Posts Tagged ‘travel’

Mexico will always hold a spe­cial place in my heart. It was the first country I trav­elled to on my own, and I did so rather impetu­ously, at a time when I was an emo­tional basket case on the verge of a nervous break­down. I showed up late at night car­rying only a vague address of a woman who didn’t seem aware I was coming, car­rying nothing but a little kid’s back­pack and a know­ledge of Spanish far more rustic than I have now (which isn’t saying a much). I had a hand full of fresh new stitches and nerve damage. Everyone who knew me was pretty con­vinced I’d either come back dead or land myself in jail.

Col­ourful build­ings, replete with seem­ingly arbit­rary paint­ings along the walls, are just so common a part of the visual cul­ture even in Ensenada, where I lived (mostly) for my time in Mexico. Just walking the streets makes me want to start painting in vibrant colours.

Instead, Mexico fixed me. My exper­i­ence there is a big part of why I’m so driven to travel now. I have long wanted to return to Mexico, but I’ll admit I think a large part of my ori­ginal infatu­ation with the country was an emo­tional one—I wanted a chance to see the country itself, rather than just seeing how it changed me.

What I dis­covered, living in Mexico for three months, was a place that never stopped sur­prising me.

There’s this story about French poet (and Sur­realist pioneer) André Breton coming to Mexico, and asking a car­penter to build him a table. The car­penter requested a drawing to follow. Breton draw a quick sketch of a table, ren­dering it in three dimen­sions, that way you would once you’re older than, say, six, and under­stand a bit better that very little—beyond paper and anor­exic models—in the world is flat

The car­penter, of course, came back with a tri­an­gular table with two legs shorter than the other two.

Some­where along the highway between Mexico City and Oaxaca, I found this giant advert­ising struc­ture built into the hill. This is, in case you’re won­dering, in the abso­lute middle of nowhere, and it must be about twenty feet tall. Like their flags, appar­ently Mexico likes its ads giant. I also saw a man on an open truck, seated at a rifle mounted on the cab roof, and thought this the far more bizarre ele­ment on that ride.

This story came up a few times in dif­ferent con­ver­sa­tions with people. So did stories of a remote spot in the jungle near Xlitla. There, an eccentric British millionaire—who kept boa con­strictors as pets—built a sur­realist garden, com­plete with a stairway leading to nothing and some­thing titled “The House on Three Floors Which Will in Fact Have Five or Four or Six”. In Tijuana, there’s a giant naked woman built by a sculptor who lived in her with his wife and chil­dren. Try as I might, I couldn’t find her any­where; everyone I met in Tijuana had never even heard of her. And of course there’s Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, living around the corner from Trotsky in Mexico City, and a whole slew of sur­realist writers and artists. Sal­vador Dali, appar­ently, at one point said that he hated Mexico. He couldn’t, he said, return to a country that was more sur­real than his own paintings.

I became fas­cin­ated with the sur­real in Mexico, and the more inter­ested in it I became, the more I noticed it. Almost everyone I spoke to about it had some­thing to con­tribute, and a lot of people started to point out strange things to me, just so that I’d notice them. Much of the sur­real in Mexico, I think, lies in the jux­ta­pos­i­tions. The country still retains ele­ments of its ancient cul­tures in a way many others don’t, but adds in the over­whelm­ingly oppressive influ­ence of the Spanish con­quista­doras, who quite lit­er­ally built their Cath­olic churches atop the Aztec pyramids.

I think this was Aztec, but I don’t quite remember. The clean lines and bold col­ours are used throughout all sorts of Mex­ican art, both pre and post Colom­bian. Somehow it man­ages to be ornate without sac­ri­fi­cing a sense of sim­pli­city. The col­ours used are so super-saturated that they verge on fluor­es­cent and clashing, but again, somehow it works. I saw these sorts of colour schemes every­where, espe­cially in the folk art in Oaxaca, which used intensely bright col­ours on little sur­realist animal sculptures.

I read some­where that Mexico is actu­ally one of the most Cath­olic coun­tries in the world, and it doesn’t really sur­prise me. Cath­oli­cism is evident every­where, from the altars set up in the most unex­pected of places to to the pro­ces­sions marching down the streets singing during various Christ­mas­time hol­i­days. I’ve taken to drinking a lot of tequila straight—like scotch, which you can do in Mexico because tequila isn’t fire­water here unless you buy the lighter-fluid kind for six dollars—when these things happen, and just wan­dering out into the crowds to see what on earth is going on. My favourite was the first day of the Virgin of Guada­lupe fest­ival, where there was a huge feria, with food and amuse­ment park rides and gaudy images of reli­gious fig­ures to be pur­chases,  set up around the church (which was lighting off fire­works, of course). On the steps on the church, a priest was throwing holy water on the heads of the amassed throngs.

But Cath­oli­cism in Mexico is dif­ferent from Cath­oli­cism in other places. Here, there are hol­i­days that don’t exist any­where else. There are saints and revered fig­ures that don’t exist any­where in any liturgy, or in fact in any country other than Mexico at all. Santa Muerte is a prime example of this. She’s quite likely one of the most revered “reli­gious” fig­ures in Mexico, espe­cially by the crim­inal and lower-class ele­ments, but she’s actu­ally shunned by the Cath­olic church.

In spite of this, people build massive shrines to her, and many pray to her more reli­giously than the any properly-sanctioned non-secular hero. Again, this goes all the way back into the country’s Aztec roots. The con­tinued infatu­ation in Mexico with death has roots all the way back into the ancient pre-Columbian soci­eties, who can­ni­bal­ized their friends, sac­ri­ficed their young, and built elab­orate graves for their deceased.

An elab­or­ately pre­pared crypt, found in a hole in the floor some­where in the amazing useum of Anthro­po­logy in Mexico City.

Throughout so many things I saw while I was there, the skull or skel­eton motif recurred con­stantly. It’s one of the unshake­able real­ities of Mex­ican imagery, and I think a part of what draws me to Mexico as well. I was so excited for Día de los Muertos, and rather dis­ap­pointed when I dis­covered there weren’t huge parades of people in cos­tume those days in Ensenada (in Mexico City or Oaxaca, both of which I vis­ited later, the story would be quite dif­ferent, but Ensenada, while it has its charms, is not Real Mexico.)

