I am eighteen and my love affair with Latin America
has just begun. It is intoxicating. The heat –
45-plus – hits me like a hammer, it is
much hotter than anything I’ve experienced before. The tropical location, the
glamorous, half-naked, beautiful black people on white sandy beaches, four-lane
highways of cars racing the strip along Ipanema and Copacabana, the palm trees,
the music, the city rising up into the hills dripping with favelas like
hanging gardens and higher up, the jungle proper. It is insane. The whole
spectacle overseen by a giant Jesus statue against a backdrop of electrifying
tropical storms. It is hot, and humid as hell.
The fact that I am (was) in Brazil is
Harriet’s fault. The somewhat beautiful older sister of my next-door neighbour,
on whom I had an entirely predictable, mainly hormonal teenage crush who had
recently returned from a three month over-landing trip to South America with
Exodus Travel. She raved about it and much to her mother’s dismay now planned
to elope to New Zealand with her ice-cream and
pizza-parlour magnate boyfriend, Giovanni, who she’d met and fallen madly in love
with on the truck.
I was a hopeless virgin, clumsy and shy
with girls. A friend from school, Alice, had managed to track me down and book
herself into my room in the hotel as a surprise. She was also travelling with
Exodus, on a different truck, but we shared the same itinerary for the first
couple of months. At 18, the difference between us in terms of mental maturity
might as well have been twenty years, even though we were the same age. We were
both headstrong and chose to hang out with different people most of the time.
On the beach she stubbornly ignored all advice and got sunburnt back and front
determined that she’d just go brown the next day. It must have hurt.
It was Alice who read In Patagonia
while we were in Patagonia and afterwards recommended it to me and lent
me the book, which in conjunction with the place itself, has been a real
inspiration ever since. To the extent that I’m now writing my own book about Patagonia , it was a moment that changed my life.
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