Welcome Home

I was invited to attend church with my father and stepmother on the Sunday morning after I arrived back in the country. The service was at St Paul’s Episcopal Church; a mainstay on the main drag in Key West, Duval Street. It seemed fitting that my journey would end here in a church. I traveled the world for 365 days. As I sat in a pew, I really did not hear the sermon but looked at the works around the church: the stained glass, the woodcarvings, and even the hymnals. I began thinking about all I had seen and experienced. 

I thought about the courage it took to act on something that I had wanted to do for such a long time.

I thought about my arrival a world away on that first day.

I thought about visiting a place where I could see myself living if I ever needed to say goodbye to my homeland. Or so I thought at the time.

I thought about how one man’s heaven could be another’s hell.

I thought about the sincerity of people.

I thought of the fragility of freedom and the wonders of friendship.

I thought of the festering scars of war.

I thought of the lost souls.

I thought of the ancient wonders.

I thought of beguilement.

I thought of the hospitality.

I thought about the perseverance of human nature.

I thought of the fact that it is personality and not nationality.

I thought about the banality of evil.

I thought about the triumph of the human spirit.

I thought about the joys of companionship.

I thought about the wonders of art and the impetuousness of youth.

I thought about personalities harmonizing with each other.

I thought about savage beauty.

I thought about the way some soldier easily bury their animosities. 

I thought about the demise of decadence.

I thought about a new world’s promise.

I thought about the ease of violence.

I thought about the ability to commune with nature.

I thought about the thirst for power.

I thought about the desire for money.

I thought of what wrapping this all up meant for me. 

I realized that I probably had felt much like the pilgrims felt before when they were in that Church in Amsterdam before they set sail for the new world. I did not know what my future held. It is safe to say that in late February of 2020, neither did the rest of the world. What I did know was that soon, I would be wrapped in the arms of a woman that loved me that I too loved and I was looking forward to that more than I realized. 

When the sermon was over, we all got up to leave. The minister stood at the doorway and greeted the flock. As it got to be my turn, he extended his hand and I took it. I thanked him for his sermon. As he looked at me he asked where I was from. I hesitated for a moment, thinking about everything I had been pondering before.

“I am from a little bit of everywhere. I just got back.” I said.

Slightly perplexed but quickly he shaking it off, he said, “Well, welcome home.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I was home.

And with that, I affixed my sunglasses and walked out into the already hot Key West morning.  

Pura Vida

Two words are synonymous with Costa Rica: Pura Vida. Literally meaning, “Pure Life,” this phrase abounds there: emblazoned on tshirts, bumper stickers, and on the lips of the inhabitants.

But it is so much more than a simple phrase lifted from a once-popular Mexican television program. Pure Life is a way of life there. Sure, in the cities there is a hustle and bustle that can be in any city of the world. Outside of it, away from it, there is both a new and an ancient way of being.

Before man traded his time for money, he lived. Once his needs for food, water, and shelter were met, he could live. Sure, if he wanted a family, those basic needs would need to be increased, but not by much.

There is a reason why I chose this beach town as my final stop on my year-long, worldwide adventure. And no, it was not that this is where the best prostitutes of Costa Rica were. I knew I needed to slow down, gather my thoughts and my feelings, and truly appreciate what I had done. Once my needs of food, water, and shelter were met, I could return back to this pure life. 

Modernity is synonymous with obligation; a fact that I understand all too well. Rents, mortgages, car payments, tuition, loans, debt etc. It is under this weight that people potentially lose themselves; trembling like Atlas holding up the world. At times like these people just think if they work harder then their lives will improve without understanding the underlying cause of their misery i.e. larger rents, more expensive mortgages, bigger car payments, higher tuition, grander loans, and increasing debts.