Far from being a morbid interest, this infatu­ation with death often comes as a cel­eb­ra­tion of life instead. Far from grisly, the imagery is most often car­toonish, playful, or replete with bright col­ours. Skel­eton fig­ures are often presented as a bride and groom, per­haps mocking the insti­tu­tion that is so highly revered in Mexico. There’s a syn­thesis here between the ancient and the rel­at­ively new Cath­olic tra­di­tions, and they meet in strange and unex­pected ways.

Having lived in Mexico for nearly three months, I started to notice how incred­ibly rich the visual nar­rative of the country is, and that there are cer­tain ele­ments that recur con­sist­ently, no matter what you’re looking at. For me, the bright colour palettes, the con­tinual images of death, blood, and viol­ence, are as much a part of Mexico as the tacos.

I came to Mexico hoping to answer the riddle—to figure out where all the sur­real rooted from. I learned a lot, and I saw a lot, but ulti­mately, I think I ended up leaving with more ques­tions than I had when I first arrived.

I have no idea what this vehicle is used for, if any­thing, but I like it. The hand-painted typo­graphy every­where was really lovely.

In the past twelve hours, I’ve booked two flight itin­er­aries for six dif­ferent flights to be taken in the next three weeks. In December and January, I’ll have vis­ited around eleven dif­ferent cities (pos­sibly more), in five dif­ferent coun­tries, on two dif­ferent con­tin­ents. In Feb­ruary, I’ll be adding even more coun­tries and cities to my list. By the time I return to Canada in the summer, I’ll have lived in seven dif­ferent coun­tries in four continents.

I am, without ques­tion, a vagabond.

Booking a flight can make my heart race. The feeling of landing in a strange city, lost and con­fused, gives me great pleasure. I actu­ally get a huge rush of endorphins, like a high, at the exact moment that I feel an air­plane leave the ground. I am hap­piest, and most sure of myself, walking through a for­eign place and watching everything around me. If I stay in one place for longer than a few weeks, I begin to get intense wanderlust.

It struck me the other day that what I’m doing is not exactly normal. Most people don’t take off from their homes for long stretches of time, and those who do most often travel in a way that’s markedly dif­ferent from mine. When I meet new people, I often get thrown by their ques­tions: yes, I’m trav­el­ling, sort of. But I’m still working. And I live in the coun­tries I travel to. No, I prob­ably haven’t seen that famous monu­ment, and I quite likely don’t care much to, either.

This is actu­ally the only pho­to­graph I have taken in San Fran­cisco, and it’s tech­nic­ally in Moun­tain View. Still, I find it more inter­esting than a snap­shot of a monu­ment that’s already been pho­to­graphed a mil­lion times over, by people expo­nen­tially more skilled than I (and likely wielding better cam­eras than the one in their phone).

I went to San Fran­cisco last week, but I didn’t see Alc­a­traz or the Golden Gate Bridge. I went to México City prior to that, but didn’t bother with the pyr­amids. While I recog­nize that some things are tourist traps with good reason, the more I travel, the less interest I have in these things. Part of this is because they’re often crawling with tour­ists, espe­cially in Europe, but another part of it is that vis­iting often feels empty. Sure, they’re beau­tiful or breath­taking or inter­esting, but I’ve invari­ably seen them already in movies and pho­to­graphs. The crowd of tour­ists mind­lessly snap­ping pho­to­graphs of these much-photographed monu­ments, as though checking off items from a scav­enger hunt, only exacer­bates this emptiness.

I don’t want to see the world through a lens. I want to taste, smell, and feel it as well. That’s why I’m trav­el­ling instead of watching a doc­u­mentary or zooming through Google Street View. I want to exper­i­ence and interact with the world around me.

The true journey, as the inter­jec­tion of an “out­side” dif­ferent from our normal one, implies a com­plete change of nutri­tion, a digesting of the vis­ited country– its fauna and flora and its cul­ture (not only the dif­ferent culinary prac­tices and con­di­ments but the dif­ferent imple­ments used to grind the flour or stir the pot) — making it pass between the lips and down the eso­phagus. This is the only kind of travel that has a meaning nowadays, when everything vis­ible you can see on tele­vi­sion without rising from your easy chair.

The incom­par­able Italo Calvino, “Under the Jaguar Sun”
(About travels in Mexico! Must find prior to leaving.)

I’ve always been prone to making up my own rules. While I tech­nic­ally wrote some­thing of a busi­ness plan (in about two hours, at four in the morning, off the top of my head), I didn’t do most of the things you’re sup­posed to do when run­ning a busi­ness. Hon­estly, some­times I wonder how I ever made it work, and how it con­tinues to work for me. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I don’t really do much of any­thing in the tra­di­tional way—my work, my edu­ca­tion, my rela­tion­ships, my pas­times, and my travels are all plotted out according to a set of rules that exists solely in my own head.

Ser­i­ously, I live here. This is not always what comes to mind when people think “Mexico”. I like it for its dirty parts as much as for its pretty parts.

Somehow, though, it all works. I become more and more delighted with my life as I veer fur­ther and fur­ther from the orthodox.

I’ve noticed that some­times people don’t under­stand this. I received a birthday card one year that said “Don’t worry, you’ll find your place and settle down even­tu­ally,” and it took me a while to stop being offended by the implic­a­tion that I’m unhappy because I haven’t roped down a man, staked out my plot in the woods, and started pro­du­cing chil­dren yet. While I know that many people are happy with this sort of pre­scribed life, I know I’m not one of them (or at least, I’m not yet, but I sin­cerely doubt I’ll ever be). It frus­trates me that some­times that means people will see me as a failure, because I’m choosing to do things in such an unusual manner. I abso­lutely love my life, and not everyone who “has it all” would say that. Some of the coolest, best-adjusted people I know are weirdos like me.

So buck with tra­di­tion. Drop out of school, live out of your car, take six dif­ferent wives. Don’t break the rules solely for the sake of breaking them, but don’t allow them to fence you into a life you didn’t choose. The world is full of people who are stuck by cir­cum­stance, but as a cit­izen of an affluent country, you have such a myriad of options open to you. Don’t follow the status quo just because it’s what we’re trained to do.

