A Year and a Day #15: The End of the Beginning - Mexico

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My three month anniversary of starting this trip passed last week
(scary). This is my last night in Mexico, and San Christobal de las
Casas very much feels like The End of the Beginning of my RTW
adventure, to quote W. Churchill. The end of North America, the end
of getting the hang of the basics of this travelling thing, and, I
suspect, the end of the easy part before Central America proper. I
wanted to review for myself and explain more fully the reasons why I
decided to do this trip, what travelling has so far shown me about
myself, and what I want from travelling going forward. Felt a little
awkward writing all this navel gazing, hope you don't mind reading
it, but I think that it makes the more standard "travel writing"
sections of my travel diary make a bit more sense if you know
something about what is motivating me to do things. Also started
Thoreau's Walden, and came across a nice line, (paraphrasing) "I
should not talk about myself so much if there was anyone else whom I
knew so well."

Why did I decide to go on this trip?

1. I enjoy travelling - probably the most basic reason. I love the
everyday exoticness of being in a foreign country: reading a book or
cooking a meal and thinking, "and I'm in Mexico!" Or sitting on a bus
and looking at mountains, knowing they are not my mountains. I'm
happy to pass time walking the streets of a new city, watching how
people walk, how they drive, the clothes they wear, their
expressions, how they make eye contact, peering into restaurants to
see what kind of things they eat. To travel around the world has been
a dream for years. I've lived in New York state, Hawaii and Venice
for three months each, and now wanted to do the full RTW trip,
travelling through countries and watch one change into the next.

2. When I was deciding to do this, my 25th birthday was approaching,
and I couldn't face spending that year of my life hunched over a
computer (errr, what am I doing right now then?). A large reason for
making this a RTW trip was reconnaissance for the rest of my life. I
wanted to visit a large enough portion of the world to get some
inkling of where I liked and where I might want to live. Not sure the
UK is really the place for me by any means. The reason for doing the
trip now as it seemed right to do it before buying a house or getting
£20,000 into debt doing a two year MBA in Barcelona (which was
the alternative I spent a lot of time considering).

3. The next reason, and much harder to write about, was self
improvement. I suppose everyone travels with this in mind, but here
are my thoughts on the subject. No one can be perfect, but we all
have aspects of our personality that generate results we don't like,
results that don't make us happy. I've met and worked with people who,
under stress, flip and start shouting, instantly regretting it once
the pressure's released, or people who try to avoid conflict at all
costs, and so on - I feel that while one may never make oneself
flawless, and certainly, who knows what will happen in this strange
world, but if people don't pursue the difficult aspects of their
character, certain situations will either have to be avoided as much
as possible, or the same problems will keep coming up and limiting
one's happiness in life. Life seems such an unlikely and incredibly
varied blessing, it seems to me like one of the purposes of it is to
grow into the person one could potentially be. Nietzsche's proverbs
are quoted a lot, but one I've always liked is "Become what you are".

For me, I was feeling that after 3-4 years of working, I was only
growing in a quite narrow way. I had learnt a lot since leaving
University, had become more self assured and more happy in myself,
and had learnt a lot about working in a company - which in itself
requires a universe of skills. But I guess that I always felt a bit
like an overgrown schoolboy. I knew a lot of stuff, but felt like
there wasn't much behind it. I was generally confident, but in
certain situations that were hard for me I seemed to lose all that
and regress to my unhappy secondary school teenage self. I was a
little afraid I'd not try to do anything about all this, get to 30
and realise this was all still the case. To speak more spiritually, I
wanted to take this adventure to grow my soul.

