Friday, September 12, 2014

Alegría


I’ve said before that the main reason we travel is freedom. That special kind of freedom that we've only ever attained through long term travel. Well, I may have been mistaken. It struck me, late one evening in a small cantina Antigua, that the real thing we're probably after is JOY. The pure, unadulterated joy you experience a few salty margaritas in, when you are linked arm in arm with the folks you met in another town, that you loved so much you couldn’t bear to leave, so now you’re all singing along with the quirky guitar player in the corner to Green Day’s “I hope you had the time of your life”, while the owner brings out a fresh plate of tacos and pours another round of tequilas, and you feel so far away from home but so close to everybody in that bar, and the light is warm and the candles are flickering and it’s raining outside and you feel like you might burst from the sheer joy of it all. And you know that it might not sound like much, yet you feel like nobody is as content and connected as you are at this moment, in this bar, on this cobblestone street in the middle of this old colonial city in Guatemala. And you feel overwhelmed by the thought of it and your eyes actually brim with tears for a brief moment as you recall yes, this. This is why we travel.

1 comment:

  1. totally true, been there years ago traveling as a student and still doing it cause THAT feeling is AMAZING! Good people ALL over the world, sigh.

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