I want a world full of free-spirits and vagabonds.

From a dentist’s window in Ensenada. I’m not sure if this is con­sidered an unorthodox mar­keting tactic in Mexico or not, but for the pur­poses of this post, I’ll choose to believe that it is.

A little more than a month into my Grand World Tour, and I’m still utterly thrilled by it. My sense of time is all skewed—it feels as though I’ve been away from my “home” and the people I love so much longer, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve been living in México for a month. I’ve been absorbing, learning, and chan­ging so much, and I don’t think I have, for even a single moment, yet regretted my decision to under­take this grand venture.

It’s pretty intense what I’m doing, and I often find myself overly emotional—not in a neg­ative or pos­itive way really, but I think it’s my way of pro­cessing the gen­eral instability of this way of life. Everything around me is either con­stantly in flux or con­stantly unfa­miliar, and it would be easy to become unbal­anced by it.

One month in, here are my tricks for staying sane. Nine months (and two or three more con­tin­ents) in, I’m checking back with this, to see how much of it stays the same.

1. Realize that some­times a day will be a wash.

Some days, you’ll be sick. Some days, you’ll be tired and jet­lagged. Some days, you’ll be mel­an­choly and home­sick. I struggled with this with my recent trip to México City—I was only there for eight days, and I wanted to absorb as much of the city as I pos­sibly could. It’s fas­cin­ating, chaotic, and a chal­lenge to com­pre­hend, and I cas­tig­ated myself for being asleep or working at ten am. I should have been out exploring! Then I real­ized that run­ning myself down just doesn’t work long-term. I’m not on hol­iday for a week, I’m living my life in a for­eign place. Not every day will be pro­ductive work-wise, and not every day will be rev­el­atory travel-wise. Some days will be neither. That’s okay.

Some days, you get totally lost for hours, because all the streets in Mexico City go in circles and have six dif­ferent names. But then you acci­dent­ally bump into beau­tiful old build­ings covered in graf­fiti, and everything works out.

2. Stay in touch.

My biggest fear is loneli­ness. This is my first time trav­el­ling for more than five weeks by myself, and I know that I’ll miss the social struc­tures, and the people I care about, more than any­thing. Luckily, the internet is a magical thing, and it affords me roughly a thou­sand dif­ferent ways to keep in con­tact with people. So I use Face­book and Twitter more than I would nor­mally. I send texts to my litttle sister via What­sApp. I send emails and make phone calls. I had a Skype date with my room­mate, in which we both drank wine, talked, and made faces at one another for two hours. I send stories written on the back of post­cards. Keeping in touch with the people who made my “stable” life so rewarding (and in fact were pretty much the reason I stayed in Hal­ifax as long as I did between trips) goes a long way to keeping me sane and bridging the old life with the new. When everything around you changes, you change immeas­ur­ably too. Keeping grips on your alternate self helps you realize the things that remain con­stant and true throughout, and help you to be more assured of who you are, even when some­times it feels as though everything’s been torn out from under you.

3. Make new friends.

While it’s important to stay in touch, if I didn’t make new friends, I’d be hor­rific­ally lonely and home­sick. This was the biggest mis­take I made in Argen­tina, when I wasn’t trav­el­ling alone, and it con­trib­uted greatly to the deteri­or­a­tion of my rela­tion­ship with my travel com­panion, as well as my own sense of self.

I didn’t make friends with a baby jaguar, but I really wish I had.

I tend towards being a hermit. I’m a bit of a mis­an­thrope to begin with, and I work by myself all day, so it’s easy to spend a day in which I don’t talk to anyone. So I’ve act­ively been working against that, knowing that while yes, some­times I just need time and space away from humans, but more often it’s healthy for me to meet new people and make new con­nec­tions. I live with a room­mate, I couch­surf a lot again, and I make it a rule to gen­er­ally say “yes” when someone asks if I want to go out. As a result, I’ve met a ton of awe­some, intel­li­gent, varied people, and I’ve learned more about the cul­ture and hidden under­cur­rents of this country than I ever would have if I’d isol­ated myself. Sure, some­times I end up stuck at a party where everyone’s speaking Spanish and I feel lost and uncom­fort­able, but most of the time I find myself having a great time, making new friends, and learning new things. As far as I’m con­cerned, that’s a more valu­able part of travel than seeing pyramids.

4. Focus on the little things.

I find, the more I travel, the less I care for typ­ical touristy things. Sure, lots of these things are famous attrac­tions for a reason, but I no longer beat myself up if I miss one or two (or six­teen, depending on the place). Usu­ally, the guide­book attrac­tions are swarming with people (this becomes espe­cially true in Europe), and, while impressive, can feel like a one-hit-wonder. It’s nice to see, but then it’s over. I’ve seen so many tour­ists storm through an attrac­tion, taking photos every two seconds, not stop­ping to con­sider any­thing or even look at the thing they’re pho­to­graphing so enthu­si­ast­ic­ally. (Watch people in the Vat­ican if you don’t believe me.) It feels empty.

Really gor­geous graf­fiti in Colonia Roma. As much as I like museums and such, I think out­door art install­a­tions (whether “legal” or not) are far more inter­esting. Art should be con­tex­tual and integ­rated into daily life. México City is full of great museums, but I liked the series of coffee cups installed out­side the museum better.

I’m finding more value in taking a six-hour walk through a city, get­ting lost and finding inter­esting signs, build­ings, or things hap­pening. I’ve dis­covered that I love urban parks of all shapes and sizes and beau­tiful, multi-level book­stores (I’ve been to #4 and #6!). I really enjoy finding a per­fect little café to work away my day in. Long-term travel isn’t so much about the awe-inspiring or the impressive as it is about the everyday.

5. Remain flexible.

This is, above all, my most important rule when trav­el­ling, living, or nav­ig­ating rela­tion­ships. Things will always fail in unex­pected ways, espe­cially when you’re in con­stant motion. You need to be super-flexible in order to make it work. Every time I embark on another long strange trip, I change the rules up, adjusting the for­mula until I hit on some­thing that works.

If you want sta­bility, stay home. If you want adven­ture, learn to adapt.

