How the hell do you to travel so much? (II and final part)

So let’s continue with the future bestseller (hopefully!): "The Seven Habits of the Highly traveled backpacker " or, more realistically, the answer to the question: How the hell do you to travel so much?

Check Part I for points 1 and 2. The ones who already have been initiated, without any further introduction, jump with me to point 3. Follow me, backpackers!

3. I descend my quality standards

Just as each person chooses how he/she wants to invest his/her money and what kind of reality he/she wants to live in, everyone choose how he/she wants to travel. And to make such a significant decision, it is important to keep in mind what you need and what makes you happy.

Some people say: "No way. I can’t afford to go traveling. And if I go only with the money I have now, I will have to suffer, to sleep on the street, to eat poorly and be stressed. In that case I'd rather stay home watching TV and that's it". In that case, if you think like this, what you need is a vacation. Not traveling. That vacation I take when I return to Costa Rica and I spend hibernating in a cave built by comfortable duvets, sleeping under an unquestionable spell of Sleeping Beauty syndrome.

Or maybe what you have in mind is the idea of the all-inclusive trip, the idea of the beautiful hotel and the idea of eating well, like Barceló Tambor Beach style (no sponsor of my travels, obviously). In that case, what you need is an escape from your reality. Not traveling as I understand it.

All positions are very fair. I also practice this ritual of staying at home watching TV (well, I almost never watch TV, but I sleep a lot) and, while I sleep, I dream a bit too about the trip when you have nothing else to do but stretch your hand to receive a cocktail (although I don’t think I will ever have this kind of trip). I don’t think so, because my trips match with my budget. If I live in Hatillo, it is unthinkable that I will always stay at hotels, eat at restaurants three times per day and go shopping. The consolation that I least have is that in the southern suburbs cable TV works.

When I travel I descend my standards. I sleep in hostels, I do couchsurfing and if I have to, I already have experience sleeping in parks, train stations, airports, on the street and in public toilets. I eat twice a day: from the supermarket or at McDonald's (since sometimes this is the cheapest option) and I drink water from the tap wherever I can. And I only buy postcards.

I understand that not everyone is willing to go hungry, to sleep outside and sometimes have a bad day. But I do. Not only for budgetary reasons, but because as masochistic as this might sound, for me, a good trip involves some suffering.

In Slovenia, where everything was so beautiful...

I have better stories to tell when everything has gone wrong. In Slovenia, for example, everything went perfect. Nice hostel, nice morning, nice place. The only thing that went wrong was that it rained in the afternoon with a tropical fury, which I didn’t know it could also have a Balkan passport. In the end, I stayed two days. And so, Slovenia became one of the countries less significant to me. In India, on the opposite hand, everything that could go wrong, went wrong : I crashed in the worst hostel I have ever been (located in the center of Delhi’s main bazaar, with other rooms shit coming out of my toilet, a mouse running on my bed, a hole in the window where people could peek at me, anyway, a place which is famous as an urban legend among backpackers, but I KNOW it does exist beyond hell ), I got sick the first week (and I spent two days with fever languishing alone in the room, with no one to help me to go to the hospital), I had the first cultural shock in my travels and the first panic attack in my life. (On the bamboo rocking horse). In the end, I stayed four months. India, thus, became the most significant country for me.

It is under these circumstances that you test yourself. That you become stronger. That you discover yourself. And for a writer, the worst decisions always leave better stories to tell. Tell someone about how nice it was to spend a weekend in the ultra fancy Hacienda Pinilla in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, or how does it feel to wake up with the Acapulco beach at your feet from the heights of a hotel is very cool (because I spent a really good time), but boring. Tell someone how I got deported from Albania or how I almost lost an eye in Bulgaria is more interesting (even when I spent a really bad time). (Want to know more? Then buy the novel On the rocking horse and learn some Spanish :p).

 It's very cliché, but simple things fill me. Eat a pot of ordinary rice or a bit of caviar and tell me which of these makes you feel less hungry. I have stayed in five star hotels (ok, you can judge me), due to coincidences of life more than anything else, but it was never as fascinating as the time  I slept on a mattress in the desert. I have eaten in fine restaurants, but it never tasted so good as the tiny shop’s burger at a corner in Belgrade. In my closet I have a pair of $200 boots (ok , NOW you can judge me) but if my house burns down,  I won’t save them. Rather I would save my chest, which is full of insignificant objects, like a scarecrow that cost one euro in El Rastro market.

