Experience: the Killing Fields, and the Tuol Sleng (S-21) Prison

Choeung Ek Killing Fields

This was arguably the hardest day of my trip, emotionally. Indeed, being lost among the marvels of Cambodia’s ancient past in the temples of Angkor Wat, or dealing with ever-smiling Cambodians can never prepare your heart to relate to the horror of the country’s recent events. So, before starting my tale, let me (very briefly) introduce you to this particular little bit of history.

During the course of the Vietnam War, fought between South and North Vietnam and with extensive involvement of foreign allies on both sides, conflict and fighting (and bombing) spread to the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, leading to the creation, in the latter, of the Khmer Rouge (Red Khmer) – a communist radical insurgency group. Khmers are the majority ethnic group in Cambodia. Led by the revolutionary leader Pol Pot, this group fought a gradual guerrilla war against the government forces, being backed up by communist forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. The Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia after seizing the capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975.

Pol Pot wished to create a pure agrarian communist state in the country. Being suspicious of city-dwellers (regarded as parasites and lackeys of capitalism), he ordered the immediate evacuation of cities. In three days, the entire population of Phnom Penh (between 2 and 3 million) was ordered to move out and assigned to 12-hour-a-day forced labor in farm fields. As Pol Pot’s regime developed, violence against perceived “traitors of the revolution” escalated, leading to the creation of prisons, torture chambers and, ultimately, killing fields all over the country. An estimated 3 million people (out of a former population of 8 million) died under the rule of the Khmer Rouge.

For more information, I recommend the good Wikipedia articles on Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, and Democratic Kampuchea. I also highly recommend watching the 1984 movie The Killing Fields. So, upon arriving in Phnom Penh, I decided to visit one of the killing fields and the most famous political prison, to have a deeper understanding of that sad bit of human history.

The Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, created upon one of the killing fields in the outskirts of Phnom Penh, first impressed me by how lovely the place is. It was a sunny day, the place is clean, verdant and pleasant, and not at all what one would expect of such a location. On the front, there is a high memorial stupa. This quickly brings you back to reality – the stupa houses an incredibly high pile of more than 5,000 human skulls, part of the over 9,000 bodies found in that field alone. More on that later.

The memorial stupa

Choeung Ek wasn’t a concentration camp, as there was no forced labor here. One entered the place either to kill, or to die. The aim was to eliminate prisoners as quickly and efficiently as possible. The method was mainly bludgeoning, since the Khmer Rouge wouldn’t spend precious bullets for such a job. Executions were conducted only at night, to avoid raising suspicion of people and workers nearby. Prisoners would be walked to previously dug collective pits, killed on the spot, and thrown in the pit, much in the way illustrated below.

There are signs marking the places where the buildings (later destroyed by the Vietnamese) were. Two of them are particularly touching. During the height of its activity, more than 300 prisoners were executed every day here, more than the guards could handle. So a small prison, dubbed “the Dark and Gloomy Prison” was erected – just a windowless depot for storing human cargo to be executed during the next night. There was also a storage room for chemicals – those helped cover up the unbearable stench, and also served to kill any half-dead prisoners thrown in the pits while still alive.

Perhaps the best image of the Khmer Rouge’s utter disregard for life is provided by their own famous saying, aimed at the traitors: “To destroy you is no loss. To preserve you is no gain.”

There are many, many depressions in the soil around the site. These mark the former pits. The bodies were exhumed and moved to proper burial sites. However, during every rainy season the waters and erosion bring up fragments of bones, teeth, and cloth rags. Indeed, you can see many of them in the ground around your feet, one of the gloomiest visions I ever had. It’s almost as if the place itself will not let anyone forget the horror that happened here.

There is also a very good audio tour provided along with the entrance ticket. You can hear explanations about each part of the place, as well as stories from survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s prisons and camps. There are no survivors from Choeung Ek. It’s impossible not to be moved by the stories, or to to fight the tears as you try to imagine what it must have felt like to go through all of this. Suddenly, all your problems, suffering, and everything you ever thought hard or painful in your life seem small and insignificant – and they really are.