This doesn’t prop­erly cap­ture the chaos of Mexico City, but ima­gine that there are a few mil­lion people jammed into tiny streets over­flowing with street vendors and old build­ings. I’ve left the orderly world I lived in behind; there’s no room for rigidity here!

All the way to Mexico, that’s all people asked me. The US cus­toms officer, before I’d even left Hal­ifax, looked at me like I was insane when I said I wasn’t staying in San Diego, but was just plan­ning to meander across the border. (Tech­nic­ally a lie, as I stayed in San Diego the first night, but I have such rotten luck with cus­toms officers that I find it’s best to give them the simplest answer pos­sible, and they’re often con­fused enough by my vag­a­bond ways.) “You’re going to Mexico?” he asked. “Near the border? By your­self? Don’t you know how dan­gerous it is down there?”

San Diego, from my hostel bed­room window in Gaslamp. If you’re looking for a nice place to stay with sur­pris­ingly shoddy internet, the rooms at the HI hostel were actu­ally rather lovely. I miss that bed.

I’ll admit I expected it from xeno­phobic Amer­icans. (Sorry, America! You’re great! Travel more, okay?) What sur­prised me was that, as I got closer to the border and found myself the only white girl on a trolley crammed with Mex­icans heading home, even they started asking me if I was in my right mind. I’ll point out here that they were busy being super friendly and helpful, helping me manœuvre my six­teen tonnes of lug­gage around. But for whatever reason, everyone seems sur­prised at my decision to live 100km from the notorious border for two months.

It sunk in. I tried as much as pos­sible to remind myself that a lot of travel alerts are xeno­phobic hooey, and that mil­lions of people live out their lives in northern Baja with no troubles what­so­ever. I’ve done a lot of trav­el­ling, some of it to places many would con­sider “dan­gerous”, and often these places were my favour­ites. (Sara­jevo, with its two mil­lion exploded land­mines and its gor­geous wounded beauty, is a not­able example.) In all my travels, I’ve only twice had any­thing really bad or dan­gerous happen to me, one of which was a mere pick-pocketing that lost me an iPhone. Ulti­mately, far more hor­rible things have happened to me in the city I call home than have in for­eign countries.

Sixty miles south, Ensenada looks like a dif­ferent world. Ser­i­ously, I can’t wear heels unless I’ve got a ride. (I just wear my “prac­tical” walking shoes, which are wedges.) What is becoming of me? Also, I like to pre­tend this taco stand is called “Sarah” even though it isn’t quite. It’s one of my land­marks so I know what street is mine, since it’s not sign­posted at this intersection.

I’ve always believed it’s a matter of aware­ness, and that’s some­thing I try to cul­tivate as I explore new places. Ideally, a for­eign envir­on­ment forces you into a state of heightened aware­ness. I pay more atten­tion to what’s hap­pening around me when I’m trav­el­ling, often because I’m usu­ally a vis­ible minority. There aren’t a whole lot of extremely white red­heads in little dresses in Mexico, and I stand out. I’m also gen­er­ally car­rying about $2300 worth of elec­tronics on me at any given time, and I’m aware that the com­bin­a­tion makes me an easy target.

There was this day last week when I was walking along the side­walk, and ahead of me were a group of men cas­u­ally swinging base­ball bats. Logic­ally, I knew they were prob­ably just waiting to go play base­ball, but my brain wired itself up into para­noia mode. I sup­pose the “safe” thing to do would have been to cross to the other side of the street, but I don’t believe in giving in to fear when it’s irra­tional. Instead, I gritted my teeth, turned off my music, and walked through them, all with stomach-turning vis­ions of a bat cracking into my skull dan­cing through my head.

This little girl is the most dan­gerous person I’ve come across so far in Mexico. I’m not quite sure why she’s so pleased with her knife, or why the but­ter­flies aren’t run­ning away from her manic bellbottom-wearing weapon-yielding ways, or why the hell she’s on the side of this building, but I really like her. The type is pretty great, too.

Of course, nothing came of it, and as I’ve accli­mat­ized to Ensenada, I’ve become less para­noid, without losing a sense of vigil­ance. I’ve also come to realize that—much as I’d expected—the reports of these parts of Mexico being so dan­gerous are largely unfounded. Sure, it’s dif­ferent. There’s a mil­itary man standing out­side the gov­ern­ment building, right next to the hos­pital, with an AK-47. I saw a truck pulled over on the highway, its entire front assembly lifted up to look for drugs hidden within the engine block—apparently they’ve cracked down on drug barons in Tijuana, so many of them have begun to migrate south. And much of the city looks dan­gerous when you’re used to the ster­ility of Canada or the States—the side­walks are broken and haphazard, houses are unkempt, and things are gen­er­ally in a lesser state of repair. Most houses are gated-in, and many have bars across their first-floor win­dows. The bath­room of a café I fre­quent looks a little like a gulag, espe­cially at night when the light is so dim I can’t see myself in the mirror. At first glance, it’s easy to mis­take a lower standard of living for danger, but that cor­rel­a­tion isn’t in all cases true.

Ulti­mately, part of what I like about Mexico is its rough-around-the-edges quality. I love that it isn’t per­fect. I love that you can see where its weathered, and that things are a little bit more chaotic and haphazard than I’m used to. And in spite of wan­dering around late at night down empty streets, in spite of get­ting drunker than I ought on too many tequila shots, in spite of being such a blaz­ingly obvious gringa, I haven’t had any prob­lems what­so­ever. In fact, people here have been excep­tion­ally nice to me—much nicer than they were in the air­port in Chicago or the pub in San Diego.

While Ensenada isn’t as pic­tur­esque as other (gen­er­ally more Spanish-colonial) cities in Latin America, it has its charms amid the dust and rubble.

I’d hate to think that I miss out on learning new things due to unfounded fears, and I’m glad that I didn’t listen to everyone who basic­ally told me going to Mexico was a death sen­tence. I’ve yet to be kid­napped by roving gang—instead spend my days eating deli­cious food, basking in actual sun­shine, and dis­cov­ering new things! In a new place, even the tiniest everyday acts are adven­tures. I’m here to explore.