Everyone chooses his or her own quality standards.

And I have news: simple things are the ones you enjoy the most and with the ones you learn the most (speaking of simple things, what a simple statement, like a Paulo Coelho’s one, but it is so true).

In India, where not everything was that beautiful...

4. I lose the fear

Another question that people often ask me is if I'm not afraid of traveling alone. Money, fear… such curious topics come into people’s mind.

The first time I traveled alone, I went to Belgium and I have to admit that, by the time I got on the train, I was so scared that I felt my body in a state that we could define as “ethereal”. I guess I was so terrified that my soul left my body temporarily and left it alone there, probably protected by an urgency of whoever-who-can-save-himself-go-ahead. Anyway my soul left my body and told it: "So now, dude, you are screwed!” In other words, I felt like a sheet of paper, moved by the hurricane gusts of fear.

Ever since, the phenomenon is repeated each time with less and less degree of intensity (with the exception of India, which breaks all the schemes as the emerging world power that is). I have two theories:

Theory 1: Maybe it's the fact that, like all learning, you must start first with an easy country to travel, like Belgium (where almost everyone speaks English, the trains are punctual, safe, organized and clean) in order to get the backpacking PhD eventually, which for me would be India (where those who speak English do so with their peculiar accent “Yes, madam, du yu nid riksho?", trains are very complicated, a country that is not very safe for the solo traveler woman, that is a chaos and it’s dirty as many sacred cows roaming the streets made it possible).

Theory 2: Maybe it's the fact that if there is something I've learned in my travels is that, out there in the world, there are more good people than bad people.

"I've always relied on the kindness of strangers”. The first time I heard this phrase was in All About My Mother. At that time I didn’t understand it, but over the years I have realized that it is true. It's like when we meet someone for the first time. Most of the times, we are super polite. Respectful. Lovely. We don’t know that person yet and we want to build a good relationship. Over time, this first good purpose often deteriorates itself: as we move on, and problems arise, we don’t give a shit to say to that person what bothers us about him/her, and we are less and less eager to do something nice for that person. Unlike by the time when we met, when the score was 0-0, now we can go 100 to -20. Just think of how idyllic love relationships are at the beginning and you will see what I mean. The same applies to strangers: with many of them, we only live this idyllic initial stage, in which humanism wakes up and empathy pops up every minute.

It’s so true that, in my travels, no one have ever stolen from me (well, once my laptop was stolen, but I recovered it within the same day with the help of many other strangers). But, for example, when I didn’t have a single penny in my pockets and I was deported from Albania, the bus driver paid my ticket and he helped me to find another bus that could take me out of such a migratory disaster.  Nobody ever hurt me. But, for example, when I almost lost an eye in Bulgaria, a random taxi driver was the one who took me on a pilgrimage to several clinics (though he did not even speak English) until we found someone who could help me. Less, much less, somebody has ever raped me. But there have been people who have offered me to stay at their homes without any money in the middle, like a woman who, seeing me sitting alone in a bar in Mozambique without knowing where to go, gave me a room at her home.

In Mozambique.

Believe me, the greatest lesson of all my travels has been that: there are more good people out there than we can imagine. What happens is that we all live being afraid of each other.

And if by any chance, fear grips me (because sometimes it happens), I swallow it. I can’t do anything with it. In the end, I always finished sitting at the same table, unharmed, with all those people who let themselves get dominated by the ghosts in their heads and never decided to travel.

And I've got news: in the end, MANY MORE BAD THINGS happen in people’s paranoid imagination than in the real world. In short: bad things happen in movies. Bad things happen on TNT. But bad things almost never happen in real life.

5. I set a date

Very well: finally we decided that we are going to travel. Somehow we managed to chock our fears and they are going through the esophagus, we didn’t buy the latest smartphone to give priority to the trip, we have our backpack ready and we're reading point number five.

Buuut Christmas is coming. Buuut I just got a promotion at work. Buuut maybe I need to save more money. Buuut "black Friday" is around the corner. Buuut I just adopted a dog. Buuut I better start a French course. Buuut...