There is an old joke about an investment banker that goes to some paradise for a much-needed vacation. While he is walking on the beach, he encounters a fisherman and strikes up a conversation with him. The banker asks about his typical day. The fisherman replies that he gets up early, takes his boat out on the water, fishes until about 11AM, takes his catch to the market, then spends the rest of his day playing with his kids. The investment banker says he could be doing so much more. With the fish prices and the International market especially in Asia, he should get a group of investors together to invest in a fleet. Eventually, the fisherman would be able to have several crews working under him, then he could really set the market. He could then horizontally integrate by buying a canning factory so he could can his catch and might be able to diversify by buying a shipping fleet to get his catch to bigger markets. After 15-20 years, he would never worry about money again. Then he could stop his work days at 11 AM and play with his kids.

As I stood at El Mira, looking out over Jacó, I began thinking. Too many people take their lives for granted. One day they will have the perfect career, the perfect relationship, and the perfect life. The problem is that on no calendar does it say anywhere One Day.

I knew I needed a place to relax and ponder everything I had experienced; the good, the bad, and the ugly. I knew that soon, I would be back in the grind. I would be worrying about all the things I worried about before I left. But I had perspective now. I knew that things could be more simple. 

And it was here in Costa Rica that I re-learned about what life can be, in its purest form. 

The Big Stick

The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley is probably one of the top three history books I have ever read (the other two being Salt by Mark Kurlansky and Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford.) The Imperial Cruise covers one of the most important moments in the ascension of America in the early 20th Century. Fresh from the victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, after ascending to the presidency in 1901 with the assassination of William McKinley, President Theodore Roosevelt sent his Secretary of War William Howard Taft as well as his indomitable daughter Alice Roosevelt off West on a steamship. This was not only to take stock of the new protectorates including Guam and the Philipines that had been garnered from Spain but also to help facilitate the end of the imperialistic feud of the Russo-Japanese War. This act would get Roosevelt a Nobel peace prize. 

Roosevelt knew the importance of naval supremacy. After studying the works of the American military historian Alfred Thayer Mahan, he was determined to make sure that the United States was ready to take a leadership role in the world; walking softly and carrying a big stick of military might and readiness. Due to this idea, he wanted a very quick way to command the seas of the world. The problem was that, at the time, the fastest way to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific was to go around the bottom tip of South America. He was determined to find a better way.

It was here that the hero of San Juan Hill, the military battle in the Spanish American War in Cuba saw an opportunity. With the recent Spanish independence of a lot of their colonies in Central and South America, Roosevelt reached out to the government of Nicaragua to see if he could build a canal. There were too many problems. However, Panama already had the beginnings of a canal and he offered to complete the job in 1903. Eleven years later, it was done. 

This created a great dichotomy. Since Washington’s Farewell Address, America had had a policy of staying out of the affairs of other countries, unless it directly impinged on America’s national and vital interests. That is the reason why there are such foreign places as the Halls of Montezuma and the Shores of Tripoli in the United States Marine Corps Hymn. It was reiterated by President James Monroe with the Monroe Doctrine saying that the United States would not tolerate any more European colonization in the Western Hemisphere. 

However, Roosevelt saw things very differently. His Roosevelt Cooraley to the Monroe Doctrine said they would not tolerate European interference as America would provide protection to the hemisphere by doing an end-round on the European concerns for security. This is when he formally stated the United States would provide protection for Panama and the newly constructed canal.

Now, I understand full well the anachronisms of putting history through the lens of present-day mores. However, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. If a foreign power offers to “protect” a sovereign nation, moving troops to be billeted on foreign soil to provide said security without the actual threat of coming war, then this duck quacks in American-accented imperialism.  

Whether this was a force for good or for bad, people have and will debate this from the safety of over a century’s distance. The likes of Howard Zinn would say that the United States was an Impearlisitc leviathan; lacking the prestige and grandeur but with all the blood lust of ancient Rome. While someone like Victor Davis Hanson would say that Panama was offered a pretty good deal and would leave them without the need for a standing army; one less possible domino to fall in the Western Hemisphere. Given the tumultuous 20th Century and the grand stage upon which the United States would sit, it is a worthy topic for discussion. 

The Lens

Cocaine.

