Beachcomber Magazine 05

OUTSIDE MAURITIUS THE ART OF DISCOVERY 56 Now, I remember the landscapes of Patagonia, so beautiful they led to a rethinking of the world, of its size and all it held, ledme to wonder, at the end of a day spent exploring: “ if this was the beginning, I can’t wait to see what life will be made of next ”. So beautiful I’d find myself inventing colors in my dreams. I remember the three days spent on the Amazon in a regular trans- port boat, its decks filled with hammocks hung topsy-turvy, a mirror-image of the surrounding forest, and in which each of the passengers was getting ready to live, eat, sleep, hold lengthy conversations and watch the world’s largest river flow by while slowly adopting its drawn-out pace for themselves, for the length of the trip. I remember a procession of Bolivian women wearing long, colorful skirts and round black hats walking in a line between the rows of coca plantations, along roads that didn’t deserve the name and that went zigzagging across the steep hills of the Sun Island – because on this island populated merely by men, donkeys and llamas, this was the only way to reach the shores of Lake Titicaca, and that the Lake had to be reached for the women to wash the clothes of one of their elders in, for she had gone the previous night, in her sleep, to a place that the tapestries woven in this region evoke as one where horses will, occasionally, give birth to birds. I remember the faces of children in various cities. Those, enthralled, On the roads of Patagonia, Chile. A road of over 1240km, called the Carretera Austral, crosses over most of Chilean Patagonia and some of its national parks. Sur les routes de Patagonie, Chili. La Patagonie chilienne est parcourue par une route de 1240km traversant plusieurs parcs nationaux du pays, la Carretera Austral. Volcano Osorno, seen from the Petrohué Falls National Park, Chile. Volcan Osorno, vu depuis le Parc national des chutes de Pétrohué, Chili.  