Wanderers

I often get asked what my favorite place on the planet is, and the truth is I don't know how to answer. There are so many and they are all so beautiful! I could choose a corner of Tuscany, or a little inhabited Greek island, or a hidden village in the Spanish Mediterranean (if any are left), or a village in the highlands of East Africa, or a place in the Canadian Arctic, or a tent in the Nubian desert, or - why not - New York or Rome. I love both solitude and crowds, noise and silence, living in company or alone with myself. But above all, I love variety. Once, a reader asked me to dedicate a book to him and to put the motto 'The world is my homeland' under his name. I made that expression my own.

About twenty years ago, while traveling in Turkey, I met a South African boy who had been away from his homeland for about six years. He would arrive in a place, look for a job, learn a little of the local language, explore it, and when he got tired, he would look for another country to settle in. He hardly carried any luggage, owned next to nothing (not even a camera), and he didn't plan to return to South Africa. He was the perfect wanderer, and I couldn't help but admire him.

Of the explorers whose adventures I have followed through their books, the one who fascinates me the most is the Scotsman Joseph Thompson, who at the end of the 19th century was the first European to cross Maasai Land, traveling unarmed and with hardly any askaris to protect him, between Mombasa and Lake Victoria. He got sick with fever and, when returning to his homeland, still young and shortly before dying, he said he did not consider himself an explorer, a scientist, or an adventurer. 'I am just a wanderer,' he added. 'And if I could get up now, I would put on my boots and wander through Africa.'

That is my primary vocation. And I believe that if my family and friends didn't hold me back in Spain, I would leave and never come back, like the South African boy I met in Turkey. I would be like the one who sings this song: 'I don't care to know who I am, where I come from, or where I'm going.' Is there a greater sense of freedom than a life in which you are unaware of where your steps will take you next? I doubt it.

For this reason, the word 'wanderer' has begun to seem not quite accurate to me. Moreover, many people assign it to those characters who abound in cities, who have nowhere to wash, who spend nights in the doorway shelters and shops wrapped in sleeping bags, and who often rest surrounded by empty beer cans. However, they are not wanderers but beings exiled from the fortune of consumer society, miserable representatives of the social inequality that surrounds us.

I also do not like the expression 'globetrotter.' Simply because it is ridiculous. Do you have to bounce around a map to be considered a traveler? Imagine the scene: a man hopping from country to country looking for someone to see him as something like an explorer. Pathetic.

Wanderers would be the exact word. Leaving behind what you were, seeking the new, risking encountering an unknown geography, putting on your boots to never return to your homeland merely for the pleasure of listening to the free winds.

Wanderers..., the beautiful expression that takes us away from the boredom proposed by that other stupid word: 'daily life.'