Without thinking, what is the first thing that comes to mind?

I bet I can tell you where you are from.

If you think of Studio 54, scantily clad women, Tony Montana, parties, Wall Street, and rock and roll, I bet you are American. Or European.

If you think of an uncle you never met, killed when he was at the wrong club when a sicario sprayed it with bullets, or a cousin killed by a car bomb as she walked down a street. I bet you are Colombian.

It all depends on the lens you look through, the consumer or the provider.

I have long been fascinated by illegal substances, especially cocaine. Not because I do them. I have known for a long time to equate one gram of powder with one pint of blood. Even with my straight-edged white privilege, running with the usually higher educated, I have been offered my fair share and even unbeknownst to me at the time, most probably transported it. Twice. I am still haunted by what would have happened if I were swept up in an arrest. Yet, I am fascinated by it due to the logistics, the business models, and the business people that surround them. Even with penalties ranging from life in prison to immediate death, paraphrasing Thyisodes, some men are still attracted to danger. 

Whether it is Medellin, Miami, Marseille, or Moscow, people without prospects for a better life will do what they have to do to try to secure one. Even the cocaine traffickers themselves in the early days said this was a rich man’s drug; sold to the Hollywood elite and self-styled Wall Street Masters of the Universe. Having moved in a few Hollywood circles myself, I learned that pink cocaine was a party favorite of two very prominent celebrities at the time as my roommate knew their supplier. What the supplier did not mention was that it was pink because it was stored within dead fish being smuggled in from Mexico; blood was mixing with the powder. Quite an apt metaphor.

This all changed with crack, however. The rich man’s drug became the scourge of the poor. With little more than a coffee pot and some items from a grocery store, one kilo of pure Colombian white could be made into countless rocks to be sold cheaply and smoked quickly. This creates a faster and more intense high also causing it to dissipate more quickly, necessitating another boost in the very near future.

In my own life, I have seen what the drug game can do to people. I was shadowing my father during my freshman year of high school as he worked as a trauma surgeon in what I call a crack suburb of Philadelphia. He got a call that someone was coming that had been shot multiple times. I was in the Emergency Room watching him work, standing in the corner. There was some blood but not as much as I was expecting from someone with multiple gunshot wounds. This guy was shot through the belly and the back. My dad was able to stop the bleeding and then took him up to the Operating Room to remove the bullets and repair what he could. And I was right there every step of the way. He opened this gentleman’s belly, got what he could, stopped all the bleeding, and sewed up everything. However, when we looked at the x-rays together, we could see that there was a bullet lodged in one of the lower vertebrae of this man’s spine. He would never walk again. The cops said it was a drug deal gone sideways.

While the sea of blood that once tried to drown Medellin has washed up in places like Ciudad Juarez with the reins of the drug trade switching hands from the Colombians to the Mexicans, many people have said, if there was no market, there would be no violence. But what if the very supply of the product creates its own market? What if simply providing a product could make you and your family so rich, you could not spend all the money in a single lifetime? What would you do to protect this way of life, knowing that droves of people are coming for you and your family?

On the other side, is it because the government does not control the trade that makes it illegal? Look at the Opium Wars. Look at what occurred in Afghanistan. One of my tour guides, a local Paisa to Medellin said this: Americans are not evil, they are just ignorant. Perhaps, it goes beyond that. Some may be ignorant, but others know all too well. 

Bygones

I am not a person free from prejudice. I think it takes a big person to admit that. However, being a white American male my prejudice may surprise you. It was not for a people but for a country. And that country was Ecuador. 

To me, Ecuador became personified by one of my high-school professors. He was Ecuadorian, a doctor of economics, and an absolute dolt. Most, unfortunately, he was my academic advisor for my Junior year. I could not understand why the powers that were at my rather prestigious and expensive college preparatory school thought that he would be anything more than a detriment to those pursuing higher education. This is not the ramblings of some overprivileged spoiled brat; this was a concern of a discerning consumer who had been a loyal customer for over 11 years at this point. Not only was he ignorant of the American school system, but more ignorant of American culture. To the point of not really being able to converse with those he was charged with advising. 

