So, another tale of my travels has come to an end.
Journeys are like threads, and posts are like the knots in a quipu. Some are more tangled, some are shorter, some are brighter, and some are paler. On their own, they carry echoes of what happened, but together they form the bizarre hairdo of my life.
This trip was calmer and smoother than many others, since the country is pretty flat and devoid of revelations, although not devoid of charm and originality. I once learned to understand culture from Andrey Gorokhov's "Muzprosvet" music radio shows. A certain theme came up there time and time again. Even though the means, instruments, and format restrict musicians, they also give them a creative impulse, a chance to overcome artificially erected limits. When there are no boundaries and barriers whatsoever, it's impossible to figure out your direction of development, impossible not to get bogged down in the minutiae of endless choice, in the dopamine hits of doing stuff just for kicks. What I'm getting at is that we chose mountains and bicycles as the instruments of our activity, while direct low-cost flights from nearby and budget overnight stays were forced upon us by reality. But both the former and the latter toughened us up, making us move our legs and our brains. I mean, of course, our epic two-kilometer high ascent, which turned out to be much less scary than our imagination painted it. Rybakov, though, said it was a piece of cake and he's ready to do it again.
Well – he'll get his chance, because we're flying to Jordan, and there's no way we can avoid two hardcore days, even tougher in terms of elevation gain and distance than what we survived in Cyprus. On the other hand – the reward promises to be even greater.
It's not about the country, of course, it's about the adventures. Had there been no breakdowns and problems – we wouldn't have gotten to know local life closer, wouldn't have felt that rush of energy and mild panic when circumstances press down on you, nor the waves of joy and relief when things pan out. I felt at one point that despite all of life's ups and downs, humans, and other animals too, are incredibly lucky – we are alive, we can experience emotions, sadness, joy, and ponder the fleeting and the eternal. A rock is deprived of all this – it merely exists, there is nothing and will be nothing for it. It's hard to imagine a greater misfortune than never existing at all, despite all the sorrows and miseries that our mortal existence unloads upon us. I guess I just got lucky and had the chance to look at life from different angles – with an understanding of many of its limitations and possibilities, and my own place in this endless cycle.
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