But I MUST LEAVE YOU
But alas, sometimes I need a break, hot weather, and the opportunity to learn and grow and experience a different culture. They say (I don’t know who they is…but I hear it often), that NYC makes you hard and SF makes you soft. I agree and I don’t like soft so I have to get outside of my comfort zone and venture to lands of foreign language and unknown challenges and rewards. Enter South America. I’ve always avoided SA because I thought it was full of Americans and that EVERYONE traveled there. I like to travel in more obscure places – places people have sort of heard of and certainly haven’t visited. I don’t really like to be a tourist – I prefer to be a traveler. Being a tourist is easy – everything is in English and the path is well carved and clean and safe. A travelers route is a bit longer, more convoluted, less comfortable, more surprising, and in my opinion more rewarding. Although there are certainly worn paths for travelers, the Gringo Trail in South America, there is plenty of opportunity to stray. Traveling also fits much better with my small budget. Tourism is expensive.
When the opportunity for travel presented itself, I jumped. I have a history of working, traveling, repeat. I left my first job after 3 years to travel for 2. I got laid off from other jobs which made traveling an easy choice. I am young (in my opinion at least), carefree (despite my neurotic mind sometimes), and without major responsibility (no mouths to feed or mortgage to pay). I have, to many people, an enviable life of passion and freedom. To others, my life is a disjointed chaos, without meaning or significance. I guess they are both right.
Either way, I can travel now and who knows what tomorrow brings? I may have a partner or baby, I might start the next Google, I might die on my bicycle. Who knows? So I’d better live while I can. And for me living and traveling are synonymous.
But I digress, South America is my choice by default. I have already spent significant time in Asia, Africa, Central America, Australia, New Zealand, and the middle east. I have dabbled in Europe and plan to explore it much more when I’m older since it is more tourism than travel. SO the big holes in my travels are India and South America. Trouble in Sri Lanka steered me away from Sri Lanka and Southern India and I found myself planning a trip to South America. With mountains, cold weather, and landlocked non-tropical countries, I’ll be trading bikinis for parkas.