Discovery
In Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild, the character York, played by Leslie Cheung, travels to the Phillippines in order to find his biological mother. At the aristocratic mansion in which she resides he is turned away at the door by a maid. As he walks away he refuses to look back, so that his biological mother does not get the satisfaction of seeing her son’s face.
Days of Being Wild, Wong Kar Wai, 1990
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Hiram Bingham was led up to Macchu Picchu by an eleven year old Quechua boy who was living nearby at the time and regularly played up in the ruined mountain-top city with friends.
Edmund Hillary was accompanied up Everest by Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa who grew up near the base of the mountain.
Henry Morton Stanley overcame his fear of women while claiming the Congo territory for King Leopold II of Belgium. In order to make the Congolese men work for him he would kidnap their wives, chain them up and release them either when their husbands relented or the women died, whichever occured first.
Richard Harding Davis and the “Wood Boys” of the Congo, 1907
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David Livingstone heard second-hand from locals in fishing boats about the grand cataract he would later name as Victoria Falls.
Conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa was told, rather nonchalantly by a band of Indians, that the Pacific Ocean could be seen “from the top of the next mountain.”
When Alfonso Alvarez de Pineda sailed up the Mississippi in 1519 he counted “no fewer than 40 Indian towns or villages” along its banks.
Aguirre, Wrath of God, Werner Herzog, 1972
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On his way to Tenochtitlan Cortes attempted to recruit the shipwrecked Gonzalo Guerrero, a Spaniard who had been living amongst the Mayans for seven years and who raised some of the first Mestizo children in history. Guerrero replied to Cortes’ advances with the following letter to Friar Aguilar, who had for a time lived with Guerrero:
“Brother Aguilar; I am married and have three children, and they look on me as a cacique (lord) here, and captain in time of war. My face is tattooed and my ears are pierced. What would the Spaniards say if they saw me like this? Go and God’s blessing be with you, for you have seen how handsome these children of mine are. Please give me some of those beads you have brought to give to them and I will tell them that my brothers have sent them from my own country.”
In Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together the character Lai, played by Tony Leung, visits Argentina with his boyfriend Ho, played by Leslie Cheung, so that they may revive their ailing relationship. The aim of their stay is to see the Iguazu Falls together. Eventually, after numerous break-ups and reconciliations prompted by Ho’s promiscuity, Lai visits the Falls alone.
Happy Together, Wong Kar Wai, 1997
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Those Native Americans who first saw the ships of Europeans and imagined them as floating mountains were experiencing the optical phenomenon of Fata Morgana, the result of a temperature inversion over water.
The Europeans searching for Cibola created those cities of gold they sought.
Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog, 1982