I think it is easy to be a good person when there's no pressure - I
hear said about so many unpleasant, incomplete people, "oh, but he's
an alright person to have a drink with". What's hard is growing
emotionally enough for the difficult times. On my flight back from
three difficult months trying to find work in Hawaii (four years
ago), where I certainly didn't act at times as well as I would like,
I picked up a copy of Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (I had been working with a bunch of people who
believed in reading these kind of books). In retrospect it was a
terrible book to read as an introduction to Self Help Lit in general,
as nothing I've read since, including later works by Covey and
cohorts, comes close to some of the brilliance of this book. The
awful title is vastly misleading, it isn't some survey of what
effective things effective people do (maybe, "always get a second set
of keys made up"), but is about trying to achieve lasting happiness
and living according to whatever values one possesses. It talks about
how frequently people live their lives just reacting to external
events - eg: I want to leave my job because my boss makes me
miserable, I'm happy because it's Friday, and all kinds of other
things - and then about what trying to live according to some
internally thought out set of principles looks like.

Look, I'm not trying to say the book has all the answers, nor that
it's perfect (I've always felt habits five to seven were a bit of a
let down), but it made a big impression on me. I reread it maybe once
a year, and every time I'd think, oh dear, that is exactly how I've
been thinking about person X, or whatever. I felt generally, seven
habits or no seven habits, I wanted to get closer to being able to
live a life I felt happier with, where I was closer to my potential
as a person, and didn't feel that continuing working in an office in
London was going to get me there, nor was going off to study more.

I've been thinking about some of the things I'm learning about myself
as I travel, and what I want from the trip going forward. The power
of travel is that it takes away some of the fluffiness of everyday
life � it's harder to ignore good and bad features of oneself...

Things I'm realising I like / dislike in my travels

1. This trip is demonstrating to me undeniably to me that I am a city
person. The places I look forward to visit are always interesting
sounding cities and towns. I am definitely not a beach person at all.
Something about more than an hour lying on a beach sets my brain
itching � do something! Yet put me in a new urban atmosphere and I'll
sit lazily for hours watching the world go past. After my whole mega-bitten, unhappy couple of days in Baja, I spent three days in the tiny
Mulege and Loreto. It was OK, but I only really started feeling
better when I arrived in the state capital La Paz. Suddenly I
felt, "yes, back where I understand."

Very big cities I'm finding hard to experience � places like LA or
Mexico City are like London, too large for even long term residents
to understand, so not so satisfying to visit. Kind of undecided about
what my views are on villages and the countryside, need to spend more
time in such areas in Central America (Mexico has been largely a
story of cities for me).

2. I like eating and cooking a lot, in fact food is pretty integral
to my idea of travelling to a place. I'm massively enjoying writing
this travelogue, and am missing greatly a supply of good English
language books to read. I enjoy dancing, but suspect a lot of
unpleasant work is going to be needed to learn salsa adequately,
rather than my current almost passable pseudo-imitation of it.

3. I don't seem to mind places that have lots of tourists, but I
think I need to feel like that isn't all there is to a place. I
definitely don't feel like drinking/clubbing every night... since I
stopped working there isn't the negative suppressed energy to expunge
every Friday night. A few or several beers with friends every few
nights is cool. Drinking is expensive too, I met people in Guanajuato
spending spending $20 each night they went out, which is about
a full day's expenditure for me now. I've also realised that a key
thing I enjoyed about drinking with friends was the "with friends"
part of it. It doesn't feel the same going out with people I've just
met � I don't feel so comfortable with getting a bit drunk and
potentially saying something embarrassing...

Good things about myself I've noticed

This section isn't an exhaustive account of all the things I think
are special about me � the internet isn't big enough to transmit such
a file. This is just a few travel related things that I've noticed
that I seem to be good at.

1. I seem to be pretty funny. This has come up with a lot of the
people I've met, which is nice. Most of my jokes involve letting my
brain relax and come up with witty, bitchy or just absurd connections
with something someone has just said. I went to a quite unpleasant
secondary school, and an ability to accurately and instantly retort
or quip is something both myself and my best friend from that school
(in fact, my only friend from that school) seem to have developed as a
result. It's nice I suppose to be able to use this power for good
rather than evil.

2. I seem to be generally a socialable and easy to befriend person. I
think when I'm relaxed and feeling OK about the world, I seem to meet
a lot of people. I also seem to connect reasonably deeply with
certain people every so often, which always feels like a blessing
when it happens.

