After two weeks of very intense backpack traveling alone in Peru, I’m back to Ecuador. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, from almost all sides of things. From being almost rubbed of all valuable things in Lima, to the sunset on Machu Picchu from the Sun Gate, from the 12 hours bus rides with chickens and pigs, to the nightlife in Cusco, everything was magic and reality combined in a highly addictive yet tiresome mixture.

It has been the first time I traveled alone and I will not be able to stop. The freedom of choice, of meeting new people, of deciding where to go and with whom is far more enriching than it is lonelysome. Well, most of the times, that is. It’s not nice to arrive in Nazca at 4AM and there is nothing open and you have to sleep alone on the ground in the middle of the main plaza, with silent people walking by and you are ready to run like the wind if anything happens. Ah, and you have diarrhea, a bad cold and probably fever as well.

But it’s amazing how fast we adapt to those situations. Incredible. Hopefully, I won’t adapt back to the good old comfy and spoiled lifestyle we first world citizens all share because it’s when you don’t have things anymore that you really start to appreciate them. And probably this trip was exactly to test myself to see how low I could reach without breaking down. But it was only two weeks and I’ve met a bunch of people that spent 6 months or more traveling like that. That’s going to be my next thing.

Fuck jobs, houses, girls and first world artificial safety of your stinking car, your mutual insurance, your retirement plan and then look at your fat belly, do the stress therapy, cure your problems sleeping with even more pills, find new stupid ways of impress yourself on a saturday night injecting enough alcohol to stop thinking how miserable your life is.

Enough. It’s over. We are all going to die anyway, right? who’s the wise man that said: don’t take life too seriously, you are not going to get out of it alive anyway!

There are persons who are so afraid of dying that they spend their entire life preparing for it. Result: they never lived. And others, called crazy by most, who just don’t care about dying and take everything they can, right here, right now. Because there might not be a tomorrow and, even in that case, it would have been fair anyway.

The magic and reality, life and death, light and darkness, order and entropy, past and present: this is what I found in my trip, this is what I took back from Peru with my 350 pictures.

And the more you realize that these stupid computing machines are just tools, not an ordered world in which to hide yourself or a filtering window that allows you to see things from a safe distance, the more you feel free to really experience life and emotions directly, almost naked in front of things but without the innate fear of being left without protection.

Citing one of my favorite movies The Fisher King, I feel more and more like I can lay down naked in central park and break the night clouds with only my thoughts.

And it’s such a great sensation of peace.