1. The first time I saw Machu Picchu
It was a long, long time ago. It was 1985. Peru was in tremendous economic and social chaos. It was years before tourism became massive and saturated this Inca site. I was traveling with my sister and we contracted an excursion to go from Cusco to Machu Picchu and return in the day. Things of inexperience. The visit to the citadel was done freely, without queues, you could enter and leave whenever you wanted. And the vision of that magical place captivated me. When the agreed time to go down we looked at each other and, without needing to say anything, we decided that we could not leave such a place like that, with outburst. We give up the train back, we sit on the grass watching sunset over the beaked mountains of the Urubamba valley, with the venerable stones of Machu Picchu for us (nobody threw us out or urged us with the closure), and we delight as I have rarely done it again with a unique vision just for the two of us. Then we go down to Aguas Calientes to find a place to spend the night. I will never forget that moment no matter how many years pass .
Today its fame has reached such a point that the authorities have set quotas of 800 daily visitors , who can stay on the mountain for eight hours. The busiest season is from July to August, but at any other time during the dry season (from April to October) the visit is just as attractive and there are far fewer people.
2. When I set foot in Antarctica
There are trips and trips. And then there is Antarctica. The Journey in capital letters . The coldest, most remote and inaccessible place on the planet. I was lucky to be sent there for a professional job in 2011, to mark the centenary of the conquest of the South Pole. To get there you have to cross, for two eternal days, the terrifying Drake Pass , a sea crossing of almost a thousand kilometers that separates Cape Horn (Chile) from the Antarctic Peninsula. I remember the waves reaching the deck of the ship, but when I asked the captain for epic declarations, he told me, without a hint of emotion, that this was a normal day in those latitudes, the strong winds known as the "roaring 40" . When I landed on Livingston Island , the first Antarctic land where we anchored, I knelt down and kissed the ground , aware that I was trampling over the same place that Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, Ross, Nordenskjöld, and so many other revered explorers were.
3. A dream: by Cape Horn Horn
I would already have the right to put four rings on my ear and urinate four times to windward because I have been many others in Cape Horn . But I will always remember the first experience there, when I dubbed it on a sailing ship in the company of friends as loving as I was of the romance of epic voyages of exploration. The schooner, a two-masted steel hull skippered by a French couple crazy by the sea who lived in Ushuaia chartered (renting) their boat, left the Beagle Channel towards the Picton Island in search of the open sea and the mythical end of the emerged lands. When I set foot on the Chilean island of Hornos it was as if I had set it on the moon itself. The materialization of the dream of a child who , as a child , liked to be given maps rather than balls .
4. Christening with sharks
One of my passions is diving . I have been fortunate to travel half the world filming the best seabed for the television series Journey to the depths . Since I first immersed myself in my native Cabo de Palos (Murcia) I have had an obsession: seeing sharks in their natural habitat . I tried it for the first time in Madagascar , but I didn't see a single one (other than I almost died from a rookie recklessness). I got it on my next trip: Galapagos . And there it was crazy: diving into the Wolf and Darwin islands , among hundreds of hammerhead sharks , huge galapagueños over three meters long, white or reef points, in addition to the big prize in these waters ( the whale shark ), is an adrenaline rush impossible to forget. Nothing I have seen again, in hundreds of dives and dozens of seas visited later, has managed to match those days under the waters of the Ecuadorian archipelago. Well, almost nothing: those huge whale sharks that I filmed for a documentary in Cenderawasih Bay , Papua, also left their mark on me.
5. And then I said enough in Aconcagua
There was a time when I was more fit and gave me high altitude mountaineering. My friends José Luis and Begoña proposed that I climb Aconcagua (6,982 meters) , the roof of America, and to Argentina that the three of us left. I did not get to the top, I confess. I stayed at about 6,500 meters of altitude, before the famous Canaleta that gives way to the final ridge. I was totally exhausted, with the beginning of altitude sickness , it was difficult for me to breathe and I was also alone. I sat on a stone admiring the Andes at my feet and when I recovered I wrote a few words in the notebook that I always carry with me, a reflection on the effort, the search for your limits and the meaning of life that every time you I reread I feel like crying with emotion and happiness.