Okay, I’ll admit it. Some­times, I get ter­ri­fied. Tomorrow morning, I hop on a plane bound for San Diego. From there, I’ll walk across the border and take a bus from Tijuana to Ensenada, where I’ll be living for the next couple of months (assuming I find some­where to live). After that, I’ll head up to LA, and fly over to Hong Kong for New Years’. I’ll spend a few months flit­ting around South­east Asia, living mostly in Thai­land and Vietnam, depending on how the visas all play out. Come spring, I’ll hop over to Spain, and finally get to tour around—ideally vis­iting Morocco, Por­tugal, and France while I’m there. By September, I’ll be heading back home, with a brief stop­over in Ice­land to hang out in the lagoon.

I’m really, really, really excited—but I’m also utterly terrified.

Appar­ently Google Maps can’t cal­cu­late the dir­ec­tions between Hal­ifax, NS and Hal­ifax NS if you take the insane route.

I’ve been plan­ning this for a while, but of course I’m nowhere near to ready. I haven’t even so much as looked at my suit­case yet, in spite of best inten­tions, and I leave in around four­teen hours. I have a couple of leads on apart­ments in Ensenada, but nothing con­crete. Everyone and their dog wants to see me or send me emails, so I’m run­ning about like a head­less chicken and pri­or­it­izing based on fleeting feel­ings. I prob­ably won’t sleep at all tonight, and I’m guessing I’ll be hung over on my plane.

And of course my brain is just going crazy. What if it doesn’t work? What if I’m miser­able? What if my phone is stolen and I spill scotch on my com­puter again? What if I can’t find any­where to live? What if I get sick? What if all my cli­ents abandon me for being a wild vag­a­bond? It’s hard to turn off the para­noid ques­tions once they get started, and some­times the uncer­tainty of it all is enough to drive me batty.

And of course I just real­ized that in all the excite­ment of learning more language-bits and plot­ting out maps, I’ve for­gotten to tell most everyone I’m going across the world for nine or so months. Whoops! My five-month tour of South America last year went by so smoothly (well, mostly) that it doesn’t seem all that important anymore—my cli­ents know now, that even if I’m in a dif­ferent con­tinent I’m avail­able and working. Most of them only com­mu­nicate with me via email anyway. I did just get an email from a client asking me if I could meet up on Thursday, which obvi­ously won’t be hap­pening unless they meant “in Mexico”, but I’m hoping that everyone real­izes I’m just as reli­able, if not more so, when I’m working from a café in Croatia than I am when working from my couch in Canada.

What I’m most scared of is not having a busi­ness any­more when I finally get back.

But ulti­mately, I think if I’m not scared, I’m doing some­thing wrong. I’ve always made it a rule to do all the things that scare me—sometimes because they scare me—and as a result I get to be stronger and have a life that’s full of crazy adven­tures. I make my own rules and determine how I want to exper­i­ence the world, rather than fol­lowing a pre­or­dained set of steps. A few years ago, I decided I wanted to travel the world, and I’ve been testing the waters with trips that get pro­gress­ively longer and more involved.

And now, I will lit­er­ally be going across the world. Some­times I forget how wildly lucky I am, but today, on the cusp of a new adven­ture, abso­lutely pet­ri­fied, I remember.

Last weekend was my birthday. (I won’t tell you how old I turned, but I am now offi­cially starting to feel old. If you’re really inter­ested, I’m sure a quick Google search will turn up some­thing that’s not yet a lie.) As a present, a friend took me on what can best be described as a “whirl­wind trip”: we rode his motor­cycle 3000 kilo­meters to New York City, and back, in four days.

It wasn’t until we’d hit Bangor, Maine on the second day that I real­ized just how insane of an idea that was.

For starters, when I say “motor­cycle”, I don’t mean a cushy touring bike with back­rests, stereo speakers, massive wind­shields, lug­gage racks, and padded seats. This was a beast of a super­bike, with a tiny little tri­an­gular seat on the back that looks like a mini­ature rocket. I jammed all of our vital belongings–two com­puters, sev­eral pairs of shoes (Excessive maybe, but it can’t come as a sur­prise), my flat-iron, three books, clothing–into my giant orange back­pack and strapped it to my back. The effect was as though I’d gained a 30lb hunch­back, and my bal­ance was thrown so out of whack that climbing up on the bike was roughly akin to mounting a nine-foot tall horse with a broken leg. After an hour, my ass ached like I’d never felt before, and my feet would keep going numb. By the end of the trip, I had fric­tion burns on my thighs and back pain that lasted for days, along with a giant smile on my face.

It was most assuredly one of the most insane, intense, incred­ible things I’d ever done.

Yep. This thing. I may as well have ridden a rock­et­ship. It was also hot as hell, so every time we stopped I’d strip off the moment I clambered down and fling my things all over the place, as evid­enced here.

Things I think I can’t do

When the con­stant pain wasn’t dis­tracting me, I was busy being ter­ri­fied. Three deer standing at the edge of the road waiting to jump out and kill me. Taking turns at 100 and leaning 45 degrees with the bike. Flying into my driver during an emer­gency stop coming into the city. Foggy night riding while a thun­der­storm lit up the sky around us. Lane-splitting between trucks. Con­struc­tion coming out of nowhere. Other cars cut­ting and swerving in. I’m a nervous passenger. There were so many times when all I wanted to do was say, “Listen. I cannot do this any­more. Drop me off at the nearest exit, and I will hitch­hike my way home. Thanks for the ride!” By day four, when we needed to make good time, and the riding was get­ting intense, and the wind blast was so crazy I was con­vinced I was going to be pushed off that tiny little seat, I was ver­ging on down­right miser­able. The only thing that got me through was sheer determination.

That determination—less char­it­able people would call it “bull-headedness”—has gotten me through so much. Earlier this summer, I went to Cape Breton with a friend. We found this charming place where you walk through the woods, clamber down a cliff using a system of ropes, cross through a rumbly river, and swim in ice-cold salt­water through a cavern until you reach this lagoon amid the rocks. Above it, there’s a cave in the side of the cliff, and more ropes. The boys who had gone the day prior told us we’d need lots of upper-body strength to pull ourselves up. One of them had even needed to be pushed up.

