Afflicted with a severe form of nostalgia, we longingly looked at our pictures from the trip of our lifetimes, and noticed a lot of them which were worthy of publishing but did not have that luck. Here they are, in our third episode of Unpublished, spanning seven months of our life, from New Zealand to the USA to Central America.
There is something timeless, something grander than the human notion of time, something beyond reach of the comprehension of mere animals in the crushing silence and vast expanse of the desert.
The stillness of everything — rocks, salt, lakes, even grass unmoving in the immobile air — is contagious. It gets at you. It starts with a nudging feeling, poking inside your mind, telling you something is abnormal in the surrounding environment. There is no sound at all, no chirping birds, no rustling leaves, no scurrying rodents. You slow down, and then you stop cycling altogether, as if moving in such a fixed landscape were insulting it.
That moment is the one you begin realizing the immensity, the infinite age, of the place you find yourself in.
Flu had not seen the ocean for ages.
I must admit that I had got quite used to it during this round-the-world trip, enjoying very different seascapes over the past 16 months and, therefore, somewhere on the way, forgetting that for Swiss people being close to the ocean was quite extraordinary. Hence, visiting the Ecuadorian coast was very high on Flu’s to-do-list for her holidays and she would not be disappointed. José and I, for our part, were equally excited about stopping on the Pacific coast, for we had heard that humpback whales frequented the waters in summer and chances at observing those impressive cetaceans were high.
Were you afraid that we had given up our blog? Not at all (though the idea of it occured to Jose from the very first days of its existence…) and we are sorry for the lack of updating and publishing posts. We were just relaxing like this cute sloth we spotted near Isla de Bastimentos in Panama. I guess we were merely taking a huge breath in Central America before flying to South America and starting the last three months of our trip, beginning with Ecuador together with my sister Flurina. So again, I apologise in advance if we will not be frequently publishing during the next three weeks.
We are just busy travelling, enjoying life, and soak in every minute of this special time of our lives.
On our way down from Nicaragua to Panama, we stopped on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica to get some sun on the beach and explore the rainforest. Though we unfortunately had little sun — this time being the rainy season of Central America — we did enjoy a day of wildlife watching in Punta Cahuita.
I guess we dreamed about that, when we were sweating in the unswerving heat of Montaña Grande: a deserted beach, a lost paradise on Earth, where we could relax and cool down in the water whenever we wanted. Though the waves of the Pacific Ocean — I still cannot fathom who named it like that — mostly raged so furiously that we would not swim in the sea, we found refuge in the pool that belonged to our hotel. No wonder we stayed for a whole week at Playa el Coco, tanning in the sun, playing frisbee on the beach and splashing in the pool. In the evenings we even had the chance to observe courageous little turtles which made their first journey into the vast deep blue, being swallowed by the waves and not returning on land until they would be old enough to lay their own eggs.
Before leaving the East Coast, we decided to make a short trip to the Yosemite National Park to have a glimpse of Nature’s beauty in the United States. Fortunately, the snow which fell there during our rainy week in San Francisco had already disappeared when we pitched up our tent under the towering pine trees. And we were rewarded with three beautiful days of clear skies and crisp air — what else could we wish for when hiking?
The last two weeks on New Zealand’s South Island consisted in a lot of driving and stopping on the way at famous sights. From the alpine scenery in Mount Cook National Park, we crossed the Alps to reach the West Coast with its famous Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers that are partly embedded in rainforest; only to arrive, a few hundred kilometers further north, at the marvelous beaches of Abel Tasman National Park. At the end of this road trip, I felt very tired for we changed our campsite every night and did not have time to relax properly. In this sense, I was relieved when we finally boarded the ferry to cross the Cook Strait and reach the North Island. But it also meant leaving this marvelous, diversified part of the world behind us…
Rummaging in our travel photos, we decided that it was time for yet another Unpublished episode. Again, just random pictures that are worth publishing but did not fit into our posts… A short travel through time and space, back to Asia — it already seems so far away — and beyond!
