Well, everyone, the inevitable has happened: Kyle has left me to become a Panamaniac. It’s true. Your intrepid explorer now finds herself alone in the South American continent. It’s okay, trust me. I’m launching into this new challenge with a sense of confidence previously unknown to me. I feel comfortable in Peru, I know my way around the bus stations and other potentially frightening places, and my Spanish is a finely honed tool (never you mind that just yesterday I regaled an Argentine man with the story of the great ice cream avalanche in the nearby town of Yungay).
It’s strange traveling without Kyle. He left a few days ago from Lima, but it wasn’t until yesterday, when I was driving away from the hostel in a taxi without him next to me that I experienced a little wave of fear/panic. Sure, there are some things about traveling with him that I will not miss, such as his stinky shoes of death; how he takes up one and a half seats on the bus, leaving me with just a half; how he steps on my toes every single time we sit at a table together; how hopeless he is at blending in (example: we come up out of the metro station in Santiago, he sees a large train station and stops dead in his tracks to point with a straight arm and shout, “LOOK! WOW!).
But the list of things I won’t miss ends there, and the list of things I will miss is considerably longer. Like the card games we played every time we had a few minutes to kill (he creamed me in our last game of yaniv). I’ll miss our ridiculous conversations, like the one we had while drinking a beer and gazing at Huayna Potosi, the huge mountain we climbed:
“Wow, how did we do that?” he asked between sips.
“By being a couple of complete badasses,” I responded.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It must be in our blood or something.”
I’ll miss not having a readily-available trekking partner that I hike perfectly with. I’ll definitely miss his camera (the number of new photos on this site is about to seriously decline). I’ll miss the hugs. I’ll miss the things people say when they find out that we’re cousins (“Wow, the Traveling Cousins! It sounds like a circus act!” and “Cousins? That’s…fun.”). I’ll miss having him as a buffer between me and the skeezy men on the streets. I’ll miss smoking our tobaccos pipes together on rooftop terraces in new cities.
The list goes on.
Kyle, the best "cousin" I’ve ever had, thanks for everything, man! Lotsa love, Sarah
