Talking to strangers
Travel notes from someone who should be more careful
I have so many projects (with deadlines!) to work on, but because of that I felt the burning need to write down some notes from my trip last year. Maybe I will fashion them into something better sometime but for now here is a little piece of writing, loosely extrapolated from some journal entries. I wanted to tie it to Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen trilogy, detailing her childhood, youth, and adulthood as someone with a burning Want within herself, but I do not have the brainpower to do anything clever or technical or referential. Her protagonist has an aching desire to be a writer, and when this is achieved, she realizes that her well of desire is much deeper than that, something she risks drowning in. Anyways. Another time. Also yes this reeks of privilege but you are my friends you already know this about me.
Last year I travelled through Colombia and Peru on my own for six weeks. I spent the month leading up to the trip desperately trying to learn some Spanish. I wrote down verbs and useful phrases and read them to myself out loud over and over again for about an hour a day, which even a bad language teacher would tell you is a terrible way to learn a language quickly. I know I’m a horrible, tacky, presumptuous person for thinking I can show up somewhere and speak English the whole time, or worse, that I can just “pick up” a whole language. I digress. For the first time in my life, I had the foresight to book my flights with the same airline instead of the cheapest, jankiest route I could find, so when my flight to Miami was delayed and caused me to miss my connection to Cartagena, American Airlines figured it all out for me and put me on the next flight down, arriving at 9 pm. It felt incredibly luxurious to have someone else re-book my flight (the airline doing its job), which might tell you a lot about my usual travel logistics. Once the high from that wore off, I realized that I would be spending the next six hours in the Miami airport and arriving in Cartagena after dark, something I had tried hard to avoid. But I was getting ahead of myself—Miami would have to come first. America always feels so profoundly American, a strange fantasy land where the normal (Canada, duh) is amplified, like a Las Vegas-fication of reality. Miami felt like the usual American airport on steroids, with huge men in flip-flops, fake tits in Juicy, and kiosks emblazoned with flags, sometimes literal flags on top of flags. It scared me, and it felt like a bad omen for this already nerve-inducing trip. The second scary aspect was arriving at night. Everyone I had told about my adventure had warned me to be careful travelling alone in South America, especially as a woman. My parents were aghast. People were displeased with the fact that I seemed to be spitting in the face of Death, purposely putting myself in harm’s way, and for what? Because I’m a young woman, I had to be very careful, and landing in Colombia for the first time at night was definitely not that. No word of a lie, my arrival was far less scary than six hours in the Miami airport, and that’s after I forgot my debit card in the airport ATM and almost got scammed by a fake cab driver. My biggest regret from that trip was worrying so much about my safety. I got spooked into thinking that I would be in perma-danger. My risk tolerance in foreign countries is, admittedly, much higher than many people’s, but once I finally let my guard down, I found I made friends everywhere.
The thing is, “womanhood” isn’t especially hard. I like being myself. I like the point of view from which I observe and feel the workings of the world. I like the softness of my body. My frustration is in the inability to experience the kind of personhood that I see men experience. Or, to not be perceived as a person in the same way. I’m supposed to have some sort of concept of what being a woman is, what it’s like to be a woman, what it means to have female friendships, and I’m supposed to have a fraught or loving relationship with my body. Everything must be filtered through a lens that I wish I didn’t have to see through, every interaction has these big neon signs that say HELLO, GIRL! IT’S GIRL TIME! And most annoying of all, everything and everyone is supposedly out to get me. I am so incredibly lucky to have reached this point in my life relatively unscathed by violence. I am lucky that I am able to feel strong and capable when one bad experience could have made me fearful instead. But it makes me angry that this luck seems to make people think that the other shoe will drop, that the bad thing is just biding its time, and they bristle at my lack of fear for this future moment. I have had just as many conversations with men who have told me that I “need to be careful taking public transportation” or that they “can’t imagine walking at night alone as a woman” as I have had unpleasant experiences doing either of these things, and knowing a man warned me never made them any better. (It is of course ironic that I write this tirade about existing as a woman to escape the bounds of having to write as a woman).
