In all ages of civilization, the rich, the well-to-do, went around the wide world. The Greeks went to Egypt, the Romans went on pilgrimage to Greece to acquire knowledge that would remove their hair from the pasture. But here in time, the English, owners of half the planet, toured southern Europe, especially Italy and a little less Spain, looking for exoticism. In the 1960s and 1970s, India became the El Dorado of the time; thousands of people came there to, above all, find the spirituality that the West had lost and seek God. It was normal: three of the six most practiced religions in the world, (Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism), were born in the Indian subcontinent…; there must be a reason.
The initiation journey… In our culture, traveling is supposed to mean acquiring knowledge that would otherwise be impossible to understand. Historically, of course! It was almost never like that. A guy who lived in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance would never think of straying more than a hundred kilometers from his town. He hadn’t missed anything beyond this distance. Only merchants, Marco Polo style, or the Arabs, dared to go further. They sought wealth, almost never knowledge.
Today it is true that traveling makes you freer, wiser, more supportive. Traveling manages to make you see things from a broader perspective, always away from how rickety it is to always see the same people, the same valleys, the same mountains.
In this province we are lucky to find people, landscapes, food, dances and stories that are nothing like each other and no more than a hundred famous kilometers. A story heard in El Bierzo bears little or no resemblance to one heard in Riaño; A mountain chanfaina only has the same name as a Bercian, but they don’t taste the same; Understanding the way someone from La Cabrera or Bajo Sil speaks is a tremendous effort for someone from Vegas and vice versa; the saguntino secarral is so different from the maragato that it makes you want to cry; even the mountains, which almost all belong to the same mountain range, are so different that it is difficult to assimilate why they can be so different. This, in modern, they call “diversity.” Until yesterday, one of Cain only left his valley to go to the military or to the doctor’s office in Cistierna or in the capital. And he almost always came back. Leaving Valdeón implied a considerable effort and was not worth it, or so its inhabitants believed. And the same thing happened in Los Ancares or in Laciana, or in Los Argüellos. All these people worked their whole lives to survive, nothing more… and nothing less. Those who were studying to be priests and four deranged people who had nowhere to drop dead invariably left the towns and even risked crossing the ocean and trying to make ‘the Americas’.
One does not know, with what is falling into the world, if we will return to that way of life or not. It is scary to think that it will be like this, but it does not depend on us: we are at the mercy of NATO, Putin, the Chinese and the mother who gave birth to them all. Einstein said that the next war in which men would fight after the holocaust, they would do so with sticks and stones, and how could Einstein not be right! If that were the case (God forbid), we Leonese would be much better prepared to survive than a man from Madrid or a Parisian. We are lucky to have been born in a place with exuberant nature, which provides us with much more than what we need, as soon as we look for it.
I am telling all this because my friend, the Australian, made it very clear to me last Thursday that he was not on vacation: he was traveling. Since he is right, because he is right, I have no choice but to write this article. If it turned out to be a vacation and not a trip, he would have gone, for example, to Marbella or Benidorm, where he would fuck for sure and things would be much cheaper. When he comes back from the trip, he will surely be wiser than when he left, his spirits will be calmer than when he left, and he will have learned, in the first person singular, that everything is precious, wonderful, and different; that the people who live there are similar (in their way of being, thinking, eating or suckling), to us as they are alike an egg and a chestnut; that they are also extremely lucky to live where they live and that they are in love with their country and its customs just like we are. But, at the same time, they do worse than us: they are children of the Anglo-Saxons, which implies a birth defect. It is always going back to what our grandmothers used to say when, for example, one was looking for a girlfriend in the ass of the world: «Who is going to marry far away, is going to ‘cheat’ or is going to cheat”. Why go so far, with the work that costs? And, finally, the phrase with which they, the ‘güelas’, ended any discussion: «At home, nowhere». Health and anarchy.