Saturday, August 20, 2011

enter the wild country

we're here.

this place is wild. lush. gritty. dirty. wicked. green. beautiful. rough. aged. weathered and brilliant all at once.

it's completely surreal.  partially because i rode from the airport in a van with a low ceiling, loud calypso music blasting through the speakers, thinly covered metal seats and the wind tossing my hair every which way. it was 35 degrees today, sunny, humid, a welcome change from the Swedish summer, which can barely be called such.

i have a hard time deciding which part was the most surreal.

was it the part where we landed and walked down the airplane stairs onto the tarmac? or perhaps the part where my grandma went over to the flower bed at the airport and touched the giant tropical blossoms gently with her long fingers? or maybe when we rolled up to the house my grandparents built only 5 years before they moved to Canada? or maybe my mother's childlike hand writing, scrawled across the inside of a cupboard in the hallway, frozen in time 34 years ago...?

either way, this day has been full.  full.  full.

i will post some more photos tomorrow when we have settled into our hotel. part of the adventure of traveling here i gather is that things never really go the way you plan.  our hotel "forgot" we were arriving today, so we found another, quite lovely place around the corner for the night.  this was after our pilot was about to land, but changed his mind and took sharply off again into the sky. an aborted landing, because he couldn't see the runway through low cloud cover.

for now, you can all know we are safe and sound, about to hit the sack after a long, intense and incredible first day.

No comments:

Post a Comment