And so, yet another story about my travels comes to an end.
Travels 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 mane of my life.
This trip was calmer and smoother than many others, for the country itself is quite flat and devoid of revelations, although not lacking in charm and originality. I once learned to understand culture from Andrey Gorokhov's radio show about music, "Muzprosvet". The following theme came up there quite often. Even though mediums, instruments, and formats restrict musicians, they also give them a creative impulse, an opportunity to overcome artificially erected limits. When there are no boundaries or barriers whatsoever, it is impossible to decide on a direction for development, impossible not to get bogged down in the minutiae of endless choice, in the dopamine fix of the "cool". What I'm getting at is that we chose mountains and bicycles as the tools 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 hardened us, made us move our legs and our brains. I mean, of course, our epic two-kilometer-high ascent, which turned out to be far less terrifying than our imagination had painted it. Rybakov, mind you, said it was a piece of cake and he's ready to do it again.
Well then — he'll get his chance, because we're flying to Jordan, and there is no way we can avoid two grueling days, even more difficult 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, but about the adventures. Had there been no breakdowns or problems, we wouldn't have gotten a closer look at the local life, wouldn't have experienced the rush of energy and mild panic when circumstances press down on you, and the waves of joy and relief when things pan out. Once, I felt that despite all of life's ups and downs, man, and other animals too, are incredibly lucky — we are alive, we can experience emotions, sadness, joy, ponder the fleeting and the eternal. A stone is deprived of all this — it just exists, for it there is and will be nothing. It's hard to imagine a greater misfortune than never existing, despite all the sorrows and griefs that mortal existence rains down on you. I guess I was just lucky and got to look at life from different angles — with an understanding of its many limitations and possibilities, and of my own place in this endless cycle.