Of course, I figured I wouldn’t be able to make it. Pos­sessing an extra x chro­mo­some already pre­dis­poses me to be rather lacking in the upper-body depart­ment, and my twice-broken wrists of last year put me at some­thing of a dis­ad­vantage. I remember perching atop one of the rocks, about to jump into the icy lagoon, looking up at the cave in the cliff and being con­vinced I’d never make it.

Then I gritted my teeth, pulled everything in my body together, and I made it! I’m cer­tain it was that stub­born­ness, not any hidden reserves of strength, that fuelled my suc­cess. I’m also pretty sure that’s how I’ve struc­tured the entirety of my life.

Things that scare me

Breaking both my wrists last year made me pretty skit­tish about my vul­ner­ab­ility. Being in a couple of car crashes in quick suc­ces­sion when I was eighteen made me an extremely nervous pas­senger. As a gen­eral rule, I very much dis­like things that are beyond my control.

Obvi­ously, riding pil­lion on a motor­cycle is sort of a double-whammy for me. But I’m quite cer­tain that for­cing your­self to face things you fear makes you a stronger person. As a result, any­time I think “Oh, gra­cious. That sounds scary.” or “That sounds hard. I wonder if I’m cap­able of doing it?”, I take it as a sign that I must do it. Learning to ride a motor­cycle (I have a license now!)? Moving to South America for five months? Going zip­lining? Life mod­el­ling? Bring it on.

And of course, run­ning a busi­ness is one of these things. I’m amazed that I’ve been doing this for so long and I’m still ter­ri­fied of it and con­vinced I can’t do it at all. What if I mess things up and ruin my repu­ta­tion? What if I get jerked around and can’t pay my bills any­more? What if the stress drives me totally insane and I end up wan­dering about aim­lessly, mut­tering about em-heights and kerning?

Run­ning a busi­ness is one of the scar­iest things I’ve ever done, and it never stops being terrifying.

Being a brave little toaster

Facing fears in other areas of your life forces you to become stronger and more self-assured. That sense of determination—the “I don’t know if I can do this, but I’m damn well going to try as hard as I pos­sibly can”—is enough to push you to do everything you can in order to make it happen. I think, ulti­mately, I would have killed my busi­ness had I not started pushing myself to con­front fears in other aspects of my life.

I’m a big fan, how­ever, of pushing bound­aries incre­ment­ally. If you sud­denly dive into some­thing ter­ri­fying, it’s easy to become para­lyzed by fear, and no longer retain the ability to respond in an agile way when things change, as they invari­ably do. It’s important to push through things you’re afraid of, and things you don’t believe you’re cap­able of doing, but you can’t allow your­self to become locked up by them if you take on too much at once. It’s a fine balance.

It’s for this reason that I keep ramping up my adven­tures. I’m deep in plan­ning mode (by which I mean “vaguely thinking about from time to time”) for my next crazy adven­ture, which is shaping up to involve a few dif­ferent con­tin­ents. By pushing things a little fur­ther every time I do them, my brain starts learning that it can handle whatever chal­lenges I can throw at it. I stop being appre­hensive when some­thing crops up and I think I can’t manage it, because con­sistent exper­i­ence tells me that I can.

This is the classy way to relax. (Don’t worry, I’m in Con­necticut. The gas sta­tions are spot­less.) I was per­forming some variant of this sprawl, often with the back­pack still strapped on, at every gas sta­tion down the eastern sea­board (when I wasn’t busy doing cartwheels to stretch out.) Coin­cid­ent­ally, this is also how I look when I’ve had the week from hell and have been working non­stop put­ting out fires, scram­bling to get things done, and gen­er­ally going crazy. Like this one! Good times.

And hey, if I hadn’t pushed myself to make it through this trip, I may not have learned how to smoke a cigar­ette while riding a motor­cycle in New York City. You’re wel­come, lovely cli­ents. I do crazy things to make you happy.

Three months in South America turned into five months, and I was still sad when it came time to come home. Some­where in the JFK air­port, exhausted from my eleven-hour flight and an hour and a half of standing in line, waiting for US cus­toms to harass me for flying through a country I had no time to step out­side in, I started to get hor­ribly depressed. It was cold and grey. Everyone around me was speaking Eng­lish again. Everything looked so familiar, too per­fect and sterile.

Luckily, by the time I got to Hal­ifax (and another long wait at cus­toms while they inspected every single item in my giant suit­cases), I returned to the most enthu­si­astic home­coming, oth­er­wise I might well have turned around and gone back home.

When both the des­tin­a­tion and the origin are “home”

The concept of home has always been strange for me. When I moved to Canada as a little kid, I felt always felt weird singing the national anthem, which my teachers insisted I do loudly and proudly. This cold for­eign country wasn’t my “home and native land”, it was just the place I happened to be at the time. Years later, I do con­sider parts of Canada home, but it still feels like an adopted home—somewhere I’ve spent most of my life, but I never entirely feel like I fit. For this reason, I think, it’s easy for me to adopt new places that feel like home. After the time I spent there, Buenos Aires also feels like home.

Photos like this make me homesick.

Trav­eling long-term is so dif­ferent from trav­eling short-term. When I spent five weeks circ­ling through central Europe, I changed and grew so quickly, but no place ever felt like home, as I was con­stantly in transit. In Argen­tina, where I even­tu­ally settled into some­thing resem­bling a routine, change was so subtle that I’ve only now started to notice it.

Be stronger. Less scared.

Given how much of last year I spent hanging out in the hos­pital with broken wrists, it’s not sur­prising that I ended up a little on the para­noid side. I felt weak and break­able. When I first got to Argen­tina, I’d been out of my second cast for nine days. I couldn’t do a single pushup or open a bottle of wine. Worse still, I was so aware of my own vin­cib­ility that cer­tain things scared me that never used to—riding down­hill on a bicycle, slip­ping down a stair.

I picked up an exer­cise habit in Argen­tina (prob­ably the first time I’ve picked up a good habit!) and it changed me so fun­da­ment­ally that I’m insistent on car­rying the change over. Yoga, espe­cially, turned out to be pretty mira­cu­lous for my poor wrists. I’m slowly get­ting stronger, and I can do all sorts of things I couldn’t before—pushups, yes, but I can also bal­ance on my hands for short periods of time, hold myself up in a bridge, and open a bottle of wine with nothing but the most prim­itive of corkscrews.

