He wanted isolation and metaphysical experiences with nature, I was offering him a real navigation.

A month ago, when I called him and asked to join me in the upcoming navigation of a Chinese river Folco’s answer was, at first, evasive. Somehow, his research he had been doing was diametrically opposed to the one I offered him.

He wanted isolation and metaphysical experiences with nature, I was offering him a real navigation on a very polluted river, in one of the most urbanized places in the world, where nature was just a distant memory. Yet, a week later, it was he who called me and said, “Let’s go!”.

If the concept of harmony, in the Chinese thought, is a delicate game of opposites, then it made sense to immerse ourselves in the Pearl River to realize that the creation and destruction of nature coexist in a harmonious endless cycle.