Norway - a new personal top favorite

Today I almost dropped my camera in a toilet full of piss as it slipped from my shoulder when I was flushing. It was a close one as I grabbed the strap in the last fraction of time, like a well trained soviet agent... Why am I writing about this mundane, almost stupid accident you might entitledly wonder after I have been silent for so many days in updating my travel journal. The explanation is quite simple, because the moment occurred in the toilet of a motel located HERE

Exposed to this kind of incredible beauty, like most of us do, I find refuge in the stupid or ridiculous to vulgar things, first because of a deep buried fear I could not cope with the emotions that such an encounter can generate and maybe in my particular case by the haunting thought that I will not be able to convey, to put in proper words the emotions I might come up with. Would this be the hubris of someone who feels words are one of his choice instruments or just the tragic intuition about us as species being too small and insignificant to a larger “scheme of things” that expresses itself also through forms like this? And I don’t mean by that the manifestation of any kind of deity. People who know me are accustomed to the kind of irreverent disrespect even the concept of God gets form me. We are a (growing) bunch of little hairless apes with the unique, among other living creatures on this planet, capacity to conceptualize, nullified none the less by our tragic incapacity to surpass our primary animal instincts as fear, rage, aggressiveness, need of hierarchy (most of the time enforced by primitive behavior), etc. witch leaves us trapped in the condition of our more hairy cousins who also can count but don’t know that this can lead to fractals or advanced mathematics, not any more than we know our capacities can lead to significant and fulfilled lives if we could just see beyond our selfish selves.

How can one return to a life where the struggle for an even larger flat screen TV, futile fashion accessory or better car is the driving mechanism, after being confronted with THIS?

Well, as I said, by just trivializing it, by going through the experience of it as through just another consumption routine, by viewing it as entertainment. This is why most of the people traveling are doing it by car, or even more confining to their day to day stereotypes, motorhomes. I have seen people parking their pathetic caravans in places of breathtaking beauty, extend their satellite dish and sit inside to watch TV munching on popcorn!!! This is one of the reasons why we are ultimately going to fuck up this incredible beautiful planet: because we see it as another of our lame entertainments we can switch on and off to our liking.

But enough with the ranting. One of the conclusions out of the improper way I managed to maintain updated this blog is that it’s probably not going to be a travel journal after all. I will probably have not the time nor the verve to come back to write about Prague let’s say, as I promised in my previous post, if since then I had been through the experiences of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Sweden and Norway, as it is the case now. I might very well write about experiences I had in any one of the previous places, but any sense of chronology will be probably lost. I will try though to maintain some kind of temporal continuity through the maps of the itinerary. In this respect I have decided to create a separate section for them so they could be followed in a more flowing sequence. To come soon.