But nothing! There are thousands of “buts” in the way to convince you that you are not ready or it’s not the right time. I don’t say that in life there are no contingencies or opportunities that can’t justify postponing a trip. Buuut dude: life often throws you to the deepest parts of the pool without saying a word and you have no other choice but to improvise. And, in the end, you survive.

There is never a moment to be 100% ready to go, as I think there is not a right moment to become parents or to die. All these buuuuts come from you brain’s left side: the rational one. All these logical theories that expose you should stay and not go away. Like a new job. Like money. Like responsibilities. The left hemisphere is useful for many things, but it always gets in the middle. Don’t blame it: it wants to protect you and, for this side of your head, protection means send you all the possible signals to keep you within the known. The place where you have found you can survive. Where there is no danger. For better or worse (I think for the better, obviously), this brain guy is not alone inside your head: there, crowded, it coexists with the right hemisphere, which handles impulses, creativity, feelings. Well, it seems fair to me that, given the fact both of them are the same size, the right also has the right (pun intended) to gain power as the legitimate owner of 50 % of the skull’s shares. Solomonic. Give it that chance to come out on stage and surprise you.

The problem is that we think we have time. "There's more time than life." Another slogan that I never understood: what is the fucking point of having more time if you will not have life to live it? Maybe it is because often an imaginary death haunts me (because I've seen it come close, but it walked away as a passing by fly drew more its attention). But even if it doesn’t haunt you, remember that the only requirement to die is to be alive.

So I set a date and I RESPECT it. It doesn’t matter if I get a better job. It doesn’t matter if I don’t have too much money. It doesn’t matter if they begin to break the seals of Revelation: I AM LEAVING. From that day, the right hemisphere begins its tyranny and it shall never be disturbed by anyone in its almighty throne.

6. I use condoms

I bet that you didn’t see that coming... lol.

But it's true. Once again we return to the priorities speech. Today, having children is not among my priorities. I am one of those women who are expecting to hear the last bell of the biological clock and, while hearing its tics, I keep traveling and using condoms.

In my perfect future world, I totally visualize myself traveling with my kids. I hear them speaking in several languages. I look at their photos playing with Buddhist monks. I hear them breathing next to me while we are sleeping in a tent.

However, while that happens, I use a condom because first I want to make many other trips that are not for children. Trips that are not suitable during childhood. Today, I can look after myself, but not after my kids, because I know that when I have them, my backpacking style will change.

Once I knew a girl who was pregnant while she was backpacking. She had bought one of those tickets to go around the world, and in South America she got pregnant during a one night stand. She was in Nepal by the time I met her and then, she went to India. I think that obviously back then she didn’t realize that she was no longer taking care of one body, but two. I don’t judge her, but I do not EVER want to be in her situation.

So, I use condoms. To keep backpacking until the clock sets my hour. To keep backpacking so I won’t have anything to regret of.

In Stonehenge.

7. I imagine my life is a novel

The last point is my life’s philosophy, beyond the fact that, since I started with On the rocking horse project, my life has, indeed, become a novel read even by people that I will never meet.

Always, when I'm at a crossroad, I wonder what would be more interesting for my character. What would be worth to be read: A or B? If I'm writing pages that are written with carbon paper, the same ones day after day, then: does anyone would really read such a “conceptual” novel? Is it more important that the character overcomes her fears and evolves, or that she stays in the same place, without any evolution? Because good characters are the ones who change. Good stories are the unpredictable ones. Good literature invites you to turn the page, not stay on the same forever.

So I travel. I am aware that my life is the most important novel of all the ones that I might write, and that even if you have a lot of imagination, reality is always superior than fiction is. I am sure that I evolved more every time I travel, than when I sat down at the desk. And above all, I don’t want any of the pages of my life’s novel begins with the sentence every curse should begin with: "What if... ".

Each and every one of us is a writer of our own novels in which we are the protagonists. And each and every one of us decide what we write, what characters we want to add, what story we want to tell.

The most risky part is that life is not written in a laptop. Each time you write a page, there is no way to erase or rewrite it, because life is not written with a keyboard or with a pencil. Not  even with ink. It is written with time, that never returns.

We don’t really know how much blank pages we have left. I don’t know either. But whether I die tonight, before anyone reads this, or whether I die on my rocking chair in my old age next to you guys, when I will close the book, I do not want a single missed word.

