Backpacking isn´t glamorous. Sure, it can be unbelievably fun and rewarding, but it is often stressful, dirty, and uncomfortable. Travel is almost always looked upon (in America, anyways) as a bit of a luxury. A way to escape the nine to five hum drum of our day to day lives. To live, well, luxuriously. Or at least better than usual. That´s why we head off to southern beaches in the winter or all-inclusive resorts, leaving all the messy little details of daily living up to someone else.
But why do we go backpacking? It isn´t travel in most people´s definition of the word. In a way, it goes against all standards of good sense. Instinctively, most people want to settle down, to have a home, to feel secure. We need our three meals a day and a roof over our heads - some place safe and comfortable to come home to. Psychologists always say that change is one of the most stressful factors on the human psyche. Packing, moving, new environments... all right up there.
So why do some of us choose to stay on the move? Never in the same place for more than a few days, eschewing comfort and sanitation (at least by our rather posh U.S. standards)? It is wanderlust, it is adventure, it is restlessness. As I write this, I am conscious of sounding "precious." By that I mean, it is not my intention to sound as if I am complaining or focusing on the negative aspects of this invigorating/insane experience. Sure we are obscenely dirty and smelly and sometimes tired and run down and hungry or sick-ish. But we are living. I never want to condescend either to the people we meet or to the places we visit. My way is not right, it is simply the only way I know. This story is, for lack of a better term, a fish out of water tale. Highlighting our differences - be they cultural, culinary, or sanitary - just makes a good story. Sometimes a very funny story. There is nothing more delicious to me than the absurdity of human life, and at no time is it more evident than on an adventure such as this...
It is the cacophony of dog howls and rooster crows outside your window at four in the morning, preventing not only your sleep (who paid $150 pesos for your room) but also the suckers trying to escape the third world two doors down at the modern chain hotel who plunked down $1,500.
It is discovering that it is easier and quicker to buy prescription drugs in Mexico than it is to purchase a ball-point pen.
It is being served four slices of white Wonder bread with your fried rice at a Mexican Chinese restaurant. And hot salsa with your pizza.
It is drinking a sad cup of instant coffee in one of the world´s richest coffee growing regions, while the fresh beans down the street are all being shipped to Starbucks and sold for $4 a cup.
Is this starting to sound like a bad Alanis Morrisette song?
I guess we travel because there is nothing more exhilarating, stimulating, educational, or hilarious.
And like all good things - cooking, sex - it is messy and you have to get your hands dirty to really enjoy yourself.
I love what we´re doing and I´m grateful everyday that we have the opportunity to do it. Just don´t expect me to stop complaining about it....
A blog about wandering in South America, when North American weather varies from cold, to cold and snowy, to damn Arctic, is damn seductive.
ReplyDeleteThis is a paragraph about voyages, by an acute observer, who had an intuitive sense of why we explore to experience.
See you in Provincetown.
The Open World
A legendary travel writer’s first trip abroad.
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
I rattled along from village to village, from town to town, in a hay cart or on a rickety bus—private cars were a rarity, and even a bicycle wasn’t easy to come by. My route sometimes took me to a village along the border. But it happened infrequently, for the closer one got to the border the emptier the land became, and the fewer people one encountered. The emptiness only increased the mystery of those regions, a mystery that attracted and fascinated me. I wondered what one might experience upon crossing the border. What would one feel? What would one think? Would it be a moment of great emotion, agitation, tension? What was it like, on the other side? It would, of course, be … different. But what did “different” mean? What did the other side look like? Did it resemble anything I knew? Was it inconceivable, unimaginable? My greatest desire, which gave me no peace, which tormented and tantalized me, was actually quite modest: I wanted only one thing—to cross the border. To cross it and then to come right back—that would be entirely sufficient, would satisfy my inexplicable yet acute hunger.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/05/070205fa_fact_kapuscinski#ixzz1C1Dt0EDE