fresh n juicy chunks of oyster :: RTW travel blog

When I first stepped out into Lima's microclimatically humid night air from an Internet cafe one of those strange feelings hit me momentarily. It was one of those feelings that amount to nothing more than the hint of a vibration producing a note inside your body. And you feel that once in your life that note had already been sounded in another composition - back then it was different and only a single instrument in the elaborate symphony that was pounding away inside of you. And you try to remember and then it comes flooding back to you, fragments of melody, and you focus on that resonating tone that still tickles you from inside, all the way to your fingertips.

First, the city talked to me, its cars screaming metal and fumes, whispering into my ear - my anonymous ear! - of things that comfort me with a voice as silky smooth as the footsteps of strangers.
Then the city glanced at me searchingly for a split second, I almost missed it, with its bright, neon eyes locked onto mine. Only a passing glance at another one of the nameless many deep inside its nervous system.
The beginnings of a note were forming inside of me, at that point barely more than hints of harmony found in a chaos of electron storms, when, unexpectedly, the city touched me, wrapped me in its equatorial arms and floated its warm, wet breath through me.
Within split seconds the layers combined to compose a memory and some dark recess of my brain activated and spat out frames and frames of fast forwarded movie reel.

I saw the strange portal that dropped me into this strange continent. I felt Caracas re-entering my body. That distillation of another metropolis, ancient and cold yet alive, now again a straight dripfeed into my veins. My mind stretched out trying to unite the two places in space and time but the distances that lay between them just unrolled like rag carpets flung down empty roads all over South America.

What was I to do in Lima? More congregations of people, more churches with foundations on the rubble of Inca temples, more hunting for obscure and probably unsanitary places to find my next meal, more walking of meaningless streets in search for invisible alleys, more of everything else that has happened in parallel universes at least once before?
The only possible answer to my hangover: downtime. Preferably with an old friend who now lives in Lima, mourning the distance of the far-away world we both used to live in and now miss.

But I won't be coming home just yet.

[Click here for Album Peru 3 with all pics, scroll down to the bottom.]