Bones collected from the ground

On this tree a huge loudspeaker was hanged every night, playing political songs, so as to disguise the place as a Khmer Rouge political meeting, and muffle the screams of the victims.

One of the most terrifying visions was the tree below. Here, the children and little babies of prisoners were killed. Standard procedure was to hold the child by the ankles, and then smash his/her head against the tree. The horror is simply unspeakable.

By the end of the circuit, you can visit the memorial stupa. Here, layers upon layers of skulls retrieved from the pits are kept. This is truly a terrifying vision. The skulls are just there, each of them belonging to a person who was once just like you and me – good and bad, loving and selfish, generous and greedy, all of them stripped from the greatest gift of them all. They are all just there, looking back at you, as if demanding answers for the horrible crimes committed against them.

So after all this, deeply upset and lost in thoughts, I decided to look for a restroom. Found one near the museum bordering the walls. After getting out, I heard a lot of laughter and happy, playful sounds. I looked over the wall:

Just beside the memorial there is a school for small children. There they were, doing that wonderful mess children do, completely oblivious to the terrible deeds that happened next door. Probably some of their relatives even were here. I found new hope upon seeing the school – there is the future of Cambodia, and I pray those children can build up a society that learns, and remembers.

Tuol Sleng (S-21) Prison

Most of the prisoners executed at the Choeung Ek killing fields were first detained at the S-21 Prison. This place was a high school before the Khmer Rouge took power. After that, all schools in the country were simply closed, as Pol Pot believed education was useless to the revolution, and corrupted the purity of the “old people”, the pure, agrarian peasant lifestyle. The building was renamed Security Prison 21, and turned into a prison and execution center for political targets, right in the middle of Phnom Penh.

Right in the front of the main courtyard, that looks just any other school grounds in the world – classroom buildings surrounding big playing fields – are the tombs of the 14 last victims of the center, the ones whose corpses were found there when the place was liberated by the Vietnamese. Between 17,000 and 20,000 people were imprisoned in Tuol Sleng, and out of those there are only 7 survivors, all of whom had some skill useful to their captors, such as painting or photography. Right there is also a big sign stating the code of conduct of the center.

One of the buildings was used as a detention unit, with wooden and brick cells adapted within the former classrooms.

In the detention building there is barbed wire in every open-air corridor. This was to prevent prisoners from committing suicide by jumping down.

The other building was used as an interrogation facility. Prisoners would be extensively tortured to reveal names and locations of friends and family, who would in their turn be arrested, tortured and sent to the killing fields.

Looks like a regular school...

One of the interrogation rooms, and a picture of how it was found

These poles were used by students for exercise, but the KR adapted them for torturing people by hanging them upside down into water containers

The torture tools

The Khmer Rouge, in an upsetting similarity with the Nazis, were extremely meticulous in recording all their activities. Prisoners were measured, photographed, given identification numbers and photographed again after torture and death. Lists would be checked and rechecked everyday to ensure that nobody escaped. Confessions, completely made-up and gotten under extreme torture, were written down and signed by the prisoners, who were then signing their own death sentence.

One of the prisoners actually smiled for the photo. I'm still wondering about what caused that smile.

Can you see the traitorous look of these children? Such a threat to the revolution.

Some of the prisoner profiles and confessions

There are plenty of photos of the bodies after torture in the Khmer Rouge’s archives, but I really couldn’t bring myself to photograph them.

I left S-21 with a bleak feeling about humanity. Perhaps the best question was one I’ve found on the walls of one of the cells in the detention building. Some previous tourist, doubtlessly assaulted by the same feelings I was experiencing then, wrote:

“Will we ever learn?”

