The Comfort Option

So, here’s what I’ve learned traveling with my parents: 

When you travel in your 20s, you ask yourself, “How cheaply can I do this?”  With more time than money, you want to cram in as many adventures as possible and have to cut corners somewhere.  To pinch a few pennies, you put up with things you normally wouldn’t.  You eat unidentified street meat and you ignore the clump of someone else’s hair stuck to the wall in the communal shower at the $5 hostel and you willingly take the most uncomfortable bus available.  You learn creative budgeting, such as eating only bread and bananas for three days because you really want those surfing lessons.  Everything is great because let’s face it, you can’t really afford to be picky.

Well things change when you travel in your 50s.  The question becomes, “How comfortably can I do this?”  My parents don’t worry as much about a budget as they do about how soft the beds are and whether or not the complimentary soap is too heavily scented.  Every time we get to a new place Mom needs some time “to adjust,” and they both might comment that the whole town is too noisy.  Mom doesn’t make a move without first consulting Lonely Planet, and pre-books us into “the best hotel in town,” and then comforts herself by endlessly repeating the fact to me and my dad.  However, down here even the best hotel in town can make a misstep that will have Mom saying things like, “Danny, they don’t even have a bathmat here!”  (But seriously, it is nice staying at places with pools and wi-fi and free breakfast.)

Anytime we have a choice, my parents will always choose the “comfort option.”  As you can imagine, this usually has me rolling my eyes - I mean, why backpack around South America if you’re planning on being comfortable?  Isn’t being uncomfortable part of the experience?  Shouldn’t we take the overnight bus just to see what happens?  Who cares what water the vegetables were washed in!  Yes let’s hitchhike, it’s cheap!  Those are the kinds of adventures you can have when you’re backpacking in your 20s, with your friends.  Well, despite an increase in budget, it’s definitely not as fun or easy traveling with your parents as it is with your 20-something friends, especially when one is menopausal and the other one’s going deaf.  

Dad usually falls asleep around 9pm and likes to set the alarm 40 minutes earlier than the agreed-upon time so we’re all up at 7am for our bus at noon.  Plus he can’t always hear what anyone’s saying so Mom and I have to do that yelling-at-old-people thing, which you don’t usually have to do when you’re with your friends.  Mom is, you know, just a bit high maintenance and has lots of demands and questions and expectations which I have to voice for her because she can’t communicate in Spanish, not counting that diarrhea overshare I mentioned last time.  Just some of the joys of traveling as an adult with your even more adult parents.  But I’m not complaining, they’re my biggest fans and they think I’m completely fluent in Spanish!

Well...it's Bolivia!

Last time I was in Bolivia, my friend, Andreas, and I found ourselves needing an explanation for all the ridiculous things that happened here that just didn’t make sense.  That applied to almost everything, and it turns out there was just no other explanation besides, “Well...it’s Bolivia!”  Three years later, the same holds true.  Crossing overland into Bolivia is as easy as driving up to a wooden shack in the middle of the desert where everyone parks willy-nilly and chats with each other while you take pictures of the volcanoes and put on some warmer clothes and maybe dig a snack out of the back of your 4x4, after which you go into the shack where your driver jokes with the guards who briefly glance at your passport and give you a stamp.  No searching, no bag checks, no sniffer dogs, not even a proper line up.

Yes, this is the border.

Obligatory Bolivian flat tire

The first thing we did in Bolivia was spend 3 days driving around weird, alien landscapes in a 4x4 driven by Wilson, who’s musical taste ranged from Bette Davis Eyes and Roxette to Spanish covers of Whitney and Celine.  A-ma-zing.  We were doing the Salt Flats tour which takes you through the highest and driest desert on the planet, the Atacama, where we drove past fields of volcanic rock, red lakes, bubbling mud geysers and families of flamingos eating algae from borax infested waters.  We were driving through a desert surrounded by mountains, and climbing to 5000 metres above sea level in an afternoon had us all suffering from altitude sickness that no amount of coca tea or tears could cure.  We all had raging migraines, stiff necks, restless legs, we couldn’t sleep and were popping Ibuprofen and Gravol like nobody’s business.  Although the rock hotel we stay at the first night was nestled right on the edge of the desert at the foot of a mountain and as we drove up in the rain I felt a little like an intrepid scientist heading to a remote research station on another planet.  