So there is the answer to How the hell do you travel so much?. The secret?  In my case it’s simple: I simply refuse to live a life that is not worthy of being told.

At 5328 meters about sea level. Manali-Leh Highway. Himalayas.

That’s the way it is: I have my own reality too and I work in it: I write. So if you liked this text and if you think that being a writer is a respected job, like any other (including yours), you have two options: if you really think I write well, click the buttons on the right handside and subscribe yourself, or share this text in your social networks so more people can ride the rocking horse. Thank you for reading! :)

How the hell do you travel so much? (Part I)

"Che (because this guy is Argentinean), could it be that Andre is a millionaire and she has never told us? Have you ever been in her house? Do you know where she lives? Maybe she has a lot of money and we have never known about it ...”

That's one of my friends, theorizing with my best friend, about the eternal question that, I know, goes around many people’s mind when they meet me: how the hell does she travel so much?

I know. This is a question that people always ask me and, if they not verbalize it, at least, implicitly, I can feel it behind all these stares of disbelief in persons who look at me with : 1. admiration , 2. envy, or 3. with "this fucking girl, minimum, has something to do with drug traffic".

What happens is that I usually don´t think about how the hell I travel that much because, for me, it´s very normal. In the backpacking world, virtually, we all have it clear. However, when I return to Costa Rica, I start noticing the huge question that my eternal nomadism arouses.

To my friend, I must reply that if he hasn’t ever heard of my money is because, obviously, I'm not a millionaire. In fact, I come from a low-middle-class background and if you don´t believe me, ask any Costa Rican how many millionaires live in Hatillo. Ha!

To the rest of the people, what I can offer is to tell them how I manage to travel so much. How do I do it, given the fact that I can’t answer otherwise than from my personal point of view. I'm not an authority on the subject and I don’t sell any self-help books with a title like: The Seven Habits of Highly traveled backpacker". But for sure I can share my experience which doesn´t exclude anyone: if there’s something I firmly believe in is that traveling is not impossible as many people might think.

So here are my seven habits for highly backpacking. The great secret. The post that will settle a “before” and an “after” in your life. The oracle that opens only for some enlightened. The backpacker guru’s wisdom of a... Just kidding! No way. Enough maniac episode (sorry, I'm bipolar). You'll see that, in fact, there is no rocket science regarding to traveling:

In Peru.

1. I make traveling a priority

In Costa Rica we have a saying that, roughly translated from Spanish, states: "Everyone is free to make a flower vase out of his/her ass”.

Beyond this somehow scatological statement, the fact is that this also applies to money: the obstacle that many people place in order not to travel. So let’s translate it into more capitalist terms: everyone chooses her/his own priorities and invests his/her money as they want.

Broadly speaking, in the Western world, from low-middle class up to high- class population, we could say that these are the most popular monetary priorities, at least as it’s traded in the dreams stock market: 1. Buy a house. 2. Buy a car. 3. Buy nice clothes. 4. Buy a good cell phone. 5. Party often.

As I said, the most popular ones. The trick with being the most popular ones is that, because of its popularity, people tend to think they are easier to achieve, easier than, for example, take one year to travel the world.

Fallacy. I promise I would take a look about which type of fallacy is, but fallacy. It’s not like that. I don’t think buying a house is easier. Not with all the money I've spent in all my travels I would be able to pay even the first fee.

What happens is that those who travel have decided to put traveling as a priority (we are many, but definitely not as many as the overwhelming numbers of people who prefer to buy a house, a car, clothes, a cell phone and party).

It’s not the most popular way, because in our society, people seem to value more other things, the ones you can see and touch with the hand. Those things give to people a sense of stability, a word that they tend to confuse with "eternity". In any case, beyond the fact that both of them end with the same letters, both words are highly valued because they promise that nothing will change, when in fact, almost everything that is not dead is always changing even a little bit.