Needless to say, I was absolutely apoplectic when he was slated to be my advisor for another year; my senior year. I did not like him. So much so, that I took time off my precious summer break to go to school with my parents to plead with another dolt to change advisors. Dolt The Second told me and my parents that a boy at the tender age of 18 was not wise enough to decide a person’s character; seeming to forget I would be voting for president in a few months. The selection stayed and I needed to endure yet another year of this imbecile. 

So, my travels to Ecuador were twofold: 1) I wanted to add another country to my list and 2) I wanted to prove my prejudices were valid.

What I found was that while my ire was valid towards the man, it was not towards the country. Thinking back on it, the roles of personality over nationality were reversed this time. And I needed this to be taught.

Quito is a remarkable city of immense beauty. UNESCO was very wise in designating the Old City as a world heritage site. Its fantastic churches, many in their numbers and magnificent in their grandeur span the narrow boulevards of this colonial city that time seems to have forgotten. Its food is colorful, plentiful, and astoundingly good. The people were warm and kind; very welcoming to a wayward traveler in their midst. 

Ecuador is lovely and should be anyone’s first stop, especially Americans if they are curious about the continent. I should have been more prepared to leave prejudices at home. Over 20 years since I graduated high school and I finally learned something from that man: let bygones be bygones. 

Emerald Fog

A language is simply an army’s dialect. 

This little piece of wisdom was from my university Spanish language professor who, incidentally, funded his education by smuggling emeralds in a Pert shampoo bottle from South America. The Iberian Peninsula, like most of Europe, was at one time under the banner of a Roman legion. As such, the language of commerce, government, and culture was Latin. However, while it was the official language of the Empire, there were accents and dialects that were as diverse as the people from Britannia to Aquincum (the Buda of Budapest.)  

After the break up of the Roman Empire, the languages kept evolving. Words and sounds began mixing with local dialects and vulgates leading to the Romance languages we know today. However, the Iberian peninsula was changed indelibly with the advance of the Moorish empire that overtook the Christian forces, causing them to retreat all the way to the north in the year of our Lord, 711 AD. For seven hundred and eighty one years, those forces slowly began retaking the peninsula. Eventually, if you recall, this was why Castilian, the dialect of the armies of Castile and Leon became the dominant language for the Spanish kingdom after they were able to expel the Moors from the Peninsula in 1492. 

However, another army was able to assist in the Reconquista. A Galician nobleman named Vimara Peres, led an Asturian force (Asturias being the Northernmost fallback point of Spanish Christiandom) to conquer a sizeable chunk of Andalusian territory between the Minho and Douro rivers in the 9th Century, using the area as both a flank and a stronghold moving south. The Asturian King Alfonso III awarded the entire region to Peres as a country, and Peres resettled the area with Galician colonists. He named it after the largest port city in the region, Portus Cale. It does not take a great imagination to figure out what this new country would come to be called. From this point on, Portugal began to develop its own regional identity, and indeed, its own distinct dialect, separate from the others of the Peninsula that would then soon coalesce into Portuguese.

Given their coastal proximity and the advent of ocean goings ships capable of great distances, it did not take long for the Portuguese to start exercising their naval muscles. They already had colonies in coastal Africa and had their sights on new trade routes to all the corners of the world. I surmise that to keep the peace between the two most powerful nations in Christendom at the time, the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 was signed dividing the New World. In 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral landed in what would be known as Brazil and the rest is history. 

Having spoken Spanish in South America to this point, I felt newly humbled as I fumbled in a language I did not know. Portuguese to me was like trying to navigate a city through an incredibly dense fog. One has a general idea of where you are and how to get where you are going, but the haze was there distorting my path. Lucky for me, I had a beautiful translator by my side. My native Spanish-speaking girlfriend took her Christmas break of one week to learn Portuguese. Although, she had been fascinated by the country for her entire life, being far more culturally enticing than her native Peru.  I did the best with my pidgin Portuguese which was basically me speaking Spanish as if I were Sean Connery. I was understood more times than not. The word book is libro in Spanish and livro in Portuguese. To cry is llorar in Spanish and chorar in Portuguese. And I would learn that Lambada is universal.

