21 February, 2015

A non stop journey

I’m passionate about travelling. I find happiness in facing new challenges and meeting new cultures.

When I turned 18 I started working as an airplane mechanic. This allowed me to get on journeys inside my home country, Argentina, at a very low cost. A few years later, at 21, I started working at La Nacion newspaper as a photographer which is what I always wanted to be since I was 13, when I saw a photojournalism exhibition.

With the idea of getting to know other countries, at the age of 24 I quit my job at La Nacion and travelled through four Latin-American countries in 11 months. I keep many good memories and recall many great experiences from that trip; like sitting at the bow of a boat navigating through the Amazon river, eating an orange watching the sunset in a town on a mountain in Peru and the Inca road that reaches Machu Picchu among others.

Whilst travelling through Bolivia, the Associated Press offered me a job to go to Paraguay. As a news agency photographer and later as a freelance, I have been travelling and living in several countries and continents. That has done nothing but to feed my need to continue traveling.

For a while now I have thought about going around the world. Just like that, for the pure pleasure of travelling. I have thought on how to do this journey and analysing the ways of how to hit the road: walking, on a bicycle, on a motorcycle, in a car, in a van or in a bus…

When I was working in Haiti, I travelled with motorcyclists that helped me get to the frontline of news and I thought it was the perfect form of transport for what I wanted to do. The motorcycle allows me to travel slowly. It needs me to think what I really need to take with me because of the limited space. It gives me the flexibility to do more km or change course if I don’t like the place I arrived. This is more difficult on a bicycle or walking because of distance and physical effort.

I believe you isolate yourself from the environment when you travel in a car or in a van. You can cruise many km without noticing it since your body is not being directly hit by the weather such is the case with rain or in the cold.

Three years ago, just like that, without being a biker, I began the process to transform myself into a motorcycle rider: got a motorcycle licence and bought a motorcycle – a Royal Enfield, which I fell in love with when working in India and I named it Athena, goddess of wisdom. I started gaining experience to improve my riding and safety. This past Christmas I took a course in mechanic maintenance for my bike in India so I can use my skills as an airplane mechanic and be more self-sufficient in this long journey. Whilst doing this I noticed the camaraderie that unites those of us who love travelling on motorbikes; as I am a rookie, I have plenty of questions and all of them I have been helped with.
Now I wish to continue exploring the world. Air travel, televison and internet have shrunk it and whilst sometimes they show us opposing realities to ours, they do not give us the time to understand them.

In a matter of hours with an airplane one can go from extreme cold to extreme heat, from an essentially vegetarian culture to a fundamentally carnivorous one.
From a country at sea level to another at 3000m above it.

I believe that today we transport ourselves from one place to another but we do not really travel. We jump the countries in-between our start point and our destiny. I may be a romantic from times gone by where travelling meant to cruise through different territories.

This is why I want to enjoy the option of travelling by land, km by km, crossing physical borders, changing gradually, or abruptly, between cultures, customs, foods, languages and environments. I see it as an outstanding method of discovering and experiencing the world whilst pushing one’s own mental and physical limits. My life is an eternal search, a permanent analysis, attempting to understand and observe the world through my own eyes. This is what makes me feel alive.

How long will it take for me to travel around the world? However much is needed from my point of departure in Barcelona, Spain. There is no determined time. I will travel leisurely, without hurry. If the bike suffers a breakdown, or I like the place or people wherever I am at, I will stop. Maybe I will stop when my savings end, which at the moment will not cover the full journey.

I have created this web site to help me with a few things. I’ll write my anecdotes and experiences in the blog where you can follow the journey and see the work I will create along the road. The site will also be a selling point for the work produced in the journey. People can also support my journey in the “Support” section or enrol in photography workshops that I will be giving in many different cities that will be announced in the “Workshops” section.

Welcome to the adventure.