So it seems good to invest, for example, in a house, because you can use it every day. It seems so stable, and so eternal, that even many persons shield themselves behind the phrase "Now I have a place where I can die”. Actually, I've never understood this slogan. I mean, at the risk of sounding a little bit Asperger, no one really knows where you will die. It could be in the middle of the street and anyways, someone will have to pick you up, unless they want to take the risk of leaving you there, stinking, becoming an epicenter of birds of prey, rats and other lovely animals. Or it could happen at a friend’s house, in which case I don’t think she or he would be such a motherfucker and leave you there. I guess she or he at least would call the morgue and say: “Listen, this fucking dude just died here in my living room, could you please come and remove him?” Or you could have a tragic death and no one will ever find your body. If I start thinking about it, I should rather save for a grave. And live to pay my death ... to me, that makes no sense. Buy a house where I can spend my old age? It isn’t too early to start thinking about that? Invest my youth so I can buy a few square meters so I can put my rocking chair? And don’t come to me with the tale of The Ant and the Grasshopper. Sorry, but let’s face it: the grasshopper had a blast too (if we translate it to Marxist terms, we could even say this might be a proletarian tale). Buy a house so I can leave something to my children? Well, I prefer to leave to my children a good education and unforgettable moments, not some concrete walls. Once they become well educated grown-ups, they can decide whether it worth investing or not in the same view from the same window. For now, I've decided not to.

Anyways, right now, if the house no longer seems worthy of any economic anxieties, the rest of the things don’t have a chance. A car? Anyway, in most cases, no one goes very far with it and it’s more expensive for traveling and not ecological at all. Clothes? While it’s true that sometimes I suffer from that stereotypical female weakness for buying clothes, it’s also true that in the vast majority of times, I restrain myself under my inaflible-art-in-90 %-of-cases to translate “clothes” in terms of "travel". For example: those boots …$60... With $ 60 I can buy a Ryanair ticket from Madrid to Morocco... And at home I already have three pairs of boots... And I've never been to Morocco... And with these boots I will walk the same streets as today... So sorry: Bye-bye boots.  A mobile phone? So I can forget it on a table in a bar, so somebody can steal it from me, or so I can accidentally let it go into the toilet? I will never forget my memories and the lessons I’ve learned on my trips on a table bar. Quite the opposite: I take them back to life every time I sit down in a bar and share them with my friends. No one will ever steal my memories, unless in order to steal my cell phone, they smash my head before. And certainly, my memories will never go down through the toilet, unless I throw myself in it. And if you stick to the party side, well, I do party as well in Costa Rica with my friends, because I also value my moments with them. But I try to measure myself with the money and not drink too much beer. As a Costa Rican and consecrated backpacker friend of mine says: “At the end, it’s all about peeing the money”.

I prefer to buy experiences rather than objects. I'd rather invest my money in moments, which are something you can’t touch with your hand and which go away fast. Unfortunately, as I once said, the present is very fleeting (My life has been worth every minute), but the stories and lessons will remain with me until the very last day of my life when, sitting on the rocking chair, after all, I will die, maybe next to you. In short: I invest in something that you can’t see and in something that is not “everlasting” to the eyes of many. But really, I invest in the only thing I can take with me beyond the grave.

And I've got news: traveling, in many cases, is not half as expensive as to live in one place.

Atitlan's Lake. Guatemala.

2. I make traveling as a lifestyle

To me it seems incredibly naive, but as logical as the reasoning of a child (and please note that for me children are tremendously wise) when people tell me: "It must be very cool to spend all your time on vacation". 

Vacation??? Ha! I don't know if I should crack myself up more with that or with the idea of my mythological chalet in Hatillo. I almost never have holidays. Us, who have made traveling as a lifestyle, know that backing is just that: a lifestyle. As other people wake up early, go to work from 8 to 5, and enjoy their time with their families in the evenings and weekends.

For me, holidays, what I call vacation, are quite similar to those which the average people have in mind: basically to sleep AS MUCH as I want, wake up in a nice place somewhere and throw myself to read without anyone bothering me, only to return to sleep AS MUCH as I want again. Something cyclic, lazy and predictable.

Rather, my vacations begin when I return to Costa Rica and, entrenched in my sacred bed, shielded by my legendary pillows, I hibernate for days, sleeping 15 hours in a row. Maybe you can understand it better if I state this: sometimes when you travel and you go back home, you feel the need of one or two days to recover. The real vacations because you finally take some rest. Well, that happens to me.

