Tuesday 9 April 2013

Home

Well. What a long and full adventure it has be for the past half a year.

Argentina feels like a decade ago, and yet I can still taste my first empanadas when I look at the photograph...
Bolivia's Sucre feels like a dream and yet I close my eyes and I am playing ukulele into the sunset at Gringo's on the terrace, wine by my side and friends gathered round the tables...
Peru's Cusco is so far behind me but when I look at my drawing from the mirador, I remember all the fun we had in our apartment and the most amazing New Year we had in the plaza...
Ecuador...how strange to think I was there, and yet I remember those landscapes so very vividly...
Colombia, my final destination...the taste of the fresh coffee I sampled in Salento still on my tongue...

It has been the most phenomenal, truly beautiful and amazing half a year, I can't quite believe all the things I have seen, let alone all the places I have been... Incredible ruins, cacti-dotted deserts, the salt flats of Bolivia that blew me away, winding bus journeys through gaping valley mouths, new and unfamiliar and stunning birds and animals, amazing, intricate textiles, incredible and interesting new food (chicken foot soup), a myriad of accents as I moved from country to country, new rhythms as I danced my way through the continent...

And as I have danced, I have collected many new wonderful human beings along the way, who have helped make this whole journey a lot more flippin excellent and I hope to know you all forever :)

But now it is time to return to dear old Bradford, who will not even have noticed my absence, changed very little, and is completely unlike anywhere I have been on my trip. It will be strange to have seen so much and to slot back in to the normal rhythm of life again, I have forgotten what that feels like, to be based somewhere, not to be able to move around whenever I want...

I'm not quite sure how to feel in this odd space between here and there... I will sleep on the flight and when I wake up we will be coming into Heathrow airport, Simon will be nearer to me than he had been for a whole six months and I will finally be in a country where people say "tomato" instead of "tomayto" or "tomate". Where a good cup of tea is always at my fingertips, and the countryside is rugged and wild and beautifully bleak. Where I say "cheers" instead of "gracias", "hiya" instead of "hola". I will miss Spanish dearly, not to mention all the different accents I have meant, how everything in Peru and Ecuador ends in "ito" or "ita", making it all very small, Argentina's "sh" instead of "y" when ll is used like " me llamo Ruth".

In less than 12 hours I will be home again. England. How very weird. All I ask is that the sun shines and the daffodils smile at me.

See you soon, dear country.