Border-crossing Adventures

After our hurried 11-day Rajasthan loop, our much-reduced group from Kolkata (now consisting only of me, Giselle and Ana) reached Delhi, India’s mighty capital city. There we said goodbyes to Ana, who took her flight back home via Dubai, and Giselle and I sailed on fr yet another adventure. I will not write about Delhi because, frankly, my 24-hour stay in the city was uneventful (except for a scam we turned on the scammer – oh yeah – and about which I may write later).

So on February 11^th Giselle and I took yet another train ride, this time to Gorakhpur, a city in central-north India that is known for nothing BUT for being the train hub for those wishing to cross to Nepal overland. Due to some confusion on the train tickets, Giselle and I were separated into different classes for the trip. However, this apparent inconvenience turned out to be a defining moment of my trip, for it was during that train ride that I have met Sarah and David.

Dave and Sarah are a couple of extremely friendly and intelligent Americans from Massachussets (ok, Dave, we know you’re from Ohio – dang!) who were sharing the same cabin (a “cabin” in India being the 8-bed niches in which train space is divided) with me. We quickly warmed up to each other in conversation, and little did I know how much more time I’d spend with them before I was done with Nepal. They have been travelling a lot, having been in South America (shamefully not in Brazil) before tackling India, Nepal and Southeast Asia, and they also have great stories they upload on their BLOG. The one thing I don’t like about them is that they have this habit of choosing the worst possible pictures of me whenever citing me on their blog.

Dave and Sarah

Reaching Gorakhpur, we found Giselle again and the five of us (Giselle and I, Sarah and Dave and Giselle’s unreasonably big and unmanageable bag) got into a bus for the Indian-Nepali border in Sunauli. We went through the immigration rubber-stamping of both countries and finally entered Nepal. We had to take a 4-km bus ride to the (slightly) more substantial city of Bhairahawa. The funny fact was that said bus was already full. The Nepali drive just said: “NO PROBLEM, my FRRREND, you go on top the bus”. So, the four of us, along with a lot of luggage, enjoyed the only uncrowded and cool spot possible in a Nepali bus: outside of it. Upon reaching Bhairahawa, Sarah and Dave bought tickets to Chitwan wildlife reservation, their first stop in Nepal, while Giselle and I got ours to Kathmandu.

Goodbye to India

Our little gang on top of the bus 

We were starving, and we had half an hour before my bus, and one before Dave and Sarah’s, so we all had a hurried lunch of life-saving, redeeming Chowmein in Bhairahawa. Giselle and I reached the bus station 5 minutes before the appointed time, only to have a handful of ever-smiling Nepalis tell us that it had already left. WHAT?? And then we discovered one of the lamest national facts of my trivia treasure: Nepali time zone is FIFTEEN (yes, fifteen) minutes ahead of India’s, despite the country being minuscule and right in the middle of the Indian time zone. Indian Standard Time (IST) is GMT +5:30 (with this half-hour difference to other time zones being already odd, but understandable for the convenience of having a big country running entirely within the same time zone), but Nepali time is GMT +5:45, and these freaking 15 minutes made us lose the bus. I did some research on this and there’s no reason for that except to reaffirm Nepal’s sacred place as a single nation ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FROM INDIA. And, of course, nobody thought it would be nice to tell us while crossing the border.

We even tried hitching a ride in Dave and Sarah’s bus to Chitwan in the hopes of catching our bus along the way, but in some city up in the road we had to buy the last two backseat tickets for the overnight 10-hour uphill ride to Kathmandu.

Here I have to stop and tell you a little about what is riding a bus in Nepal is like. The terrain all over the country is incredibly rugged and steep, which means every road is curvy and narrow. Narrow roads make for small-sized buses, which also make for small luggage space, which means that everybody’s luggage is placed in the middle corridor. People who didn’t get a seat also seat there in whatever way possible. If you’re in the back of the bus, you have to hop from armchair to armchair through people and bags to find your way to the door. The roads are also all in terrible conditions, and the drivers are all crazier than in India (and I thought that was not possible). So you have maniac drivers speeding over holes and bumps on the road, and in each one the passengers fly from their seats like popcorn from a cooking pot. The drivers also pay no attention to the mile-deep abysses besides the roads, and the tire is always kissing an unsure-looking slope or rock. To set the atmosphere for that, every driver likes to pay his compliments to the passengers by introducing them to his favorite songs (all of them a young woman screaming to the limits of the human voice pitch range) in the loudest sound system I have ever seen in a bus. Now picture yourself in this ambience seating in a backseat, the bumpiest spot of them all, in a position in which you hit your head on the ceiling every major bump. Welcome to the joys of bus-travelling in Nepal.