The first thing that struck me about Brazil as I was traveling from the airport to my lodgings was how green it was. São Paulo was a city that felt ensconced in a garden. And the Paulistas were like the residents of Eden, beautiful and carefree. The emerald nature of the country was only heightened as we traveled to the rainforest in Foz Do Iguaçu. The nature there was almost overwhelming; as if it was going to burst through the seams of reality itself. But the verdancy which was once only contained by the gardens and the forests then spread to the waters of Rio de Janeiro. Rio was a city that seemed to grow around its nature and not the other way around. I then realized why green was such a prominent color in their national flag.

During this time there was another fog of language I was dancing through. I have been very careful with the words I use with women I am seeing, for I know they mean a whole lot more to them. Utterances, jokes, or free words can have unintended consequences. I had been with women, some for a very long time, some too long, that I did not know if I loved. Or if they loved me. Even if those words were exchanged. The silly games of wounded children in love that can sometimes feel like war. But A was different. It was more than an infatuation; a collection of a “flag.” She cared. She wanted to know my thoughts. And I hers. We talked for hours in our native tongues. She gave me new perspectives of life as I did for her. We looked after each other. She took a chance with a man she barely knew, a foreigner nonetheless, to travel to the other side of the continent. And she was happy. She was in love. I did not need her sweet words to know.     

I remember sitting on a supplied beach chair with my hand intertwined with A on Copacabana beach. As the many green caipirinhas passed our lips, I noticed that some of the many fogs swirling around me since I arrived in Brazil had lifted. I cocked my head to one side, looked deep in her eyes, and said, “Eu te amo.”  

Peru Es Lo Mejor

If there is one country to visit in Latin America, hands down, it is Peru. I say this partially biased as I was sleeping with one of the country’s representatives, but from what I had experienced in other parts of the region, it is a great place for the experienced traveler and novice alike; it can be as exotic as you want it to be.

While other countries have their wonders, Peru did it right in that they have had decades of practice welcoming visitors from all parts of the globe. Tourism is one of the country’s life bloods. Lima, especially in the coastal enclaves, can rival any part of Southern California in restaurants, nightlife, and atmosphere. Cusco, in the charming central highlands, is even more hospitable, once one gets acclimated to the altitude. Everywhere, the people are friendly, the food is excellent, and barring certain cultural excursions, it is inexpensive.

For a Latin American country, it is relatively safer than other parts of the area. Believe me, while I always had my head on a swivel while traveling, it seemed that everyone in the country was a lot more chill. Granted, this does not mean go walking about at night, alone, drunk, in a skimpy outfit with money hanging out of your pockets but the likelihood that something bad happening to a typical tourist in a populated section of town in broad daylight is a lot lower than other parts of the region.

I loved this country so much, that with the aid of my Peruvian girlfriend, I wrote my own tongue-in-cheek patriotic anthem for the country’s 200th birthday entitled Peru Es Lo Mejor (Peru Is The Best) which I sang for her family. They loved it. And they loved it more that an American was singing their praises.

Chilezuela

EatPrayGreg.com Protests With Fire

I walked into the hostel kitchen to make dinner where one of my hostel mates was already stationed. We were allowed to use the flatscreen TVs there and this hippie-esque, kind of grungy gentleman had YouTube open playing a song in Spanish. It was incredibly catchy with panflutes and drums. But as I listened closer to the lyrics, I realized that it was a political ballad. Looking at the screen, it was a slide show in black and white of Salvador Allende and his supporters. The song was from the band Inti Illimani and it was called Canción del Poder Popular. Poder Popular was the socialist (read communist) party of Chile of which Allende was the leader that won the presidency in 1970. As the song continued with lyrics including “We’ll throw out the Yankee and their sinister language…” and images of people walking with hammer and sickle banners, it was incredibly surreal and made me think of the old adage that while history may not repeat itself, it does rhyme. Considering what was going on outside the fortified barricades of my hostel, it was quite the juxtaposition. All that was old was new again.

