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Manu | 3 May 2012 | no comments

What a strange and sad feeling leaving Argentina and its people. Until the last moment, this country has showed me such a joyful sense of friendship and welcome, that at my departure I felt surprisingly sad to leave.

Argentina, a place to discover and enjoy. Its people love complaining about their country but they are all proud of it, and aware about its beauty. They love to emphasize that their country has everything and it’s true: the blue sea, the snowy mountains, the forests and the desert, the waterfalls and the glaciers, it even has the World’s End, and let me add amazing people who make this country a place not only to remember but also to be back to again.

My 1st impressions of Argentina is of a country that astonished me. I knew it was beautiful, still I didn’t expect it in such an emotional way. It’s a land that keeps a bit of yourself there forever. That must have been the re reason why all the people who moved here decades ago never came back to Europe, getting so much into this country and creating the Argentinian feeling that is the one they belong to nowadays. Even all the hours spent on a bus have been amazing me. The memory of the Pampas, the long never ending roads leading to Ushuaia, with the landscape changing at any road bend, leaving you with a sense of wonder, making you feel so small and so powerful at the same time, on the way to the last town in the world, admiring how Mother Nature has created such a silent windy masterpiece that fully gives the concept of space and distance to your human mind, everything amazed me.

In Argentina, distances become first a mind challenge and then a geographical one. Knowing to be on the road for 27 hours is not easy to take at the beginning. It’s scary and gives the impression to waste a day travelling. But as soon as the trip starts and your mind opens its horizons to the space surrounding you and its wonder, the trip gets a totally different meaning. The destination doesn’t even have any big importance anymore, and travelling becomes the reason to get anywhere. That’s the great lesson I got in Ushuaia, where I realized how reaching the world’s End had more importance from a symbolic point of you to me and to all the others who made it, rather than for its barely geographically meaning. It’s still impressive to see on a map where you have been, but it’s impressive because you made it, first of all, and if you made it alone it has double meaning!

Travellers keep hitting the roads of South America and Argentina all the time, at any season, any year, and only if you come here you understand why. South America is like a road teacher who educates you to grow up and become a traveller. It’s a challenge and a way to understand if this is what you are, or you rather loose yourself in the huge amount of tourists doing the weirdest tours ever just to get a picture of them in front of something. That’s the difference, and when you are in Patagonia, you get who you want to be. Time and space make you understand the difference. And if you are into it, I think it’s the most beautiful feeling in the world, because no matter how far, no matter how tired you are, you just go, keep moving, ready for the next destination.

I still think abut the guy who suggested me to bring a book at the Perito Moreno, as after a couple of hours “it could have been boring”….how fool! How can I even imagine to read a book when I have in front of me one of the most amazing and eldest creations of the Nature. At the Perito Moreno I wished I could stay there forever, or at least come back the day after. It’ like a moving place, the energy of the Earth is surrounding the place and I could feel it right in front of you. The Planet magnetic energy, what it makes it live, water, life, everything that has to do with the creation can be observed just there with our simple human eyes.

Patagonia is not a place where you go to read a book, definitely. I brought one with me, happy with my choice, and so far I have read only 59 pages, half on the plane to go and the other half on the way back. How can you even think to read a book when you are crossing such a beautiful world. I would rather stare at the Pampas for ten hours, and not reading only one page missing the turn of a bend on the Ruta 40.

The greatest feeling of all I had in Argentina, and especially in Patagonia, is that Nature is still left to itself, free to grow and surround you. There is not much that people have done in order to urbanize it and this is simply great. Every single town or village in Patagonia is right in the middle of nowhere, with kilometers and hours of journey ahead before next one, kilometers of amazing freedom…

In the middle, nothing, only space, and Nature that here seems to have chosen one of her favourite place to stay

I never experienced such a big space concept before, where you loose yourself in the incredible feeling of long distance. Making it back from Ushuaia to Buenos Aires in 48 hours was a real challenge, and made you feel almost like an adventurer when you take your third bus in a row, at 3 in the morning, heading to the next stop in the middle of Patagonia and not even your destination. This gave me the power to know I can make it, again and again and not only, this is what I love! This travel made me understand once more how much I love it, how much life inspiration I get travelling like this, how any place visited gives me a new motivation to keep doing it, to keep waking up in the morning and choose next one. In Patagonia I understood it’s my life choice, and from now on I will make everything possible to make it happen again as soon as possible.

 

Argentina will stay in my heart forever, and I know I will be back, to catch the emotions of the North next time. I still have the feeling that I will be back to Patagonia again once in my life, maybe to start a new trip just from there, from the end…

 

Hasta luego, Argentina!

 

 

 

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