3. I'm willing to try lots of things, even if I suspect I'm going to
embarrass myself terribly. This is perhaps the thing I am most proud
about myself. I seem to be able to be not quite awful at most of the
things I try � but getting better than that at many things, such as
salsa, seems to need a lot of work.

4. Teenage Mexican girls seem to like me.

Things which I don't really like about myself, things I'd like to change through this travelling

Now for the meat. This is a much longer section, if only because a
central point of this trip is to develop as a person, and the
difficult nature of travelling by myself is highlighting various
arenas of potential improvement.

1. I don't always give people enough respect. This is particularly
unfortunate, as I hate when it's me being patronised, but every so
often someone convinces me that they are irredeemably stupid and I
rarely conceal that opinion well. In a hostel, one of the American
staff talked us through some of the most blindingly obvious sections
of the film Tombstone as we were watching it, as though these were
actual critical insights rather than deliberately signposted aspects
of the film. Later on when cooking, I asked him if he knew how long
the pasta that the hostel stocked needed to cook, he said, "ten
minutes I guess, but what I do is to try a bit as it cooks and see if
it tastes ready." I must have given him a bottomlessly disdainful, "No, really, Sherlock?" expression, because he visibly
recoiled and said a little sarcastically, "but I guess a smart guy like you already knew that."

2. I do seem to get on well with most types of people, except people
I don't like. I've spoken to friends at the end of a night, "what did
you think of that guy from the bar?" and they respond "oh, a
patronising little turd." I am always stunned � I thought that as
well, but other people seem able to chat amicably about the Yucatan
to people they really dislike, while I find myself seething silently.
This isn't a sign of how principled I am � I rarely or never speak up
and tell the person what I think, or even really ignore them
properly, I just seem to regress to a bitter, sulking ten year old. I
probably just smile wanly at the person with a "when I rule this
planet, you'll be on the first train to the salt mines" expression �
he probably goes away with a warm feeling about my friends, "alright
people", but I'm sure fixes me as a strange, tense, unhappy person. I
find this particularly with people who intimidate me � I can't accept
that they think they can boss me around, and they probably sense
that, but am generally unable to utitlise my aforementioned quip-making to their face.

3. I'm realising on this trip the extent to which I stress out about
things. Not all types of things, in fact I'm often a very relaxed
person. Practical, tangible crises or dangers rarely phase me,
horrendously embarrassing acts are upsetting only for a short time;
but vague worries about unsolvable or unknowable problems endlessly
rile me. Am I doing this trip "the right way", am I visiting the
right countries and the right places within those countries, am I
meeting a good number of people, am I making friends - you start to
get the picture. In my second year at University it was "why God why
am I only getting two ones for my essays?", then at work "how well am
I perceived as an analyst?" etc etc etc, so this is probably just the
conversion to a different subject matter.

I'm realising that, at least on this trip, none of the things I worry
about matter at all. If I was terrified about getting mugged or
having my stuff stolen, at least that would be something worth
worrying about. Instead I spend my worrying time on: "do people find
me interesting/attractive/happy?", "am I really doing this travelling
thing properly or just going through the motions?"

How to become less stress intensive, I'm not sure. Since Guanajuato I
came to the decision to recognise stress about nothing building up and
just to try to dismiss it as best I could. It seems to be working,
but we will see how the trip progresses.

4. A question: would you rather laugh all day but cry yourself to
sleep, or be miserable all day but go to sleep smiling?

This question is clearly an exaggeration, but I've been thinking
about it a lot in terms of what being happy is. I'm certainly not
miserable all day at the moment, but I can't help thinking that on
some levels I was maybe more "happy" as a percentage of my day when I
was back in London. Friendships at the office, finish work and then:
Meet friends? Go to the cinema? Shop for books? A good meal in a
moderately priced restaurant? If I wanted to talk to someone there
was the mobile, if I wanted some item I could buy it.

It was only in the quiet times where the distractions of life ebbed
lower, and I'd think to myself aghast, "What am I DOING with my
life??"