Chile was in a unique position in Latin America before I arrived. While other countries in the region were dealing with inflation, Chile, having a much better economic footing, was able to open operations of mining and rail systems in many neighboring countries. They were able to do this through the iron hand of Agusto Pinochet and the privatization of a lot of things in the country, from healthcare to transportation. However, as the fees increased and the wages stayed the same, the equivalent of a 40-cent increase for metro fares for students ignited the fires of protests the very day I arrived to the country.

It was an incredibly extraordinary experience. I had never been in a situation like this. It was very scary at times. While the line between protestor and looter got blurred, the people that were trying to ransack a pharmacy next to my hostel with the intent to burn it after, made me come up with a plan of how I would escape my 7th story room. And made me miss my Second Amendment rights. I made sure to keep my distance from any and all of the protests as I did not was to become arrested as a foreign presence. However, I was able to be out on the streets during daylight hours to see the mobilizing of the police, the military, and the protestors. I was even able to watch their handy work from my perch, getting repetitively teargassed in the process.  

When Pinochet took power after the death of Allende in a CIA-supported coup in 1973, his main goal, other than maintaining power, was purging Communist influence in the country. This lead to a reign of terror where knocks on doors in the middle of the night by police would end with a lot of the summoned never returning, murdered by the state either accidentally or intentionally. It seemed that some old habits died hard as some protestors were picked up by the police, taken to undisclosed locations, and brutalized, with some not returning home. Photos of the disappeared were placed all over the city asking if they had been seen by their families.

I was dismayed that these people supposedly yearning to breathe free destroyed a lot of the city; spraying graffiti onto beautiful buildings, defiling their own cultural institutions, sacking and burning grocery stores, and making life harder for the poorest of the poor by disrupting mass transit. Businesses were looted and set ablaze, in apparently an ancient rite similar to what the natives did to the colonizing forces, while the businesses that could welded large iron fortifications to their storefronts. Before this time, Santiago was a relatively safer city in Latin America.  

However, given the history of “Socialist” countries never letting a good opportunity go to waste, I felt in my bones that there were agitators well versed in the practices of anarchy and destabilization under the guise of unity and comradeship. I had been watching the Maduro regime in Venezuela killing his own people for mobilizing protests, with the coup de grâce being running over protestors with armored personel carries. Then backing up. With Pinochet long dead, now was an opportunity to add Chile as a piece to their chessboard. As I was out in the streets of Santiago, amongst the protestors, I began thinking of the now ominous refrain of Canción del Poder Popular: 

Because this time it’s not about
changing a president,
it will be the people who build
a very different Chile.  

The Lost Colony

EatPrayGreg.com Islas Malvinas Protest

I love Argentina. It is an incredibly fascinating place. If one were dropped in the middle of Buenos Aires, with all the classical architecture, they would be forgiven for thinking they were strolling through one of the capitals of Europe. Argentinians are a rare breed, beautifully exemplifying the melting pot of the New World and the Old. People that wanted new lives for centuries washed up on their shores; seeking work opportunities, fleeing oppression, and even war. The Spanish spoken there is unique to the rest of the world. It is an ancient dialect that was kept from the age of conquest. It has a very particular accent (pollo pronounced as poyjo for example) and grammar structure (they use vos and sos for you and you are respectively.) However, especially in Buenos Aires, there is a lot of Italian thrown in for good measure. There, beer is not a cerveza, it is a birra. 

Argentina took a lot of skills from the Old World and managed them with adroitness. The wine of Mendoza rivals Tuscany, Bordeaux, or Napa. The buildings were constructed by the same kinds of men that built the grand cities of the United States. Their wide-open spaces and centuries of know-how allowed them to raise some of the best cattle in the world with beef and leatherworks second to none. Not to mention the world-renowned seduction of the tango. Buenos Aires is one of the cities that has the most book stores of any city in the world. 

