Every time David Arrow, Flechinaappears—reappears—because León has to bring prepared the answer to the question that everyone repeats to him: “Where are you now?” Perhaps that is why his first response is a frank smile, very much his own, the one he displayed when he left a fight in a wrestling (or judo) circle when he won… and when he lost. A smile that seems to say “do you have time?” Well, Arrow always carries in his backpack – “my greatest pleasure is to pick up the backpack and start walking” – a few countries, a few stories, happy days, nights in a dungeon, incredible sunrises and, above all, people with stories that You only find if you are going to take them from a jungle, a big city, a lost ranch, a car that picks you up when you hitchhike, a night lost in the immensity with a small tent…
– Let’s see David, last countries lived, you don’t visit countries, you travel through them, you live them.
– Well, first I had those destinations that we could call professional: Medellín in Colombia – there I knew, as you well know, that nothing would be the same again -, this was followed by Lima in Peru, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and I returned to Colombia, this time to the coffee axis area, in Manizales. In between getaways to Thailand, Türkiye…Last year I went to Kyrgyzstan and it was brutal! and then the countries that I count in the book, from Patagonia in Argentina to Alaska, at ‘the end of the world’: Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Iquitos (Peru again), Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, California, Nevada, Montana, Alberta, British Columbia and Alaska, but I would not talk about countries or states, I would talk about places and, above all, people.
– Are you talking about first ‘professional’ destinations, such as judoka?
– Yes of course. After many years as an active judoka (he was in the national elite) I went on to train and direct kids. It was twelve years ago and I was in those countries as a coach, coach, etc. But, at the same time, I insisted on believing that there is much more life beyond the tatami – which is difficult to see when active – and these adventures began, without separating myself from the sport. For almost three years I have lived in a small town in Bern, I work for the Swiss Judo Federation as a coach, and I am in charge of generating talents who will later become part of the national Judo team.
When reviewing the countries visited, David referred to Kyrgyzstan with the expression it was brutal, which means a lot to him who has experienced almost everything. “What an experience! I arrived in Bishkek, the capital, I had fifteen days ahead of me and I had no idea what I was going to do. I love traveling like that. The second day I started hitchhiking around the country and they were incredible fifteen days I ended up sleeping in the mountains inside yurts with nomadic shepherds, I spent two nights camping on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul with a Christian organization that I found along the way – which I swear, was the closest thing to a cult! and as soon as I woke up the second morning I left there ‘cracking’, and I rode a horse and shared a barbecue with the family of the country’s defense minister. Everything that happened to me was brutal.”
Without forgetting the trip from Argentine Patagonia to Alaska that has now led to a book that has just seen the light, ‘Remember to travel. My odyssey from Argentina to Alaska‘. He has dedicated a lot of time to it, he has carefully chosen the words and the title has been an odyssey: “I’m going to be honest with you, I was looking, like any kid, for what everyone…wanted to be cool!” I did my own mental tricks thinking: ‘Wow! If you do this you’re going to be crowned a man!’ It’s also true that I was looking to give some meaning to my youth and I thought about what I could do to not regret it when I look back years later. I thought I was going to die young – and I still think so – and I had the anxiety of wanting to do more and more things. But, curiously, the trip erased all these initial ideas and created a new traveler, an adventurer rather. “The trip itself, my way of thinking about being cool and attracting attention, evaporated and I ended up realizing that that trip was transforming me. I wasn’t looking for anything, I was just learning to know who I was, how much I was able to tolerate myself, what fears are capable of paralyzing me or what I want in life. In the book I say that it was a very necessary catharsis. Although, obviously, I lived through stages that were a true odyssey, the trip also offers you moments of humanity that weigh much more. that everything the bad. If everything in life had been fantastic, this book would be shit and I would never have written it.
– Some danger.
– We shouldn’t tell it, so I don’t sell the book. I’ll tell you there are many, for a tube. For example, when I was in a Bolivian prison or dead tired in the middle of the state of Nevada or sleeping in Gardiner, Montana, and in the middle of the night a snout appeared under my fragile tent…”
– Would you say the world is dangerous?
– I have the impression that that is what those who have never left home say, I would like to break that stereotype: There are dangerous areas, I do not doubt it and I know it first hand, but the world is full of fantastic people who welcome you even if you are a stranger. Sometimes it happens even in those countries that we think are a horror – and yes, in part they can be – but to give you an example, there is more humanity in a house lost by the hand of God in the middle of the department of Antioquia than in the Kilometer 0 of Madrid”.
– What seduced you to start and finish this adventure, an odyssey?
– You already know a seduction, because you have read the book. But, joking aside, I felt seduced by so many things that it would be impossible to give a single example. The local gastronomy from each place, the Inca atmosphere of Peru, the wind of Patagonia, the Milky Way seen from a ranch in Montana, the interior of Mexico. And the women…oh the women! So different in each place and in every way. “One of the protagonists of my book is a five-year-old Peruvian girl who in some way marks the structure of my entire trip, with whom, as I cross countries, I continue to maintain contact.”
A story among many stories that, he admits, some of them touched me: “The story of Romaña, my former student from Medellín, where there are 13-year-old hitmen, is very hard, and he gave me an answer that ‘touched me’. Richard, A genuine guy from Alaska, look, I got carried away with him crossing Central America and after my trip he was with me in Argovejo…it was a revolution and the whole town, the day after arriving, was inviting him to wines! Memo, a cowboy from Wilsall, with whom to this day I maintain a very special contact.”
The answer he got is in the book. After a meal in which the boy – a judo student during his time in Medellín with a group of kids who were looking for a way out of their painful situation in judo – ate with great voracity and, in response to the jokes of the rest, he said, lengthening the sentences because he was embarrassed: “Teacher, you see, I… when I see a lot of food and I like it… I cry.”
Each chapter has a QR code to view photos and videos of numerous passages; but the strength of this ‘Remember to travel’ are the thousand stories (it is not a way of speaking, they are) that it contains, told with great freshness, careful writing and full of cultural references about all the landscapes and countries that it passes through.