Chinese pose while Giselle shuts down

The still empty bus

Nepalis must have nerves of steel and titanium bladders to stand trips like this with just one stop and even sleep through it. Giselle was able to doze off from time to time, but I couldn’t. I was rewarded for my wakefulness, however, with one of the most beautiful sights I have seen.

Nepal’s energy matrix is,like Brazil’s, mainly based in hydroelectric power. However, as a Himalayan nation, their water reserves depend on the mountains’ water cycle, which means there is a very dry season from mid-winter to early spring. During this time, Nepalis experience extended power cuts that can last up to 12 hours a day.

It was during one of these blackouts that we were crossings the mountains of the Kathmandu valley. The sky was fully starred, and the black mountains set against the dark night sky made it impossible to distinguish what was mountain and what wasn’t. The thousands of battery-based emergency lamps dotted the valley with star-like light spots, and these, together with the actual stars, created an eerie but very beautiful sensation of being suspended in the middle of the sky, with stars all the way above and below you. It was one of these moments that happen from time to time while we’re travelling, where unexpected beauty is found in unpredictable moments, and suddenly it makes all worthwhile. It’s really a shame that I couldn’t take a picture of that to share it with you: the moving bus made that impossible, and the faint light wouldn’t be captures by the camera anyway.

We reached Kathmandu by 4 a.m. or so, and it was a little surprising and depressing to see the city completely blacked out. I would never expect a city that big to be completely dormant, but the place looked like a ghost town while we were trying to find our hostel. The day was dawning when we got settled in one of the best hostels I’ve ever seen, Alobar1000, and went to sleep eager for the next day’s discoveries.

Tutiyapalaiyam

We get used to everything. We get used to all the little details that are often the complete opposite of everything you grew up with to understand as right. We get used to the long hours of introspection in cramped buses and trains and to not having a clue about where we are going to sleep that night. To give a sarcastic laugh towards the first price vendors charge you, despite having no idea of how much the fair price should be, and to get into long negotiations over a 10-rupee (around US$ 0.20) difference. To withstand every difficulty with Spartan endurance.

From time to time, however, the cheer strangeness gets to you, in the most mundane moments, when for one reason or another we suddenly appreciate our own situation more rationally. Last time, that feeling hit me while I was sitting by the (always) open door of a train, legs dangling outside, enjoying the wind and watching the huge palm tree fields of Southern India run in front of my eyes. The train stopped in Tutiyapalaiyam, a little village in the middle of nowhere, in the state of Tamil Nadu, and the small station only had signs and posters written in Tamil – no English anywhere. Suddenly it was with me again – the strangeness. I realized that I was in a train between the cities of Kochi and Chennai, on my way to catch a flight to Sri Lanka – all three of them places I had never planned on visiting in my life before. And that everything around me was written and spoken in a language in which I’d never be able to say “good morning”. And that dozens of people watched me with all the astonishment (and then some) due to the alien presence that was myself in this place. And that I was so many world apart from these people physically, culturally and in every other respect that not even in a million years there I’d be looked at any differently.

This strangeness always brings its inseparable companion – fear. After all, I also realized that I had been hanging loose from a high speed train for the last half hour with no protection whatsoever. That I would not only be unable to say “good morning”, but also “help me”. That I was thousands of miles away from anybody or anything that ever made me feel safe and comfortable. That disease and misfortune could strike me at any moment.

