Do you love to travel?

Do you understand that traveling is not just to see the sights?

Travel is about smelling the fragrances, hearing the sounds, feeling the heat, the rain on your face or the people jostling against you. 

 

It's touching the roughly hewn stone of statuary or the delicate texture of a flower petal. 

  

You have to be willing to smell the experience: the odor of unwashed bodies pressing up against you in a crowded and poorly ventilated train. 

The heavy scent of dung left in the road by a horse or cattle - and hopefully not on the bottom of your shoes. The pristine smell of the rainforest just after an equatorial thunderstorm. 

You have to be willing to feel the place. The humidity. The sun beating on your clothes and burning your skin through the fabric. And sometimes, quite frankly, it's about feeling the tiredness. The aches in the muscles and joints from a strenuous three-mile walk or sitting too long on that cross-country bus. 

You have to hear the sounds. The noise of the million cicadas that do a great imitation of chainsaws, the honking of taxis, the begging of the little children asking for a small coin or two. 

You have to get used to how people in other cultures view time. If travel included handing out tardy slips, I would have run out of them. In South America, they will get there when they get there and no LA boy is going to change culture!

Travel is to taste and feel the textures of food that you simply can't get where you live. The sickly sweetness of the jaca fruit that can choke you to death because it is also very slimy. 

The unusual flavor of the açaí fruit that has the color, texture and when unsweetened, has the taste of cordovan shoe polish. 

It's the robust experience of the Brazilian all-you-can-eat steakhouse (called churrascarias) with some of the best beef in the world! 

If travel was just about sightseeing, we'd be better off with a postcard. 

No problems with odors, discomfort or inconvenience.

That's travel! To love South America (or anywhere for that matter) is to take in the place with all of your senses. Memories come not just from what we can see, but what we experience and encounter with all five of our senses. 

Remember:

(reposted and edited from an earlier entry by Pr John)