You don’t have to go that far to find a good story. If not, look what happened to journalist Julián Varsavsky. That He walked the world for twenty-five years. Five continents and their best story, he tells Vivafound it in Argentina.
“It is that of Daniel Peche Pezzente, a type of werewolf who was abandoned as a child. in the fields of Miramar. And I didn’t discover it in the Buryat Republic, Tajikistan, Laos or Iran: it was five hours from my house. “I didn’t have to go far!”
If you want to know more about Pezzente, you can read Varsavsky’s new book, Journey to invisible landscapes: from Antarctica to Atacama. Urgent result – like so many things of these times– of the pandemic.
In those pages, which he started writing on March 20, 2020, when the quarantine was imposed and he had nothing left but confinement, Varsavsky talks about the Buenos Aires werewolf and so many others lives that crossed their path. Now, if what interests you is knowing the profile of a traveler – or travel chronicler -, here are some of the personal experiences that Varsavsky tells this magazine.
No selfies with beautiful landscapes in the background or egocentric videos. What Varsavsky does, what he likes to do, is look, ask, listen and then write.
“In this book there is a prologue that is not a prologue, but a theoretical essay titled Travel to tell it in Google Maps timeswhich includes the Boludencer theorywho would be the travel Instagramer. The thing about boludencer It’s a joke and not a disqualification. Something like the phonosapiens. The vanity trip is not new: what is significant is how the traveling body already superimposes itself on the landscape in the photo and reduces its gaze to over-adjective selfies and threads of tweets. That’s why he boludencer It does not create a solid narrative: it lists facts and data. He travels to see himself and to be seen, he provides tips: he looks in his hand-navel-mirror-plasma where the other is missing, except as exotic decoration,” Varsavsky ironically says.
“A spectacle of the self,” he adds. “A Narcissus with a suitcase on the hunt for likes.”
To cover so many years and miles, Varsavsky took advantage of his journalistic work in magazines and travel supplements that gave him the opportunity to receive invitations. He made the note for which he traveled and, if he could, he stayed at his expense a while longer.
“I took the opportunity to produce other types of material, other chronicles, stopping in places and specific cultural phenomenaselected after having seen a lot,” he recalls.
For each of his trips, Varsavsky prepares by informing himself about the place: “I have to try to get to know the terrain to know what I am going to look for. Besides, I don’t have time to spare and I have to make it work. It’s not ‘let’s see what happens’. I’m not on vacation: I’m going in search of material for the chronicles. And that is intense work.”
“I define myself as a professional traveler. I dedicate myself to this and I studied and studied a lot to try to see what others cannot see in a world already completely discovered. I am interested in the underlying, discovering something unseen,” she adds.
It is not a simple task. That is why he relies on talks with anthropologists, archaeologists or, as he says, “architects who are experts in semiology, divers who They explored the depths of Antarctica where I can’t reach, geologists who look beneath the earth, evolutionary biologists and philosophers who deconstruct the world. All of them help me see and populate my chronicles.”
When he travels, he takes the minimum: “A black backpack with a camera, a fairly heavy zoom and wide-angle lens, plus the computer. Since two backpacks are uncomfortable, I drag a medium-sized suitcase with wheels. I wear dark clothes that get dirty less, a Kindle because I have already banned paper books, and the fundamental prosthetic organ of the phonosapiens just to guide me, communicate and take oral notes: I don’t take videos or selfies with my smartphone.. I make extensive use of all technologies, I could hardly do my job without them. But I use them in a different way.”
And one fundamental thing: time. To look and take notes, to think and find out.
Varsavsky explains it like this: “One chapter of my book is a deep dive into the Mennonite village of La Pampa where, to my surprise, I discovered that they not only do not reject technologies, but that they love them. They travel to the largest metallurgy fairs in the world to bring the best machinery. With just a cursory glance, which of course I had during my first trip there, one could believe that they live in the past or in the old wayand who speak medieval German. That worldview is addressed in the book by anthropologist Lorenzo Cañas Bottos, who revealed to me what we could never see about the fascinating Mennonite universe because We don’t know how to look nor do we dedicate time to it.. Mennonites use almost all technologies, but they select them with other criteria, only to produce and to the extent that they do not bring them closer to temptations and sin.
When asked about the common idea that the money best spent is the money spent traveling, he says: “It’s a phrase that is a little ostentatious, a little bourgeois. On Instagram, with its profusion of perfect bodies, a lot of frustration is generated in people who cannot achieve that. So sending people to travel as an investment when today several million Argentines cannot eat well, would be an act of lightness.”
However, he adds a nuance: “Even so, in Kazakhstan I met a Kazakh who left home with the equivalent of $50 in his pocket. He hitchhiked and never paid an entrance fee, nor a hotel night nor almost ever a ticket for anything, for four years. He never begged, people saw him as a traveler and immediately took him, housed him, fed him. He went to Beijing, but he did not enter the Forbidden City because he had no money. He impressed me: It made me think that I wouldn’t need money to travel.. One is tempted to ask: could it be that those who don’t want to don’t travel? But things are not so simple. This kid, Sergei, had traveled throughout China, Russia, Kazakhstan, he had entered central Europe and former Soviet republics. He told me: ‘I made that entire trip without having, almost every day, a single ticket.’ At some point I’m going to write about him.”
Varsavsky says he feels overwhelmed after encountering so many different cultures (“there are infinite ways to approach life”), but that there is nothing like the Argentine landscapes: “For its quantity, diversity and quality of landscapes. And if we add to that its cultural richness… It amazes me that traveling through this country continues to amaze me.”
From that journey he releases another story that appears in Journey to invisible landscapes and that speaks, precisely, of what he said about infinite ways of approaching life.
He says: “In Salta, driving between peaks that exceeded 5,500 meters, I saw in the distance a girl coming down from a hill with her little brother and two donkeys with heavily loaded saddlebags. I stopped to wait for them. They were Anatolius and Agrippina. They were going to run some errands. She was about 10 years old and we talked. She asked me: ‘Do you have little sheep there in Buenos Aires?’ ‘No, not me,’ I replied. ‘And kids?’ ‘Neither’. ‘Do you have where to plant?’ ‘No. There is nowhere in the city. ‘You are very poor!’”