Granted, I didn’t feel especially safe in Cartagena. I was accosted often by vendors and men. But I have been blessed with the ability to make myself nearly invisible, and by relying on this power, I managed to scurry around the (touristed) part of the city quite easily. I listened to the man at the front desk of the hostel and avoided leaving the walls of the old city, which seemed to be the advice given to the seniors off their cruise ships as well. I bought a bag of mandarin oranges, or some kind of small peelable orange (I’ve never figured out what tangerines and clementines and satsumas are, they’re all mandarins to me), and I wandered around ploughing through the bag. I went to a restaurant by myself where I watched local news (car crash, not gang violence) and ate muddy fried fish, plantains, and rice. I mostly kept moving until going back to the hostel, where I sat and read, unsuccessfully trying to flirt with the others in the courtyard through eye contact alone. I was once told that I look really scared when I try to send signals that way, and have been asked “is everything ok?” while trying to eye-fuck someone. The third and final night I was there, I ventured to the hostel bar, which never got easier throughout my six weeks of travel. Walking into a room with confidence, eyeing up the groups, and deciding where to sit all in one swift motion was consistently challenging, though I fashioned a tidy and funny little intro blurb for myself that made introductions easy. I ended up playing cards with a few cute Danes and met some Dutch girls who embodied that Northern European strain of hot young feminist that we don’t produce so much of in North America: short hair, many earrings, Salomon shoes, vocal and confident, yet completely, one hundred percent, straight. It was a nice evening, and I felt proud of myself. I had survived!
The next day, I was off to Minca, in the hills near Santa Marta, on the North Coast. I called a motorbike to take me to the bus station, bracing myself against the driver’s back and desperately resisting the force of my backpack pulling on me as we veered around corners. I was at the start of my trip, so I had the cash to pay extra for the air-conditioned bus. There was no one next to me, and I looked forward to an introspective ride along the Caribbean coast, picturing the window down and the ocean breeze through my hair. Dream one was dashed as the window only opened slightly, and we were supposed to keep them closed because of the air conditioning. The road was a bit inland, so I couldn’t see much of the sea. It only popped into view occasionally. The itinerary listed three official stops between us and Santa Marta, but we stopped every ten minutes or so to let someone off on the side of the road or pick someone up from outside a house. Midway through the trip, the initially spacious bus was completely packed, the air conditioning had stopped working, and an old man had sat down next to me and was speaking to me in an unrelenting stream of Spanish. “No hablo español,” I tried to tell him, but that did not seem to be an obstacle. I gave him my phone, open to the Google Translate app, but that didn’t work either—he brushed it aside. I tried to type what I thought I heard as fast as I could, then translate what I wanted to respond, but of course, that was not nearly quick enough. So, I just listened, and sometimes was able to catch something I thought I understood, which I would excitedly repeat in English, and which would have no impact on the content or pacing of his little monologue. We passed a cluster of run-down resorts near the sea, and he started talking a lot about something something roja. I was convinced he had an interesting fact about the reddish, clay-rich beach they were on, trying to hit on a translation that would click with him, but it was only fifteen minutes or so after we passed them that I realized he had just been reading the name of one of the dingy hotels. When we got to the edge of Santa Marta, two women I took to be his daughters approached from a few rows behind us, giggling. They thought their father and I made a hilarious pair and were apologetic about his stream of consciousness that I had been listening to so intensely. They asked in Spanglish where I was going and how I was getting there, and translated their father’s questions about where my boyfriend was and why was I on this bus alone? They were appalled that I didn’t really know how to get to the mountain town I was going to. They called me a cab when we got off the bus and leaned through the driver’s side window to talk to him, telling me that they had negotiated a good rate. We waved goodbye, and I blew a kiss.
In Minca I stayed at a beautiful hostel nestled into the hillside. It had a view that stretched out between the mountains to the ocean. We would watch the sun sink every night. Like at most hostels, I felt intensely lonely and intensely overwhelmed. Living in such close quarters with strangers who owe you nothing is nerve-wracking. Every day you’re surprised by the breadth of the human species, yet nothing you prepare for ever happens. I was renting a hammock between five large, loud, sprawling men. It would take me hours to fall asleep waiting for my tiredness to prevail over their snoring. I would wake up early in the morning, either to a fly buzzing outside my mosquito net or to the unlocking of lockers and packing of bags. I would sit, watch the birds dart across the pink sky, listen closely to the sounds of people waking up, and go back and forth between feeling grateful and feeling anxious. One night was salsa/bachata night. Everyone from the neighbouring hostels, and many locals, had come for the sunset happy hour and to dance into the night on the large wooden platform they had built into the side of the hill. A local dance class of young girls, ranging from 7-12 or so, had come for the occasion to perform. They danced nervously, we all clapped and cheered, and then they opened the floor up to the crowd by choosing a partner to dance with. One short, plump girl waved me over. I shrank back. I am not a good dancer on the best of days, let alone dancing salsa (which I don’t know) in its heartland in front of strangers. She shrugged and chose someone else, and I was overcome with shame. I had said no instinctively. The music went on, and more people joined in, but I remained rooted to the spot. Everyone else was having so much fun, and I felt so awful about myself that I had resolved to go to bed early when the girl came back, this time grabbing my hand and pulling me in. My courage crystallized in that moment, and all I focused on was the little face in front of me and the little sweaty hands holding mine. I can still feel the utter, unprecedented feeling of freedom, the joy I took in adding to her joy. I spent the evening dancing with everyone I could get my hands (and hips) on, messing up the steps, laughing, relishing the breeze, and the feeling of someone else’s body. I went to sleep thanking God (who I don’t especially believe in, for the record) for the opportunity I was afforded to be brave.