Although please don't be mistaken, I'm not miserable all day, I'm
having an incredible time travelling, but I don't seem able to escape
the fact that large portions of this trip are really hard. So many
things require an effort that they didn't at home, that I don't think
that travelling around all the time is really the best way to
achieve "jollification".

I'm particularly noticing that, what are on paper just tiny setbacks, especially social ones, sometimes have the capacity to depress
me quite deeply. Often, in retrospect, very minor things can knock me back for the rest of the day.

My feeling is that the reason for this is I'm by myself. When
something happens, there's no one to turn to and comiserate/whine to.
There isn't anyone who knows me well and has a good idea of the
situation � people who know me well are all hundreds of miles away,
and people who understand the situation have only just met me.
Neither group is well equipped to offer much more than "cheer up,
mate!", which is definitely much appreciated, but isn't really a full
panacea. While writing this journal is immensely rewarding and
helpful, I don't really want it to be a mindless bitch about every
little thing that narked me.

The flip side is that I do now go to sleep smiling. When I'm lying in
bed at night or having a silent coffee in a town square, and the
hassles of buses, queasy stomaches, hostels, money and new friends
are put aside, I feel at peace in a way I don't think I've felt for a
long time. Whenever I ask myself: despite these problems you're
having, is this what you should be doing with your life right now,
the answer always comes back, "YES".

What I want in the trip going forward

1. I want to keep doing activities. Things like dancing classes,
surfing, cooking classes, etc, possibly take up some fencing again
somewhere in South America, doing these kind of things makes the day
so much more vibrant and are a great way to meet people that aren't
fellow backpackers.

2. Definitely enjoying stopping in places � the two weeks in
Guanajuato and the week I spent in Oaxaca have been really great.
Want to stop in some smaller towns or villages, feel like I've stuck
to cities a bit too much so far. Would love to find somewhere like
the Whistler hostel � ie: a bit remote in beautiful surroundings.

3. Tied to both of these ideas is that I'm starting to accept that I
can't see everything. This is both in terms of countries, areas in
countries, and things to do within those areas. There is a staggering
array of "things" in the world; I leafed through my guidebook's
recommendations on Oaxaca after five days there and realised: I
haven't done ANY of this stuff. How I am adapting my expectations to
this reality is to focus on "doing things" in each place, not
arriving with the implicit goal of seeing it all. For example, in Oaxaca I ended up choosing to take salsa lessons and working in a
street children centre. That's what I did in Oaxaca, and anything
else I decide to do or see is a bonus. So in Guatemala there are a
few things I definitely want to do (learn more Spanish, spend two
weeks somewhere that isn't Antigua, shop in the famous markets, visit
Tikal), and sure more will suggest themselves, but I am not going to
Guatemala with the intention of "seeing" the whole country. This
shift seems a recipe for more happiness, rather than thinking like
some of the people I knew at University, that a good essay was one
where you stuffed in everything you could think of on the subject.
Doug Lansky wrote about this, doing rather than seeing, in a book I
read First Time Around the World, but it seems to be one of those
things I needed to travel first to understand better.

4. I want to try and mix tourist and non-tourist places. The problem
with going off the beaten track is that it frequently isn't as much
fun; the beaten track is generally that way for a reason... I think
one of the main things about tourist popular places is that they are
immediately accessable: it is instantly clear why Venice is a unique
place to everyone as soon as they arrive, whether they then like the
place or not. Whereas non popular places, often it takes a while to
explore them and find the places one likes. I'm sure I've been
guilty of going off the beaten track and thinking after a day, hmm,
doesn't seem that great.

5. Remember that it is a guide book, not a guide dog. Guide books are
pernicious things, and I'm trying to fight my dependence on mine. I
use Footprint's Mexico and Central America handbook � it's OK. The
problem I think with guide books is that they give you the impression
that you know a lot about a place, when in fact, you have no idea.
Guidebooks make me feel a bit like some idiot savant � I can tell you
where the post office is in Morelia's town centre, but I can't cross
a road in Morelia without endangering myself. And the times when I
really needed the guidebook's advice and relied on it as a decision
making tool, like counting on buses running out of Leon after 1am, my
book has usually been wrong. It is particularly unhelpful with hotel
prices, these seem to be highly frequently up to double what the book
says. Presumably anyone listed in a guide book raises prices as extra
custom comes in.

