By Rinaldo Berra
I’m not a young boy any longer.....
I’ve been travelling all around the world, meeting people from Australia to China, from USA to Latin America, from India to south Africa, and those people have given me irreplaceable experiences and knowledge of histories and cultures I had never heard before.
In all of my trips, I had never felt such an intimacy, a deep friendship, a warm welcome as travelling with the Touareg in the desert of Libya. Tourism reached that land only in 1992, when a group of tuareg started showing their desert to a small group of visitors, on their dromedaries, which they only recently replaced with the old but reliable Toyota FWD, which they learned to repair everywhere and for any problem. The desert has no secrets for them, while I still have not understood how our driver was able to find his own tracks after hours of driving in the middle of nowhere, after the wind had cancelled most of the human signs.
During those unforgettable days, in the astonishing silence, the sand as fine as talc, surrounded by thousands of colors, and under such blue skies, we could never imagine, I understood for the first time of my life that the sky is not “flat”, I experienced moments of education, respect, sensitivity, absolute devotion from our tuareg friends, all feelings which I never felt in the so-called civilized world where most of us live.
Every night, I used to look at one of our guides walking away from the group to go on a higher dune, where he was just sitting and looking at the sunset in silence, and that image made me understand how this population adores its word with silent respect, spiritual devotion, and manages to live in perfect harmony with it, stealing its secret, but then keeping them for themselves.
I will always be grateful to these people who gave me the opportunity to experience something so special, and I wish other people could live the same, once in their lives.
Travelling is extremely important as it gives us opportunity to interact with cultures which are entirely different from ours.
By travelling, you can live amazing experiences, which enrich your knowledge and your life.
Travelling, you become more tolerant, and you learn how small you are compared to the whole picture.
If we were all, really travelling, there would be no more wars, but, unfortunately, too many people don’t ever leave their homes.
Travelling is really
AMBITION...!!
p.s: of course, if you can afford it!
Click here to see more AMBITION pictures from LIBYA
