I only just thought of this, this afternoon while on my way home from work. I have mentioned, I believe, in other places on this blog that I do manage to get an awful lot done while living within a very strict budget. This includes foreign travel. However, there are always restrictions that apply and this becomes very difficult to communicate to a lot of people.
Life for me, Gentle Reader, has been one ongoing series of trade-offs, as I suspect it has been for many of you. When I decided that I finally had a generous enough bank balance to facilitate travel it was with the understanding that I would have to accept certain trade-offs and sacrifices. I was certain about one thing in particular: I was not going to take the all-inclusive resort route. Neither was I going to behave like a foreign sybarite. My whole notion of travel consisted in getting to know a new country, a new culture, new people and a new language. It meant, as it still does, arriving with an open mind and an attitude of respect, as a guest in another's house. It also has meant taking a non-consumerist approach to travel.
This is what makes it difficult to talk about my trips with others, unless they take the time to read my travel blogs. Most people I do talk to have, or seem to have, a rather different understanding of travel from mine. They also don't live within the sometimes extreme budgetary limitations that I have long accepted as daily life and I think if a lot of them knew how much, or how little, I earn they would be absolutely flabbergasted that I am able to travel to Vancouver Island, much less to Colombia or Costa Rica or Mexico.
I am often asked why I don't travel to this city, or that town, or take in this site or do these things and those things. A lot of times, I just don't feel like it. I don't like to travel when I travel. My preference is to find one place to stay, for a month or so, and get to know the area, the people. To make my home there, as it were. However, it is also a matter of economics. I can't afford extra air travel except on maybe occasional vacations. For example, both times I was in Colombia, I stayed only in Bogota. I did want to visit other cities and places but it was expensive so I settled for a place that is not widely considered much of a draw for tourists. Likewise when I spent three weeks in San Jose, Costa Rica. It was a gritty, hardscrabble kind of city, but it fit my budget and I really got a good grasp of Costa Rica during my time there. At times it was also enjoyable though I was really glad to make it up to the mountains in Monteverde for a week. It was also like this during my several visits to Mexico City. I usually stayed in one area because it was affordable but I could also make it work for me. There have been a couple of exceptions: the two weeks I spent in Chiapas, but expensive because of the extra flight costs. Also the two weeks I spent in Puebla, very affordable because it was an inexpensive busride from Mexico City.
It isn`t that I have anything against traditional tourism. It is simply not a good fit for me, economically or spiritually. On my limited means I am still able to push open doors that often take me into places without limits, such places as I am able to carry home with me to Vancouver where my life is made all the richer and where I have all the more to offer the world around me, from the world within me, enlivened and enlarged by the many parts of the world I have had the privilege of visiting.
No comments:
Post a Comment