360 in 365 – Joachim voyage autour du monde

Sunset on my travel’s 287th day.

There is something wildly liberating in biking across mountains and listening to Philip Glass. It builds up along the repetitive rhythm that doesn’t show any sign of change but regulates the speed of the legs motion, the waves of melody coming one after the other as do the ups and downs… The sand on the road halts you but the clarinet introduces a new pattern for the pedaling, the sky, so enormous as if hanging above me and the sun in the face, the lacerated mountain followed by a plain that’s lying about its flatness or a sand dune solely inhabited by ferocious winds, the road follows an amphitheater of rocks and you see sculptures in the distance, made by the forces of earth and the absence of water of vegetation. In the heart of the desert, the brusque and flowing music of Glass belongs to the landscape.

And then comes the moment when the bike can’t go further, the legs ask for relief and the sun hasn’t got lots of time. The music also is over, I rest an instant and I start it again, I climb the path along the dune and follow the path that is too rarely followed by tourists, and find myself at the end of the ridge, where the mountains flows in the valley below and then in the vast expanses of the desert. Far away rocks and hills grip to the sun rays, their shadows extending more and more, the wind starts to push clouds from beyond the horizon, and the moon, at its zenith, is readying for the night.

The moment has come to sit down on the last rock before the cliff, drink some over-sweetened juice and indulge in a coca-flavoured sweet while time itself expands across the valleys rocky flanks. Above me, the sky is cut in half by an airplane trail and I let my thoughts go far away.

And then Philip Glass gives out his last musical breath, the Cordillera stretches rose and orange tints and then melts in the purple of the coming night, the sun gives out its last rays in the turquoise sky and the wind blows cold.

People say that the silence resonating after a Mozart piece is still from Mozart. Glass, I say, spent more time composing the silences after his music than on his music itself. That, or the desert plays with me once again. I’m now deep set in darkness, my bike carries me effortlessly, I fly down the mountain. Scintillating in the distance, San Pedro is but another constellation among countless others.

In my head, the ever flowing music is still resonating, going up and down as if it was the road I’m riding on, trucks drive past me in the ruckus of the winds section, and the wind that blows after they pass makes me think I might not be touching earth anymore. The mountain is nowhere to be found, lost in the blue darkness surrounding me, but the landscape is still fighting, as strong as ever, by habit or by frustration of not being able to stop me forever. At the end of the road I’m back in the little streets bordered by the tiny adobe walls, tourists and wild dogs, Atacameños and locals from elsewhere, nobody knows that the shadow that’s crossing the village like the wind is carrying the mountain back with him ; a handful of mountain seeds in the deep of his shoes.