“Sometimes it is convenient to look at everything from above. At altitude, the world is perceived differently. Taking perspective can help us to understand certain things. The distance between the traveler and the place visited gets bigger and many times we try to understand the places we pass through instead of simply enjoying the adventure. Lately I do not travel to get anywhere, simply for the pleasure of doing it. The origin and destination of a trip are no longer relevant, what is important is everything that will happen along the way. The adventure is now in the journey itself.
It has been a long time since I stopped visiting countries in their entirety and banished the absurd ambition to know and understand the realities of other territories. There are areas of the world that cannot be understood if you were not born in them, so I no longer feel like visiting a country in a hurry to try to see as much as possible in the shortest time. And on the way I confuse everything. No, I don’t collect “pins” or spikes or flags on a world map, I have no obsession to get the record of countries visited (I think someone already did, or so it seems). Now I discover places, and they are not not notches on the butt of an imaginary revolver, they are simply impossible corners in which I dedicate myself to transit without haste, letting time die.
Some would say that we see less, but I am convinced that we perceive much more. Sensations happen at every moment and casual encounters allow us to discover people. I do not pass through lost villages in the middle of nowhere, but I stop for some time in many of them. The journey is much longer this way, it extends in a whimsical way, even confusing weeks and sometimes months. I know of no greater sense of freedom.
In Madagascar many travelers have not yet understood this, and are bent on a desperate attempt to see almost the entire island in less than 3 weeks, in a somewhat accelerated manner. That should never be the way. We are not obliged to see everything in one trip.
We are supposed to leave our first world to travel to a different reality in the third, but unfortunately we sometimes bring our capricious lifestyle with us, the congenital impatience of the West, the obsession of some humans to measure time horizontally. In the south of the South, time is always circular and flows anarchically, and like everything else on this island, it gravitates in a nebula that also allows us to levitate a little, to lift a few feet off the ground, then a few meters, maybe a few tens of them, and take perspective. From above, even the huge baobabs of western Madagascar look different. The island also and its careful observation invites us to enjoy spectacular corners and above all to obtain unique experiences, living magical situations, wrapped in the vaporous unreality of dreams.
This is what my travels are like now. Time stands still, until one day I return. I don’t really know why I do it. I guess to tell others, to reveal certain secrets, but above all to lend a hand to those travelers who can detach themselves from the inseparable watch for a few days, and tell them almost in a whisper, that we are here to help them discover certain impossible corners of the most surreal island on the planet.”
Sergi Formentin from #indigobe_team
📸 ©IndigoBe/Sergi Reboredo #IndigoBe ambassador.