I had a few moments in South America that utterly ter­ri­fied me. There was that incident in the Amazon rain­forest where I cut off my fin­gertip with a machete. Driving in cabs, and often­times just crossing the streets in Buenos Aires, where the bus drivers stop for nothing, held some sur­pris­ingly frightful moments. I drove around some pretty insane roads winding around the cliffs of Chile’s coast, in some cases nearly run­ning into other vehicles when there was only room for one. The final, and most innoc­uous moment was the smallest—running down the stairs in my building, my foot slipped. I caught myself, but for a brief moment, my mind was para­lyzed with fear (the second time I broke my wrist was due to a slip on a single stair). I just kept thinking how much people would laugh if I came home in yet another cast.

But I sur­vived everything. When a friend took me out for a scooter ride upon my return, I real­ized something—I wasn’t scared any­more. We’d gone for a ride the night before I left as well, and I remember closing my eyes on some of the turns, holding on for dear life, my logical brain cer­tain I’d be fine, but my heart still in my mouth. After five months of trav­eling through South America, I’m finally feeling stronger.

Work less. Worry less.

North Amer­icans are work­aholics. We have less hol­iday time than pretty much everyone else on the planet. Often­times, being a work­aholic is con­sidered a badge of honour. Small busi­ness people, espe­cially, are prone to a form of boasting/complaining about working six­teen hour days as though it’s proof of their forti­tude and commitment.

I used to be one of these people, but I’ve been slowly coming out of it. It’s sur­prising how much of life you can miss out on when all you do is work, and how easily you get burned out. I’m not entirely sure how I man­aged the first few years of my business.

The nice thing about trav­eling is that I simply couldn’t allow myself to be that much of a crazy work­aholic, or I’d never have an oppor­tunity to see any­thing at all. (Admit­tedly, I did spend way too much time working in Chile, but that was mostly because I was on a roll with a pro­ject.) I actu­ally took days off. Some days I wouldn’t work a full eight hours.

Argen­tina was a great influ­ence in this respect, because… well, I’m not sure how to put it del­ic­ately. They aren’t work­aholics, let’s say. There were public hol­i­days every other day, and some days when it wasn’t a hol­iday, everyone would just take to the streets for a good polit­ical protest. I got the impres­sion that while a great many of the par­ti­cipants were truly involved in the affair—lighting off gun­powder and cheering and such—a large per­centage would be hanging about, lazily chat­ting with one another. This atti­tude per­vades throughout much of the city—service in bars and res­taur­ants tends to be notori­ously slow, and there’s a gen­eral sort of unhur­ried pace. This gets infuri­ating when you’re waiting in line for hours, but it did help me learn a bit of patience.

Me, leaning out over one of the bal­conies in my apart­ment in Buenos Aires. I spent a lot of time in this spot, watching the street below.

…what next?

This whole slow-traveling of the world thing is some­thing I’ve wanted to do for at least a couple of years now, and my time in Argen­tina was a litmus test. It didn’t turn out perfectly—I didn’t travel nearly as much as I’d wanted to, and I ran into all kinds of electronics-related issues that made things quite dif­fi­cult. But I had such an amazing time there. I camped on the beach by the cliffs along Chile’s northern coast. I drove all the way around the coast of Uruguay and nearly ran over an arma­dillo. I crossed the Andes in a giant double-decker bus. I kayaked for three hours through the rivers of a sprawling delta. I learned how to set up a min­im­al­istic camp in the middle of the Amazon jungle. I learned how to make jokes in Spanish that people would laugh at. I wandered through beau­tiful cities old and new, I explored, and I saw so many things I thought my head might explode. I fell in love with a chaotic city that I hated at first, and I even made new friends. At times, it was frus­trating, infuri­ating, and I just wanted to go home. But I wouldn’t have traded the exper­i­ence for anything.

I’m already plot­ting my next adventure.

I was sup­posed to be home by now. Instead, I changed my ticket and delayed my return home by two months. Even then, five months just isn’t enough time. It’s sur­prising how much I haven’t got around to doing. Last week, we finally went to Chile—that trip was sup­posed to happen in December, when we first got here! I’d like to make it down (fur­ther) south to explore Patagonia a little; I’m dying to visit Bolivia’s salt flats and Peru’s high-altitude Incan cities; and I still haven’t made it to Rio, although I think I’m glad I skipped Carnaval. I haven’t taken a tango lesson yet, and while I feel like my Spanish has improved a great deal, that’s sort of like saying my suntan has developed—that is, I’m now “slightly ecru-ish” instead of “ghostly white”.

But, to be quite blithe: whatever. I’ve felt this way my whole life—like I’m not achieving enough—and I’ll prob­ably forever feel like this. No matter what I manage to achieve, I will always feel that I’m failing on some other front. As long as I can remember, I’ve always felt over­whelmed, and I’ve always been spurred by a fear of Failure. In the past, what this has meant is that I work like a demon at some­thing, let­ting other things slide, until the whole thing mani­fests itself into a giant mental break­down, and I dis­ap­pear for two days until I recover from it all.

I’ve finally changed this beha­viour. Instead of focusing on my fail­ures, I’m trying to turn that energy into pos­itive dir­ec­tion. In theory, if I focus my ener­gies instead on a pos­itive dir­ec­tion, at least I’m making efforts against the almighty Failure, no?

More on Feel­ings of Failure and a rant about body image in Argentina

Crossing the Rio de la Plata after a week-long “hol­iday” in Uruguay, I real­ized how much the way I spend my money has changed. Now that I no longer need to steal film from the gro­cery store or cal­cu­late the exact per-grain price of a loaf of bread, I find I’m more willing to spend a little bit more money on things. For example, I’ll no longer buy a pair of shoes that retails for less than $100, although I’m almost insistent on only allowing for new shoe pur­chases when the afore­men­tioned shoe is on sale. I’d also rather pay a little more for a direct flight, or a faster ferry, or even the con­veni­ence of a cab to the air­port. While I’m sure this isn’t sur­prising to most people, I’ve always been per­petu­ally cheap. It took some time before I real­ized that price and value aren’t always as dir­ectly related as I thought.