But, there is one stark reminder that this is indeed a lost colony of Europe. Their unique place in the world allowed them to think they could handle more than they could. Loans, debt, default, and constant inflation marked my time there and had well before; for almost a hundred years. But facts and figures only tell a sterile story.

Argentina was the first place in the world where I saw an entire family on the street. They were all huddled together on a mattress begging strangers for change or food. It was difficult to see kids like that; dirty and malnourished on the same street where the more affluent went to Broadway-like shows. In less than a month, the exchange rate went from 80 Pesos to the Dollar to 90. Imagine being a pensioner and seeing your life savings evaporate in front of your very eyes. Or a worker needing to take their wages and exchange them for dollars so they maintain some value. Or a restaurant owner that had to put prices in post-it notes daily as they kept fluctuating. When I was talking with an Argentine industrialist, while he was showing me pictures of his barely legal foreign mistresses, she said that most of the food from Argentia, a billion dollars worth, was being exported to pay debts. 

Why did this happen? The answer rung true throughout the region; government mismanagement and downright theft. Although Argentina was no longer Spanish property, there was still certainly a ruling class; ones that could trace their lineage back to the Criollos, or direct Spanish blood born in the New World. They were educated abroad, of course. And much like the aristocracy of the past, many considered themselves “too big to fail.” But fail they did. Only instead of losing a principality or kingdom, they would lose a country when bigger institutions offered to lend them money at usurious rates. These rulers would be fine though, spiriting away pilfered funds into foreign accounts, but their countrymen could not. A revolving carousel of politicians would come, demanding they be brought into office so they could fix the wrongs of the previous leaders, only to do more of the same. This would be a harsh lesson I would learn during my time in Latin America. But as Robert Frost would say about life, even in this state of economic uncertainty and decline, it goes on. Only there, the background music is an accordion and a violin. 

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Traveler

eat pray greg the lonliness of the long distance traveler

“Good people… we must never forget that Anthony Bourdain killed himself. Anthony Bourdain had the greatest job that show biz has ever produced. This man flew around the world and ate delicious meals with outstanding people. That man, with that job, hung himself in a luxury suite in France.”

While the show “Sticks and Stones” by Dave Chapelle was an entertaining masterpiece of comedy gold, I found it odd to start with such a starkly sad moment. Mr. Chapelle then went on to say that his friend that had a much worse life never thought of committing suicide. While I could see where he was coming from, on my voyage, I could understand Anthony Bourdain. Prolonged travel is not for everyone.

Waking, cleaning, eating, working, living, and then going to sleep. While this can be anyone’s life, when you travel, especially when you travel a lot, your waking hours can reduce themselves to a microcosm of life, a petite vie and petite mort daily. You meet people at your hotel, hostel, bar, on the street, and in transit. Those brief encounters you share together are all you have, like grains of sand passing together through an hourglass. Soon, sometimes too soon, they leave or you do. Meals you might share are only that. The drinks you consume together empty too quickly. Love affairs are over by sunrise. Every day is a life and every night is death, to be reborn the next day; in a new situation, with new people, in a new city, new country, or a new continent. Do that enough and the impermanence of life itself becomes self-evident. I do not fault those that stay home, in their jobs, careers, families, and countries that are able to anesthetize themselves to the fact that every day, we are all closer to that final journey to the undiscovered country from which no traveler has returned. 

Conversely and yet paradoxically, it is freeing to wake each day knowing that its promise is always present. When one travels, it is seeing a world with new eyes and having new lives every day. It heightens you and gives you a sense of immediacy to do all things you want or need to do. And maybe the courage to do things you do not ordinarily allow yourself to do. It is a chance for constant renewal. It is filled with new possibilities and adventure, even in the seemingly banal or mundane. It is experiencing these intense vicissitudes, at least for me, that makes the inevitable last great voyage a bit more tolerable.