Vancouver, Canada, September 2015
You are either cycling, walking or riding your car sometime on the afternoon before the suns sets and then one of the most magical things in life happens to you, you see wild life! Be it a moose, a bear, a wild horse, a caribou, an elk, or a fox, wild life in general is cool!
At the beginning of our trip we were scared of stumbling upon a bear, especially for the bad reputation they have, out of the thousands or thousands of encounters people have with them, maybe one or two end up with a life threatening situation. Unfortunately these encounters are the ones that end up in the newspaper or on TV. We will never find a TV anchor who will report in his evening news,
Empathizing with Wild Life
¨Today a beautiful encounter between a human and a wild animal happened, and no one got hurt, in fact the people that stumbled upon the wild animal realized that when they stayed at a respectful distance, it can be very safe to admire these creatures ¨.
After a couple of months of living in the outdoors of the North American tundra and forests, we realized how much wild life we were able to see, just because of how inhabited these places were. As we moved closer to the cities, we noticed how these encounters dropped drastically.
I have always been a city boy and it has taken a couple of years of traveling on the bike for me to understand the order of nature, not as much as I want to, but much more than what I used to. And I have noticed that the more contact I have had with nature and the wonderful living creatures that inhabit the earth, I have grown more empathic to them. Cycling the North of the Americas has left me with a lot of lessons, one of them in particular: humans are not the only being who we need to empathize with. Understanding the order of the animal kingdom gives us a broader perspective on how to maintain and fight to balance out the health of our ecosystem.
Since New Zealand, we have witnessed the reduction of the glaciers due to climate change. Furthermore as we debate whether or not humans are truly responsible for this, the truth is that many of us city people like me have lost contact with Mother Nature. As living beings on this earth I feel that we still have a great opportunity to go out there in our world, our home, and explore our surroundings by bicycle. As Roman Krznaric says: seek an outrospective experience that will help us build a stronger tie with nature by expanding our empathic potential to the other living beings of our beautiful planet earth. So in spirit of that, Tasting Travels is happy to share with you our safe and glorious encounters with the miracles of this earth, the wild life