The first web­site I ever built, as a gradu­ated pro­fes­sional, cost my client a whop­ping $300. I wish I could say I was six­teen when I did it, but I was twenty-two, working a full-time job and freel­an­cing on the side. Looking back, it’s no sur­prise when my first year of busi­ness after quit­ting my job landed me in debt. I’ve always had a policy of keeping my expenses as low as pos­sible, but char­ging $20 an hour simply didn’t cover such non-tax-deductible neces­sities as “eating on a daily basis”.

When I first started out, my biggest mis­take, bar nothing, was char­ging too little. My inten­tions were good—I wanted to save my cli­ents money, and I wanted to provide quality design for a low price. What I failed to realize, of course, was that would become a dif­fi­cult task when I quit my day job to run my busi­ness full-time. Sure, my cli­ents were happy, but I was broke, over­worked, and stressed out.
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Hard to believe I’ve been here for over a month already. It feels as though it’s been no time and all, and before I know it I’ll be heading back to the Land of Ice and Snow. This trip was very much intended as a litmus test for my vag­a­bond way of life—I’ve been looking for a way to com­bine work and travel for some time now, and I think I may have hit on a com­bin­a­tion that works.

I’ve come to realize a few important things, though.

1. I need more time. Way more time.

This week, I am taking three hours of Spanish class a day, in what will most likely turn out to be a rather in-vain attempt to get my Castallano up to “ser­vice­able”. How­ever, given the fact that I tend to work roughly six hun­dred hours a day, it’s a bit of a chal­lenge doing all the other stuff I need to do, like “sleeping” and “eating stuff that isn’t dulce de leche”. (Ser­i­ously, I’m not sure what sort of magic makes Argen­tines so skinny when their diet appears to con­sist primarily of ham and cheese emapanadas to start, then pasta, fol­lowed up by sixty tons of cow. Is it the mate or the fernet they’re always drinking?)

But South America is a big place, and I want to see more of it. As it is, I’ve only had time to go to Brazil thus far, and a quick weekend trip to the Tigre delta, and some explor­atory jaunts here in BsAs—which admit­tedly is such a huge and sprawling com­plex city, with its own lan­guage and pecu­li­ar­ities, that it’d take me years to really get a feel for the place.

Last time I traveled, I went to Europe for five weeks and didn’t stay in one place longer than a week. I couldn’t work my usual sort of schedule, so it was sort of like a hol­iday for me. If I want my travel to be sus­tain­able, I need to do it slowly enough that it doesn’t inter­fere with the day-to-day aspects of my life. That means three months isn’t nearly long enough for a place.

2. I can sur­vive without con­stantly checking my email.

This is a tough one, but having my iPhone, I got quite accus­tomed to being con­stantly able to check (and send) emails. Problem was, this meant there was no off switch at all on my brain. I’ve been known to check emails in bed. It’s (still) usu­ally the first thing I do upon waking up, and I was always sending emails and tex­ting while out with friends, which I think is ter­ribly rude.

Yes, some­times it sucks not having access to my email when I’m idle at a bar. But for the most part, it means that I can go out for dinner, or go for a walk, without being per­petu­ally dis­tracted by work. If I leave the house, I leave work behind, and that’s a healthy habit to get into.

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Argen­tina is most def­in­itely still in holiday-mode: it’s summer vaca­tion here, a good number of the shops still have their shut­ters closed, and everyone who can afford to is off on the beaches of Uruguay. I’ve been working a lot more than I’d like to admit the last two weeks. Tech­nic­ally I still have a suntan, but I think it’s fading.

Bal­an­cing work and life has always been trouble­some for me. I tend towards work­aholi­cism on my best days, and it’s cer­tainly not uncommon for me to put in a sixty-hour work week. I’ve gotten better: I almost always take most of the weekend off now, and I’m trying as much as pos­sible to go out and about at least a little bit every day. I’ve real­ized that I’m simply not going to see as much of this con­tinent as I’d like to while I’m here.

With all the shut­ters closed, you really get to see the lovely graf­fiti that covers the build­ings here.

But I’ve got new pro­jects coming in all the time, and work is (for the most part) going well. I wish I were doing more per­sonal pro­jects, but that isn’t any­thing new. I had signed up for the Sketch­book Pro­ject some time ago, and now the deadline’s looming. I’ve given up on get­ting mine done, in part because I totally lack art sup­plies and they’re on the expensive side here, and in part because I simply lack time. I’d rather spend my free time exploring this massive city or trying to pick back up on my Spanish, which is just ter­rible. (Porteños speak the most insane ver­sion of Spanish I’ve ever heard, com­plete with its own spe­cial pro­noun and verb con­jug­a­tion, strange pro­noun­ci­ations, and some kind of crazy pig-latin. I’m totally lost.)

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In the middle of the Amazon jungle, seven hours by boat from the closest hos­pital, I cut off my fin­gertip with a machete.

This is how I spent my Christmas: I flew to Manaus, a big ugly port city on the Amazon river, where the warm, slow, black Rio Negro and the cooler, faster, sandy Rio Solimões meet up and run side-by-side for some dis­tance, looking rather neat. Manaus was not the world’s nicest intro­duc­tion to Brazil—the city echoes the sur­rounding jungle with its sprawling messi­ness. Once one of Brazil’s richest cities, it still con­tains the opu­lent (and rather tacky-looking) pastel-coloured palaces built during the rubber boom, but everything else is either a giant ugly factory or struck with urban blight.

But it’s a jumping-off point for rain­forest excur­sions, and that’s what I was there for after all. It took two flights, one taxi ride, a speed­boat, a bus through one of the most poorly-maintained roads I’ve seen yet, and another, much smaller, wooden boat to get to the jungle lodge we’d be spending a good por­tion of the next five days. Early Boxing Day morning, I was on my way to the jungle, excited for what lay ahead of me.

I’ll be honest: it wasn’t any­thing like what I expected. I was ready for a trip that would be phys­ic­ally and men­tally taxing; I got this, but not in the way I’d expected. I’d thought I’d be tired from phys­ical exer­tion, but instead I was just cold and wet. (Or, other times, hot and mosquito-bitten.) Worse yet—I was almost bored.

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