Leaving

I am off to Bolivia. Very Chatwinesque I consider. Not that I have an editor to whose chair I can pin a little note announcing my departure but in all other respects the action is the same. I am stepping from my usual life; going South; beyond the tropics of South America to the Andes. I am in fact going to the highest capital on earth; La Paz. There the population wander through streets laid down at an altitude higher than the Eiger. They must shop in the clouds. Wonderfully dizzy of course and sustained only by the oxygenation of their blood by the coca leaf in their tea. I fear and relish the thought of such altitude hallucenogenics, as I fear and relish the thought of wandering alone in South America.
But travel is good for me, for my soul and my mind, and so I am setting off.
I realise the things I leave behind me are as important as the things I will discover. They provide our context and go some way to explaining our actions when we are displaced.
With this in mind I post the view that I see every day from my kitchen window.
I marvel at the beauty of it, the stillness of cold sheep standing in some sort of glaze the ice has made. They stand in a field on the edge of the English Peak District. I never go in to it, have perhaps walked across it half a dozen times in the five years I have lived in my adjacent house. The irony of wanderlust of seeking out in a free fall of travel remote and distant locations, defined for me in the frame of this photograph.

When I am confronted by the Latino bedlam of the Witches Market in down town La Paz, banging my head on putrified llamas or ducking out of the way of the shaman's spell I hope I do not yearn for the tranquillity of this place.

There is only one way to find out....to know how life will be when I trade my Derbyshire days for the bewildering and complicated society of Bolivia I really do have to stand up from my desk, turn my back on this view and head out.