Rio…52 weeks later
Day 371: Sunday 12th January
I rode into Rio on a white horse, right arm aloft bearing the Olympic torch of a year’s travel. The sun radiated down on me like a spotlight on success, championing my arrival into this city of Christ the Redeemer, having left the Statue of Liberty 52 Sundays earlier.
In an alternate universe – commonly referred to as reality – I was jolted into a rainy, grey, miserable Rio bus station after a 7-hour shit-stinking bus over the course of which I developed a jaw ache, a head ache, and a slight, tickling nausea, no doubt a result of the bus toilet stench sending me back to those torrid two days aboard the Tijuana-Mexico City hell-ride.
It wasn’t how I’d envisaged arriving at the end of my Americas, the lighthouse at the headland of my year at sea. But then what does one travel for? Certainly not for predictability. The holidaymaker plans and craves straightforwardness, the traveller accepts the futility of casting this same wish out over a period of several months. The long, winding road is too rocky, indeed not yet made, to be anticipated clearly and a course along it charted.
From here I took the wrong bus which deposited me on a rather sketchy street, and rather than face a half-hour walk to my hostel, I forked out a fiver to take a taxi there. Sometimes you’ve just gotta cut your losses and take the hit, eh bud?
So I arrived at my hostel with a thumping headache, a clunky left side of my jaw, and a dormitory toilet that was full to the brim with shit, which really didn’t put my bus nausea at ease.
Fortunately, I had Amos and Zack to call, and their familiar humour and all-round brilliance took my mind (and nose, and jaw) off things. Zack had earlier messaged me about my potential London-ward plans. There was something fitting in being on my way to Rio – the ‘end goal’ of this year – as he asked about my moving to London, and thus the potential of us living together. I need a job first – that old hitch! But I see no reason why not, I mean, I haven’t seen the guy for a year and I’ve never loved him more.
That leads me to this quote to end on, by La Rochefoucauld: ‘Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.’
I shall start on Rio tomorrow…