It turns out that sometimes, in South America, four hour bus rides take seven hours. And sometimes the air conditioning doesn’t work, and it’s the middle of the day in the summer. Today all of those things turned out to be true.
Unpleasant as the ride was, I found it relatively easy to focus on the positives. We were traveling for no good reason, which is always a nice thing to do, and the memory of being saturated in sweat in a moving kiln would fade.
But, actually, it ended up being a great bus ride. Those annoying kids who were kicking my seat turned out to be a team of 10 and 11 year old Taekwondo champions. They had just finished a tournament and were on their way back home to Argentina. And they turned out to be hilarious, friendly, and really good kids. And, hey, it’s not like I never kicked seats as a kid.
They asked us a bunch of questions, practiced their English, told us about their Taekwondo, teased each other, and listened to the music on our phones. I was hesitant to play Lil Wayne for them, until I realized they couldn’t understand a word he was saying.
I forget a lot of the bus rides I’ve been on, and probably even a bunch of the cities I’ve been to. But I remember the friendly and interesting people.
In Valle de Anton we stayed at a hostel and ended up cooking dinner in the owner’s kitchen. We invited her to eat and she told us about her old acquaintance, Noriega. The real Noriega.
In Japan there were the two happy fishermen on the train to Hokkaido who told us to go to Noboribetsu and posed for photos with us.
I’ll never forget the smile on that woman’s face in Cambodia when she passed her child to me through the open train window.
And, of course, the sixty year old Aussie in Qatar who unexpectedly took us up on our invitation to ride quads in the sand dunes.
In the same way that we go to dinner with friends not for the food, but for the conversation, we travel not for the sights we see, but for the people we’ll spend time with. That’s why sometimes I don’t really care where I go. Smile at say hi to enough people, end you end up meeting Pan-American Taikwondo champions, or Noriega’s old crush, or some fisherman, or…
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Photo is some friends taking a picture in front of an art installation on Naoshima, Japan.
Today’s my last day in Iguazu falls! We’re going to try to go to the Argentinian side, which may or may not actually work.
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