Tutiyapalaiyam is essential to my life, as strangeness and fear always force me to evaluate what I am buying myself with them, and whether the price is right. Four months after stepping out of my door heading for the biggest series of “first times” I’ll probably ever experience, this is a timely reflection.

Travelling, and particularly backpacking, I have learned, is a journey into oneself much more than one towards cities and monuments. It’s time to put to the test all those beautiful notions about yourself, the ones concocted on your comfortable bed or during a luxurious hot shower in your toilet-paper-abundant bathroom. It is learning to face the different as normal, and to respect the profoundly different. It is getting to know a former British business executive turned Hare-Krishna monk 15 years ago during a tourist escapade, feeling his great inner peace and seeing his eyes shining, and understanding that choice makes all the sense in the world to him. It is seeing a mile-long line of pilgrims waiting to touch a cow born with a fifth deformed leg, and immediately thinking on how many things in your own culture and religion would seem equally alien and absurd in the eyes of those same pilgrims.

Backpacking is about being forced to make do away from the pasteurized relationships of western civility – to defend your space, your money, your health, honor and very life alone, with all your weapons and means: with grace, charm, intelligence, resilience, malice, and aggressiveness. In extreme cases, even with violence (though it hasn’t occurred to me, it has to some friends). In my experience, it can be threatening a proto-gangster roughly enough so he won’t call your bluff, or turn a con artist’s scam onto himself and getting a free night in a hotel, or having to spoon a respectable sir in a sleeper bus for 16 hours. In my humble opinion, and should also be apologizing and trying to make things right if you end up, in your blessed ignorance, threatening the respectable sir and spooning the con artist instead.

Spiritually, and especially in India, backpacking is to face dozens of religions, beliefs, rituals and philosophies, and to recognize in each one sparkles of your own truth. And to see, beyond the colorful repertoire of the searchers, a glimpse of the Search that unites us all.

Travelling also taught me to recognize that the universe doesn’t care at all about our meticulously worked out plans, and that it merely gives us the big pieces with which we build the big picture of our lives. To recognize that we can build something beautiful, something clumsy or even throw the pieces away, but it doesn’t change a thing to complain about the pieces given to us or to wish they were different. And ultimately, with that understanding, it has taught me to embrace serendipity, building purposes that inspire instead of plans that frustrate.

Backpacking is a way of turning back to a more primitive way of life – everyday, priority is given to finding food and shelter, then transportation and communications, all of it within your budget, and only then can we think about merriment. And by bringing us back to basics, it also reveals to us the maze of illusions, irrelevance and vanities that takes up so much of our daily lives. And seeing that, to find out more time within our time, and more life within our life. I can easily remember almost all days of these last four months, while only a very few of my previous office years. In that, there are signs, and lessons that have been deeply touching me.

And, of course, travelling is also about the sublime moments of turning your dreams into reality, and to be amazed at the wonders of being alive and the world surrounding us. I find it impossible to really describe my feelings while watching the sunrise over the Himalayas in Darjeeling, or the first morning rays turning the Taj Mahal pink, or crying out of pure beauty under a divinely starry night sky in the Rajasthan tar desert, belly-sliding on the snow for the very first time, climbing up my first peak, or paragliding side-to-side with hawks in Nepal. Gratitude, pride, hunger for life, everything together in one overwhelming feeling of joy.

All in all, travelling has certainly given me more of the world, but, also, it has given me more of myself. I feel stronger, more prepared, more alive. Over anything else, I feel more like me. When Tutiyapalaiyam asked me if it all was worth the strangeness and discomfort, I answered that only without them it wouldn’t be worth it. When it asked me whether it was worth the fear and insecurity, I found out I had discovered within myself the true meaning of that great verse of Fernando Pessoa: “ships are safe while inside the harbor, but they weren’t built for that”.

The trip, of coruse, cannot last forever, and there are those who believe that everything I just described is just a big dream, only possible in an alternate reality, away from “real” life. However, I think that maybe this is indeed the role assigned by Providence to the act of travelling: that of touching our souls in such an intense, profound and indelible way that its marks and memories will compel us to forever seek that fullness in life.

