The Moment Has Been Prepared for

Thursday 25 March
Quito – Lima – São Paulo


I wake up at about 5 and take a taxi to the airport. I spend much of the flight asleep, though I do manage to get some nice shots of Quito smeared over the Andes before I pass out. At Lima airport I check my emails on the wifi and find that my relative has finally succumbed to the cancer that they have been fighting for eight years. They must have died at about the time I woke up. It’s terribly sad, mainly because I am here and they are there and I won’t be able to go to the funeral. They have been around all my life and my childhood is filled of memories of going to their house and spending Christmas or Easter with both of our families.

But I knew it was coming and I had kind of already expressed my grief to myself about it and had come to terms with it. I remember someone once saying something about grief which I adapted into my own interpretation. That is, that grief is a celebration. The reason the loss feels so powerful is because when they were there, it meant so much. The grief, the tears, the crying, the sadness is recognition of this fact, and we are blessed to be able to feel these emotions. The memories that we have, the times that they come back into our minds, are visits from the past, and that they live on, through us, both in our thoughts and in our genes. And the wheel of life turns once again.

I slept most of the way to São Paulo, waking up a few times to see the Andes and various dams in Brazil. It seems Brazil has a lot of dams. We arrived and it was raining. I took a taxi to the hostel. It took just over an hour which is a miracle as it usually takes two to three hours apparently. I couldn’t remember what I had booked and it turned out to be a dorm bed though in a nice hostel. It was my first time back in a dorm since Iguazu and I had justified it to myself as only being one night, and as it was Brazil there were cost savings to be made. In fact this dorm bed was twice as expensive as the single room I’d had in Quito.

In the evening I go out for a meal and watch some football match in a bar. It ends 4-2 so it was good fun to watch. After that I think about heading home when suddenly I notice that the first practice session of the Australian Grand Prix is being shown in a bar, so I stay to watch that. Button beats Hamilton and Rosberg beats Schumacher once again. Kubica ends the timesheets on top, which is good for him and Renault, both of whom look like they will be having a quiet season. Also, the McLarens seem to have the edge on the Ferraris.