Few are the days when I am backpacking that I'm not busy. Logistics are like office work: I must find the next plane, train, bus, ride or whatever, analyze hostels or Couchsurfing profiles, learn how to get orientated in the city, read travel guides, get lost so I can find myself again. You can imagine it like this: let’s say every two or three days, you wake up with amnesia and you have to find, from scratch, an apartment, you have to know the city again, learn what to do there and what not to do, find out how much everything costs, and so on (I am writing this “so on” not because I don’t know what might comes next, but because this post is becoming huge. But believe me: we are talking about a long “so on”). Many times I have not even arrived to a place and I am already figuring out how to move to the next one. After a few months, it becomes exhausting, especially because since most of the times I travel alone, everything depends only on me.

Well, if that didn’t convince you as a day job, maybe something else that takes a lot of time will do: a job. In my travels, I have met people who have been on the road for two, three or more years. Including me: I've spent one year and a half backpacking. Non stop. How the hell do we manage to achieve that? Well, like all mortals do since Jehovah condemned us to earn our bread by the sweat of our forehead: we work! The vast majority of backpackers are not millionaires (yes, I live in Hatillo).

They say need is the mother of all inventions ... and it’s true. As soon as I see myself against the wall (or against the risk of returning to Costa Rica, which for me it's worse than the wall) I start to move myself so I can keep going. And believe it or not, my hands and my brain work well beyond the borders of Paso Canoas, Peñas Blancas, the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. And yours work pretty well too. We all have talents and I've seen people that reinvent themselves and start teaching languages. They start working in bars. They start a small business. They start doing translations.

Of course, not all of them are glamorous or well paid jobs. Often it’s just about volunteer work in exchange of food and a bed. I have worked taking care of German dogs (Dog-logic), I cleaned floors in hostels, I loaded stones and weeded gardens, I have driven a truck, I have worked as a babysitter and in a construction site. But I do it, something that not everyone (especially those who give priority to their careers) is eager to go for it. And yet, I am pretty sure that even with your career as a priority in your life, if you were there in your country of origin, and there is no other choice to survive, you would do it too.

And, as it happens in the reality of most people, if you can devote yourself to do something you like, the better. I now dedicate myself to writing, for example. It is not always easy and I'm ready for the fact that, at some point, I might have to dig again a hole made out of dog shit from the last decade (Pain and gain). That's why my trips are so long: it’s not the same walking around as a tourist in a foreign country, than walking around in a foreign country with a regular job as everyone else worldwide. Undoubtedly, it makes the backpacker agenda even longer.

The misconception is that people think that I live in a fantasy world, “in a perpetual holiday”. No, no, ladies and gentlemen. My reality is this one. It’s a nomadic one. As you chose yours, whatever reality you might have. There is no difference between other people and me: as the people who work 8-5 in a city do that so they can have where to sleep, what to eat and how to move around, I have decided to travel and work even more hours so I can have where to sleep, what to eat and how to move around. We all seek to survive and, in particular, we all seek happiness. We all want to make our dreams come true: buy a house, a car, traveling, going to the moon. The only thing is that many people decide to focus their reality in only one place. I have chosen to do it in several.

Unlike many people, that when they return home , they sigh: "Back to reality", when I return to Costa Rica I go still to another part of my reality, because, as I said before, I have no home.

My reality is this one. It’s not always easy, as no reality is easy. It’s not always easy to see people on Facebook with their photos of marriage and cute babies. It’s not always easy to swim against the tide in a society that gives more value to objects than to the stories that can be told. A society that values more the titles and the status than the countries you have visited and the cultures that you can learn from. It is not always easy to spend so much time alone, living in the uncertain, in the confusion, in the instability. In the fear. But that’s the price I pay for living a "fluid, perplexed and exciting” life.

And I've got news: if you don’t like your reality, you can come to crash into mine anytime.

Seriously:  if I let myself being seduced by the temptation of the best-seller book idea, and I let myself go with megalomaniac thoughts that I own the ultimate truth, this could become a short self-help booklet about how to travel. At the end, many of these books reveal the secret behind how to create warm water, duh! Anyway, since this post is becoming huge, I will leave the steps 3 to 7 for future occasions.

That’s the way it is: I have my own reality too and I work in it: I write. So if you liked this text and if you think that being a writer is a respected job, like any other (including yours), you have two options: if you really think I write well, click the buttons on the right handside and subscribe yourself, or share this text in your social networks so more people can ride the rocking horse. Thank you for reading! :)