I wish everybody a Tutiyapalaiyam, and I hope each and every one of them is as beautiful as mine.

Tutiyapalaiyam

A gente se acostuma com tudo. Com todos os pequenos detalhes que são muitas vezes diametralmente diferentes de tudo aquilo em meio ao que você cresceu e aprendeu a achar certo. A gente se acostuma às longas horas de introspecção em ônibus e trens apertados, e a não fazer idéia de onde vai dormir na próxima noite.  A dar uma risada sarcástica ao primeiro preço que te apresentam, mesmo sem saber o preço justo, e a iniciar longas negociações sobre uma diferença de 10 rúpias (~R$0,40). A suportar cada perrengue com um estoicismo espartano.

De vez em quando, porém, a estranheza bate, nos momentos mais prosaicos, quando por um ou outro motivo avaliamos mais friamente nossa situação. Da última vez, isso me aconteceu em uma tarde quente de Abril, enquanto eu sentava na porta (sempre) aberta de um trem, com as pernas pra fora, aproveitando o vento e observando os enormes campos de palmeiras do Sul da Índia correrem diante dos meus olhos. O trem parou em Tutiyapalaiyam, uma vilinha no meio do nada, nos confins do estado de Tamil Nadu, e a estação tinha apenas placas e cartazes em Tamil - nada em inglês. Ali estava ela, de novo comigo, a estranheza. Me dei conta de que estava em um trem entre Kochi e Chennai, a caminho para pegar um vôo para o Sri Lanka - três lugares que nunca planejei concretamente conhecer na vida. E de que tudo ao redor estava escrito e falado numa língua na qual jamais saberei dizer "bom dia". E de que dezenas de pessoas me olhavam com todo o espanto devido (e mais algum) à visão alienígena que era eu neste lugar. E de que eu estava a tantos mundos de distância física, cultural e comportamental daquelas pessoas que nem em um milhão de anos eu seria olhado diferentemente.

A estranheza também traz sua companheira inseparável, a insegurança. O medo. Afinal, também me dei conta de que tinha estado pendendo de um trem em alta velocidade, sem proteção, pela última meia hora. De que não só eu não saberia dizer "bom dia", mas também não saberia dizer "socorro". De que eu estava a milhares de quilômetros das pessoas e lugares que fazem com que eu me sinta seguro e amparado. De que a doença e o infortúnio podem me atingir a qualquer momento.

Tutiyapalaiyam é fundamental na minha vida, pois a estranheza e o medo me obrigam, sempre, a reavaliar o que estou comprando com eles, e se o preço vale a pena. Quatro meses depois de colocar o pé pra fora da soleira de casa rumo à mais longa série de "primeiras vezes" que provavelmente experimentarei na vida, esta é uma reflexão oportuna.

Viajar, e particularmente mochilar, tenho notado, é uma jornada muito mais ao interior de si mesmo do que em direção a cidades e monumentos. É a hora de pôr à prova todas as belas noções sobre você mesmo criadas no conforto da sua cama ou durante um banho quente em seu banheiro com papel higiênico em abundância. É aprender a achar normal o diferente, e a respeitar o profundamente diferente. É conhecer um executivo britânico que se tornou monge Hare Krishna há 15 anos durante uma viagem de turismo, ver sua enorme paz interior e a felicidade brilhando em seus olhos, e compreender que essa decisão faz todo o sentido do mundo pra ele. É ver uma fila quilométrica de peregrinos para tocar uma vaca que nasceu com uma quinta pata deformada e perceber imediatamente quantas coisas em sua própria cultura e religião pareceriam igualmente absurdas para esses mesmos peregrinos.

