senses are bombarded. My world is only made up of the things I experience. Travel reminds me that the world I know is a limited world. Travel rekindles feelings of awe. I feel like a baby, full of wonder and questions. All this time, this crazy world had been here, doing all this and it had just been far enough out of sight to be out of mind?


World record set for question mark usage.