Opinion – Josimar Melo: Traveling just by looking

For those who live in a cramped city, with windows that face the walls, traveling to the countryside, the beach, the mountains, from where you can see the horizon, can be more than a dip in beauty.

Letting your eyes wander into the distance seems to be good for everything, even physically (the eye muscles, used to seeing screens a few centimeters away, are exercised by fixing long distances). It certainly helps the spirit: looking far away, the mind follows the gaze, gets lost in the immensity, gives itself the right to wander, which is halfway to dreaming — and who would live without dreams?

I have the privilege of having absorbed vast landscapes in different places. And what is almost paradoxical —I must confess— is that the beautiful landscape is sometimes more good for the aesthetic sense and memory than for the life experience it offers.

An example: I love seeing the sea of ​​Brazil, pretending to see the coast of Africa ahead.

Mirage, of course: on several of our most beautiful beaches, the sun sets over the sea, to the delirious applause of the spectators. As happened in my university days, when I frequented Paúba, on the north coast of São Paulo, where we stayed at the fishermen’s house (and which I never visited again since I found out that it had become a paved condominium).

The sun was setting behind a rock in the sea. Well, if that was the west, then that was the west; as in so many recesses of our coast, if we look at the sea we are looking at Brazil itself. Even in our African Bahia, where the sun sets on Farol da Barra beach.

There you can find the beauty of the sea and the horizon as far as the eye can see. But also the heat, the sand dusting the skin impregnated with sunscreen… over time, I began to prefer the view of the sea from the garden of the house or the terrace of the hotel.

The sea is also the frame for another landscape that fascinates me – that of small boats floating in a marina. Well, sometimes it’s not little boats, in the diminutive — the one in Monte-Carlo, in the south of France, is beautiful, we just have to forget about the owners of the boats the size of a Bolsonaros mansion (and possibly also the result of money laundering).

But it’s the little boats that attract me the most. The marinas in Rio de Janeiro, Ilhabela, the jangadas of Ceará enchant me — to stay alone in Brazil. If I love looking at boats so much, what can I say about having them or living them? That’s where the problem starts.

I’ve been to a place of almost magical beauty — the Marietas Islands, on the Nayarit riviera (Mexico), just a few minutes by boat from Punta Mita, and I almost died of seasickness. As people jumped into the water or strolled along the beach, I dreamed of a bucket to relieve me.

It wasn’t the first time I was seasick in paradise. But what a beautiful sight to see, this was.

I cannot forget the very different landscape, but which also reveals a breathtaking horizon: the snowy mountains with their ski slopes. While the sea hypnotizes us by the sound, by the cadenced sound of the waves, in the heights covered in the fluffy white cloak, it is the silence that impresses.

Intoxicating—even the sky, especially when it’s a clear blue, piercing sunlight against the biting cold. And look, from this sky I understand.

For a few years I went to Colorado, USA—Aspen, Vail and Beaver Creek. I tried skiing, and when I could for a few minutes, it was exhilarating (the lack of friction felt like flying).

But most of the time, I was looking at the huge sky, sprawled on the snow (“no one knows the Colorado skies like I do,” I once wrote…). But that, standing, the landscape was beautiful and vast, that was.