And so, over the course of the trip, I opened up. I still shied away from saying hi to people sometimes, still shied away from inviting them along, and then would be sitting down to dinner kicking myself for being there alone. Because being alone is easy for me, and because being around others is hard, any attempt to listen to my gut tends to pull me off track from the life that I want. Sometimes this Want grows unwieldy and unquenchable. It is easy to be hard on oneself for missing opportunities. Being raised in a time when little girls were emphatically told they could do and be whatever they wanted in an attempt to make up for an entire history of women told otherwise is a good thing. Yet in opening up to the world in a million different ways, and letting the world open to you, the responsibility for the entirety of your life is transferred onto your own shoulders. I am not naturally oriented to boldness, and even now I feel physically uncomfortable talking to strangers, but quite young I established that the kind of life I was interested in living would require me to be fearless, despite my state of near-constant worry. Growing up is, I guess, the process of struggling between the self you are born into and the self you hope you can be. And perhaps this growing up thing lasts a whole lifetime or so. I have learned my lesson emphatically by now: I always feel worse when I retreat inward. But it is an exhausting battle to consistently choose the thing that is unnatural. This is the axis on which desire and fear lie. It is terrifying to pursue that which you desire. Recognizing a real Want that is reflective of your core, like independence, love, adventure, connection, or recognition, is an exercise in selfhood. Going after that Want becomes paralyzing because not getting it feels like a rejection of your entire self. And getting what you Want reinforces that desire, catching you in a cycle of constantly being in pursuit and constantly overcoming fear. You never stop desiring; the taste of the object/subject sharpens your palette and stokes the craving, burdening you with the knowledge that an expansive, full life will never stop requiring a constant battle that takes your entire being.
I have many more friend-making stories to tell. Hiking to a waterfall with the guy I had just met who worked at a hostel reception desk in Minca, which I returned to a week after I had left when he told me he was leading an overnight trip in the cloud forests of the Sierra Nevada and that I needed to come. Pairing up completely platonically with a gangly British kid for four days to go to a rave in the jungle (gross), and then surfing in the Caribbean (lovely) before we parted ways without exchanging as much as our Instagrams. The Colombian guy who sat next to me on the bus from the airport in Medellin, telling me he could tell I wasn’t American from my accent, and he would know because he worked at a call centre that operated out of the US. We shared a taxi from the bus stop to the neighbourhood we were both going to and he managed to get us a deal. There was the aspiring model in Jardin who I took a video of so she could submit her “walk” to some nebulous agency, and she took me out dancing with her whole family, children and grandparents included. In Lima, the girl who was curious about me at the coffee shop and showed me around for half an hour, and in Huaraz the trio I fell into that invited me to their place for dinner. I could not stop making friends, even when I escaped the hostel bars and breakfast tables of Germans and Danes and Dutchmen.
I had many, many strange and scary and odd encounters. I only felt comfortable half the time, if that. But I met so many incredibly kind people that it made up for every prickle on the back of my neck. Maybe an extended cut would show that in every sweet situation I had escaped right before I was going to be scammed or kidnapped or hurt. Maybe I was just super lucky. But so be it. I tried being careful and scared, and I tried being careful and unafraid, and I can tell you with certainty which was more fun. More importantly, I think, I learned that my desire trumped all. My need for connection, the need that speaks to me most, overcame both my fear of rejection and my fear of the world around me. The Want won out, and it’s been hard to stuff it back down since.
Please stay tuned—I have lots of thoughts percolating about Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar and Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, about interpretations of history and interpretations of stories from history, and how autofiction is the worst and imagination is the best. I also have thoughts about being the centre of attention at a dinner party…Symposium by Muriel Spark and Look At Me by Anita Brookner.