Mochilar é ser obrigado a se virar fora do domínio das relações pasteurizadas da civilidade ocidental - e a defender seu espaço, seu dinheiro, sua saúde, sua honra e sua vida sozinho, e com todas as armas que possui: com graça, com charme, com inteligência, com resiliência, com malícia, com agressividade e, em casos extremos que não me aconteceram, mas sim a amigos, até com violência. Na minha experiência, é ameaçar com uma surra a um proto-gangster com dureza o bastante para ele não querer pagar pra ver, ou virar a armação de um golpista contra ele próprio e ganhar com isso uma noite de graça num hotel. Ou, ainda, pode ser se submeter a passar 16 horas de conchinha com um respeitável senhor em um minúsculo leito de ônibus. E, também, ao meu ver, saber se desculpar e tentar consertar quando em sua abençoada ignorância você ameaçar o respeitável senhor e dormir de conchinha com o golpista.

Espiritualmente, especialmente na Índia, mochilar é conhecer dezenas de religiões, credos, rituais, e filosofias e reconhecer em cada um lampejos da sua própria verdade. E enxergar, para além do colorido repertório dos buscadores, a Busca que nos une a todos.

Viajar também me ensinou a reconhecer que o universo não dá a mínima pro cancioneiro cuidadosamente martelado dos nossos planos, e que ele é quem dá as grandes peças com as quais montamos o quebra-cabeças das nossas vidas. Reconhecer que podemos montar algo belo, algo tosco ou jogar as peças pra longe, mas que de nada adianta reclamar delas ou desejar que fossem outras. E, entendendo isso, tentar abraçar a serendipidade, construindo propósitos que inspirem em vez de planejamentos que frustrem.

Mochilar é um jeito de voltar a um estágio mais primitivo de vida - todos os dias, a prioridade é achar comida e abrigo, depois transporte e comunicação, tudo dentro do orçamento, e só depois você pensa no que tem de bom pra fazer. E ao nos trazer de volta ao básico, também nos mostra o labirinto de ilusões, irrelevâncias e vaidades que ocupa tanto das nossas vidas cotidianas. E, ao percebê-lo, ver mais tempo em nosso tempo e mais vida em nossa vida. Posso lembrar de praticamente todos os dias dos quatro meses da minha viagem, mas apenas poucos dos dias que formam meus anos de escritório anteriores. Há nisso sinais, e lições, que têm me tocado profundamente.

E, claro, também fazem parte de viajar os momentos sublimes de realização dos seus sonhos e embevecimento com as maravilhas de estar vivo, e do mundo que nos cerca. Impossível descrever meus sentimentos ao ver o nascer do sol nos Himalaias em Darjeeling, ver os raios da alvorada tornarem rosa o Taj Mahal, chorar de pura beleza sob o céu divinamente estrelado do deserto do Rajastão, mergulhar de barriga na neve pela primeira vez, escalar minha primeira montanha, ou voar de paragliding ao lado dos falcões no Nepal. Gratidão, orgulho, saudade, fome de viver, tudo-junto-e-misturado.

Em suma, é certo que viajar me deu mais do mundo, mas, principalmente, me deu mais de mim em mim mesmo. Me sinto mais forte, mais preparado, mais vivo. Acima de tudo, me sinto mais eu. Quando Tutiyapalaiyam me perguntou se valia a pena a estranheza e o desconforto, respondi que sem eles é que não valeria a pena. Quando ela, insistente, me perguntou se valia a pena o medo e a insegurança, descobri que havia achado dentro de mim o significado da genial frase de Pessoa: "os navios estão seguros nos portos, mas não foram feitos pra isso".

A viagem, é claro, não pode durar para sempre, e há quem diga que tudo isso que descrevi é um grande sonho só possível numa realidade paralela, longe da "vida real". Mas penso que talvez seja mesmo este o papel reservado pela Providência ao ato de viajar: tocar nossas almas de uma maneira tão intensa, profunda e indelével,  que a marca e a lembrança do sentimento de vida plena nos impulsionem a buscar a plenitude durante o resto de nossas vidas.

Desejo que cada um tenha sua Tutiyapalaiyam, e que todas elas sejam tão belas quanto a minha.