South America 1975

In the basement, in a big box at the bottom of a pile of big boxes, I found several reels of slides, pre-digital dinosaurs from my past.  Best of all were 2 reels of pictures taken on a trip to South America that Nonna and I made in the winter of 1975 - the winter in Oregon that is.  We were so young, so naive, so happy. 

One of my favorite pictures shows Nonnie in our hotel room in Rio.  The room is classical 70’s modern, the view out the window is stunning, and she looks great.  The picture fills me with a sense of happiness and optimism; I felt that anything was possible, that my whole life was just beginning, that it was going to be a great life, an interesting and exciting life.  In twelve hours I had gone from the snow of Oregon to the sun of Brazil, and I had done it with the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, although I may have been a little slow to realize it. 

Another picture shows Nonnie at the top of Sugar Loaf mountain overlooking the beach in Rio.  She is looking directly at the camera, that is at me, and I remember thinking how lucky I was at that moment.

The next stop was Iguacu Falls, which was a tropical paradise, full of incredible water falls, rivers, jungle, and parrots.  We took a little rowboat out to the edge of the falls, on one side of the tiny dock the water was still while on the other side it plunged over a waterfall, a hundred feet down.  The guy rowing obviously knew which side to take.

Then came Buenos Aires, a huge city where we stayed in a hotel with armed security officers outside our hotel room door, where the peso was devalued by 50% overnight, ruining the dreams of many of the locals.  We ate huge steaks and watched an outdoor play.

Then we flew to Lima, and ate one of the best meals of my life, in a neighborhood restaurant suggested in a tour book.  We didn’t speak Spanish and they didn’t speak English, and there weren’t any other tourists there, but we managed to get the biggest, and best, shrimp stuffed avocado ever, plus lots of ceviche, and grilled fish, and a wonderful bottle of wine.  A memorable feast.

After Lima we went to Cuzco, and Machu Picchu, where we climbed a local hill to get a stunning view of the ruins below.  One picture shows Nonnie climbing up some almost vertical stairs and the next shows us at the top - at the top of the mountain, at the top of our lives.

There is a sense of exhilaration in these pictures that I had forgotten,  a feeling of hopefulness, a sense that we could see forever, and do whatever we wanted with our lives.  Of course we had to return to our real lives in Portland, but the feelings were too strong to forget.