"There must be something strangely sacred in the salt. It is contained in our tears and the sea."
"In the sea, there is no distinction between east and west, it is people who create these distinctions."
Twenty-six days of travel.
From Adelaide, Australia to Vancouver, Canada. Passing through New Zealand and the Fiji Islands.
The opportunity to disembark a few hours in Auckland after a week of sailing on the sea did not leave me alone. Waves that at night opened the drawers of the cabin, crew members who were sick, but all in all I didn't suffer too much.
Just enough time to meet an old friend we met on the road, have a beer together, and hear news from home.
I leave, after four days I reach the Fiji Islands. Finally the opportunity to stay on the mainland for about ten hours. I find a beach, but I can't enjoy it, the weather is cloudy, on the other hand, we are at the beginning of the rainy season in the Tropic of Cancer.
I'm back in port, the cargo will sail early and almost risk being left ashore.
I embark for the last time, 16 days await me without connections to the world, me, and the sea.
The next day there is a party on the ship, the captain decided to give the crew a barbecue in the middle of the sea. This is the custom when you sail the oceans.
Two days later I arrive on the equator: the sun sets on the left while on the right I see the moonrise at the same time. I don't notice it right away, but what awaits me is one of the most beautiful shows I've ever been able to enjoy.
A full moon night to illuminate the Pacific Ocean. The darkness of the sea pierced by that light and nothing around me. A huge expanse of water, the depth of over 7,000 meters, like flying. Above a merchant freighter over 200 meters, so small, so tiny in the middle of that sea. And me, even smaller.
I stay a couple of hours to contemplate it, fascinated. Other than a movie.
I also pass the Tropic of Capricorn, as well as from autumn to spring, from the rainy to the dry season.
Not only.
Because then it happens to cross an imaginary dateline that made me live a day twice, just like in the history of the world tour in 80 days.
This is how time, like distances and dimensions, acquires total and full relativity.
Living a day twice, already, as if twenty-six days weren't enough without touching the ground apart from the two fleeting appearances in New Zealand and Fiji.
Without contact with the outside world, a small bubble above the sea.
An endless journey from a land that I have longed for ten years to America.
I needed it.
Yes, really, I needed it. Reaching Australia allowed me to cross the first important milestone of my world tour without planes. I felt light walking the streets of Sydney again.
Light because empty.
I have been away for a year.
What I longed for, from the start, more than anything else, was to return to that land. Having succeeded after great difficulties made me feel that I had arrived for a moment. Sure in Sydney the feeling of being at home did the rest, but somehow I was satisfied.
I crossed seemingly impossible borders, I managed to get there, without planes, on the other side of the world, at the antipodes.
Nothing better than an endless journey to be catapulted into a new world, a world that, among other things, I know very little about. Apart from California, the island of Cuba, and the Mexican Yucatan, I know nothing of America. In my plans, I expect about a year in those lands, between north and south. Canada is waiting for me first, and then the United States for a coast to coast from New York to San Francisco and then down to the Latin alma: South America.
But then at the end who knows what the currents of the universe will have in store for me. For the first time I am free from fixed dates, I have no deadlines, I can float freely.
I feel like when I was about to enter India and even then I came from a difficult introspective experience: the Vipassana meditation course. Much of what I have understood since that day I owe to those ten days of silence. And just like then I had my hard times. Then I had to fight my mind, but I could get out.
Not this time, prisoner of the sea.
Today it is like this, I scan the horizon, it is always the same. For twenty-five damned days it's always the same.
Sea, sea, sea.
Not a boat, not a dolphin, not an island, nothing apart from the horizon.
But tomorrow I'll wake up on the Canadian coast, I have a great desire to get back on the road, to discover new places, to meet people. I want to be amazed again.
So I felt, in a cage, but it helped me. I have really recharged my batteries, I am charged with energy again just like a year ago, when I was leaving my city, my family, my friends, my loved ones to go out to the world, to Life.
I've been traveling for a year and if I look back it has flown.
Every day a discovery, every day new experiences, every day a different sky, every day a different horizon.
For the last twenty-five days, the horizon always seemed the same to me, but it wasn't.
The horizon, every day, a little further on.