My book has been very useful, but I kind of wish I'd
bought something more informal and opinionated, which would give
more "soft" advice, like that Mexicans are generally quite formal,
private people or, with a month in Guatemala, go here, here and here,
advice which I could accept or reject as I travelled. I've been
trying to leave the book in the hostel as much as possible � I
decided I'd rather ask people where the post office is than look it
up and walk holding the guide book's map up to my face.

6. Try to be flexible. I do seem apt at creating rules and rails for
myself where none exist. I am trying to remember that the point of
doing this trip without a RTW ticket was to give myself more freedom,
but I have a tendency to create a rough route in advance and refuse
to deviate from it. There really isn't any need for this, but I guess
I am bringing something of my old life with me to this vagabonding.

7. Cheap is good. Cheap is good, I am going to try to stick to cheap
things and places. I feel like, although I have some finanical
flexibility if I see something I like, I have an obligation to myself
to let this trip go on for a while, assuming I continue to enjoy it.
Since getting to Guanajuato, I'm also realising that my budgeting for
the trip was more or less sensible: I can do this! Since Oaxaca, I've
been trying to manage my budget for each day down (300 pesos a day
(about £16) for all daily expenses, including long distance bus
journeys, is now seeming a little extravagant), but conscious that
lots of travellers seem to be spending less than I am (equally, some
are spending much more). Feel reasonably relaxed about this, but
suspect in a year's time I'll laugh about how frivolous I was back in
Central America... In the end, believe I'll be happier choosing a
daily average budget and sticking to it rather than adopting a spend
as little as possible each day outlook.

8. I want to make more of an effort to meet people as I travel.

Sometimes I think I'm too lazy about this when I arrive somewhere new
and then spend the evening a bit miserable. I need to recognise that
I clearly have a level of socialising that I need, and should be a
bit more proactive about getting to know people. But it's not a big
problem.

9. Listen to the voice. This is harder to explain, but: I think that
a lot of people would agree that they worry too much about what other
people think. But for me, I feel it is another stage onwards � I
often find it genuinely hard to know what it is I want, especially
without getting advice from several people and choosing the most
sensible/appealling sounding one. Out of all the possibilities in the
world, I feel like it's hard for me to hear the internal voice that
says, "do this!" I have friends for whom this seems different � they
seem more internally directed on a day-to-day basis, have a clearer
sense of what they want to do with their time. As one example, I've
agonised for months on and off about whether it was my fault I didn't
get on with someone, and suddenly a friend will mention, "Oh, I only
met him for a day, but thought he was a real twat". I'll say, "why?
(i.e. justify that feeling of yours)", and they'll shrug, "I just
did". One resolution for this trip is to exercise "Listen to the
Voice" more and learn to hear the voice better, to decide on things
and just do them, even if they sound stupid. To go where I want to,
even if everyone around is saying, "but Dan, a visit to X gives
unparralelled life-long happiness".

P.S.: I wouldn't want you to think, with all the above complaining on
the subject, that I'm massively regretting the decision to take this
trip by myself. It is definitely easier to meet new people when by
one's self, and is much easier to be unobtrusive when there is only
me walking in a market or such place, and not speaking English to my
friends. By the time tourists are in groups, we are unavoidably
recognisable and, I suspect, often less appreciated. My impression from
travelling now and in the past is that people in the world like
individuals, they want to talk to you more when you are an
individual, rather than associate you with the rich bossy societies
you come from.

Being alone also allows the trip to be more personal, and
this is the most important thing. As hopefully I've conveyed by the
above, I have quite personal reasons for starting and for what I want
out of this adventure, and it would be all but inconceivable to spend
months and months of it saying, "do you want to go to Veracruz
then?"... Plus, well aware travelling with friends for a long time
can be a good way to lose them. I, in fact, seem to have something of a
gift in this respect, so it is probably for the best I am doing this
solo most of the time.



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