6. Waiting for helicopter in Greenland
To celebrate our 50th birthday, four friends decided that we would cross a part of Greenland on skis . Without any previous experience; in fact, one of them had not set a table in life. But there is nothing more daring than ignorance. We start from the Qaleragdlit glacier , in the south of the island, and we walk about 200 kilometers towards the frozen interior of Greenland in search of some nunatak that emerge solitary in the middle of this white desert. Nunatak is the Inuit word that defines the black mountains that protrude from the ice . In reality, what you see is only the last 400 or 500 meters from the top, the rest of its more than 2,500 meters of altitude are under the ice. We dragged a pulka (small transport sled) for 12 days and we achieved the goal: to reach the foot of a mountain in the middle of the frozen plain that no one had ever climbed before, and climb it. But on the way down the foem unleashed , the hurricane wind that sweeps the Greenlandic ice cap with gusts of more than 100 kilometers per hour. We spent three days locked in a tent almost covered in snow (the other was torn by the wind), with hardly any food or water. We saw the wolf's ears. If that store had also succumbed to the gale, we probably would have been frozen to death. When on the third day the wind died down and the helicopter we had hired to get us out of there was able to fly, the noise of the engine seemed to me the most sublime of melodies.
7. Selfi in the Tiger's Nest of Bhutan
There are scenarios whose mere contemplation justify a trip. Bhutan , a small kingdom nestled in the Himalayas, is one of the destinations dreamed of by any traveler, although for me, to be honest, the landscape was somewhat disappointing (not so its people, culture and lifestyle). But here is a place that alone justifies the long journey to reach this country that measures its wealth for the happiness of its inhabitants: Taktshang or the Tiger's Nest . A 17th century monastery - rebuilt in 2005 after a sudden fire in 1998 - which can only be reached by walking along trails in the Paro Valley . Raised on the ledge of a precipice that looms, vertiginous, 700 meters from a cliff cut to a peak, it is also an important pilgrimage site for Tibetan Buddhism. Tears came to my eyes when I saw it for the first time .
8. The Kapingamarangi coconut trees
The craziest professional commission that I have been proposed to do was a report on Kapingamarangi, an atoll in Micronesia lost in the middle of the South Pacific where 350 people live isolated from everything. There are no regular flights, boats, or other means of arriving or leaving. After much searching, trying to rent a helicopter or a seaplane (there was no budget problem), I located in Pohnpei, the capital of the Federated States of Micronesia, Rodney Collier, a madman of the seas who was there temporarily and he chartered his Satisfaction Plus , a 15-meter monocoque with which he lived wandering the seven seas. Once the price was agreed, he agreed to take me through the 500 nautical miles that separate Pohnpei from Kapingamarangi, but not before warning me that if something happened to us at sea, no one could come to our aid. After five days of navigation I managed to get there. When I saw the plumes of palm trees that indicated the tiny atoll, solitary in the middle of the ocean's immensity, I felt the same ecstasy that Rodrigo de Triana had to experience when sighting the New World .
9. Passion for Africa
I love Africa, it is the place I always want to return to. I have been traveling this still mysterious and full of energy continent for almost 40 years, so I have many happy moments in it. Having chosen one, I remember an Ethiopian Easter in Lalibela , a small town in the north of the country famous for its rock churches . We would not be more than 20 foreigners those days there, among hundreds and hundreds of pilgrims who came from all over Ethiopia to celebrate one of the peak moments of the Coptic Christian calendar. The monotone rhythm of the kebro (drums) and the hymn chants of the Orthodox priests rumbled against the red stone walls of the rock- cut temples. Its echo was lost among the tunnels and passageways that linked them. At one point, the rhythm of the music and the litany became more vivid. The pilgrims rose, each lit a candle, and marched in procession around the churches, following the retinue of popes, musicians, and standard bearers who raised icons of gold leaf and meskal crosses cast in bronze several centuries earlier. To outsiders, excitement knotted in our throats. It was as if we had been transported to a page in the Bible , because what was happening there at the time must have changed little, to say the least, for millennia.
10. Alone on the Camino de Santiago
And finally, a happy moment in Spain: the first time I did the Camino de Santiago . I have completed so many pilgrimages as to earn more jubilees than the life of a sinner I have left, because for more than a decade I wrote guides on all roads to Compostela for the publisher El País-Aguilar. But none of those Jacobean work routes could match the excitement of my first time on the French Way . It was in 1994, when the tourist pilgrimage boom had not yet broken out . It was February, it was freezing cold and I was alone on a bicycle. The route did not have even 10% of the services that are offered today to the walker. There were hardly any shelters open in winter and you traveled miles and miles alone. Those wonderful solitudes , those soliloquies, the true hospitality that you still found on the Camino and the ecstasy upon finally reaching Santiago I have never felt again.
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