So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good Bye

I´m sitting in the Tuxtla airport (the nearest airport to San Cristobal where I´ve been for the past 4 weeks). There´s a large waiting room. There´are only a handful of other passengers here. The flight is supposed to leave at 10 a.m. It´s supposed to start boarding at 9:30. There´s no plane. There are 6 departure gates. Each one is empty. I´m told that summer, Easter week, and Christmas are the¨"high seasons." Other than that, Chiapas is pretty deserted. In San Cristobal, there are many more hotels and restaurants than there are customers to fill them.
At about 10:15, the knowledgeable passengers began arriving in droves. The plane just pulled up, off-loading passengers. How do the frequent fliers know??
We left at 10:30, half an hour after the scheduled departure time, which means right on time, Mexican time. The flight was scheduled to arrive at 11:30. It arrived at exactly 11:30, right on time. Obviously, they build in a delay factor into every arrival time. Clever.
The expression is "Parting is such sweet sorrow." One drawback to traveling and staying in a place for awhile is that you form friendships and get to know a bunch of new people fairly well, and then, pop, you pull the plug and head off for some different part of the world. For me, if there´s a "sweet" aspect to the parting, it´s finding myself in a moving vehicle or plane and watching whole worlds pass by me. Out the window of my bus or van, I see men working the fields or women carrying heavy loads, little kids selling chiclets, all of which translates into the daily need to pursue an income. What a luxury it is for me to sit in a moving vehicle and simply gaze at them, as if peeping through a window into their lives. Their fortunes are laid bare, totally transparent, and always on the thin edge of just making it.
The "sorrow" part is leaving behind the wonderful people of San Cristobal. The teachers I met there all shared one trait in common. They taught for the love of teaching, and they lived in Chiapas because of their love for this part of the world. They´ve all come into contact with an huge number of gringos from all over North America and northern Europe. Many of them have traveled to north America and Europe. They could easily get jobs in the states or europe if they wanted to and earn a salary many time more than what they´re currently making.
Yet here they are, most of them holding down two jobs, just making ends meet. They don´t own cars; they couldn´t afford one. A new book is a luxury. Daily, they observe close at hand the relative affluence of gringos and it doesn´t seem to negatively affect them. They love teaching and they love Chiapas. There´s so much I could still learn from them.
But for me, I´m off on a jet plane, and, as the ancient folk song goes, don´t know when I´ll be back again. The warmth of the sun on my pale face, the sandy beach, etc., will help erode the memories of these highlands, but will not touch the warm feelings inside.