4 days of this

Enjoying the view from some natural hot springs

The highlight is seeing the Salar de Uyuni, the biggest salt flat in the world, 12,000km2 of bright, white salt that meets bright, white sky.  It burns your eyes.  Because there is no horizon, this is the place where you take those crazy pictures of you stomping on your friends or standing on top of a bottle of water.  Really, the pictures are the most fun part of a visit to the salar, and in this respect, having my parents as travel buddies was unfortunate for me because between Dad’s bad eyesight and Mom’s general inability to take a picture in focus, I only got one decent shot.  Plus, our afternoon spent on the glaring white salt left me and Mom with puffed-up, sunburnt lips that rivaled Angelina Jolie’s.  Not to mention that my face is lobster red and peeling from ear to ear.

Dad for lunch!

What's new?

Lunch with Wilson on the salar

After the salt flats, I convinced my parents they needed to try public transportation in Bolivia, and so with great trepidation on their behalf we boarded the bus to Potosi.  I had been waiting for the moment my parents’ got to experience a crazy Bolivian bus ride - I hoped they would fear for their lives, and I wasn’t disappointed!  When rounding switchbacks on the unpaved, muddy road on the edge of a cliff it did sort of seem like the front of the bus was hovering in mid-air, and since Mom was in the front seat, she was, naturally, in tears and ready to fly back to Canada.

Just hangin' out in the market in Sucre

The next few days in Potosi, and then Sucre, the capital, were fairly uneventful.  Unless you count getting “Bolivia Belly” and having your mom tell the hotel staff and other guests that you’ve had diarrhea for the past two days as eventful.  Cause that’s what happened.  Things got more exciting in La Paz, where everyone was gearing up for Carnaval.  On a regular day, every street in La Paz is an unofficial market selling everything from raw meat to padlocks to frozen pizzas to teddy bears to erectile dysfunction herbs.  For Carnaval things get ramped up a notch and people flood the streets selling confetti, wigs, firecrackers, water balloons, homemade liquor and candy.  Driving into the city during Carnaval rivaled Hanoi or Bangkok for craziness.  Mom was traumatized enough to threaten to refuse to leave the hotel room.  Zoinks!

Crazy La Paz

Just one of the many interesting things for sale in La Paz

Anyway, we’ve since parted ways, Mom & Dad went off to hunt anacondas and brave shaman cleansing in the jungle in Peru while I’m on my way to a farm in Bolivia to get my hands dirty with some physical, volunteer labour!  Wish me luck.

My adventures begin!

After finally and officially deciding that neither teaching nor London are for me, the flood of relief I felt firmly assured me that leaving London was the best & right decision.  Also, closing my life in London was 100 times easier than starting my life there, which is another indication I am moving in the right direction.  Everything about my crash landing there was difficult and annoying - mostly annoying.  From sleeping on a friend’s floor for a month cause the flats in London are overpriced and shit, to supply teaching at equally shit inner-city schools (where on my second day a 5 year old shouted at me, “Suck my nuts!” while gyrating his hips in my direction), to crazy amounts of paperwork for everything, to not being eligible for a phone cause I don’t have British credit (hello?! I’m a foreigner!), to their also shitty recycling programs, to the annoying London accents of 30 5-year olds calling out daily, “Miss, Miss, where you from Miss?”  If life is a matter of perspective, then my perspective on things - negative - told me that perhaps I never really wanted to be in London, and had gone there for all the wrong reasons in the first place.  So... to London I say, “Cheerio, ol’ chap - my life awaits!”

On my way back to Canada to “figure things out” (apparently practice does not make perfect in this case cause I’ve been trying to figure things out for awhile now!), I was intercepted by my parents’ and their crisis of the “we’re too old to be backpacking through South America” variety.  Since they don’t speak any Spanish, and had endured a mugging and an earthquake all in the same day, their confidence and nerves were shot.  They asked me to come down here to help them out, which means a free trip to South America in exchange for being their translator/booking agent/travel guide.  Not a bad deal for the opportunity to return to possibly my second favorite place on earth (after Japan, of course) until I realized that backpacking with your middle-aged parents is not quite the same as backpacking with your 20-something friends.  

Yay, there they are!

I flew to Mendoza, wine capital of South America, to meet mis padres and commence the wine drinking.  I was dying to get on a bike and ride around the countryside visiting beautiful bodegas, but it turned out to be a little less like Napa Valley, and a little more like dirt biking around some farms with grapes.  And cows.  Plus, we got lost on the dirt roads, only made it to one vineyard and lunch, so didn’t even get complimentary drunk!  Maybe being surrounded by the Andes was supposed to make up for that.  We also visited a friend of mine from high school, Sam, who owns some land south of Mendoza in San Rafael.  He took us to Valle Grande, where Mom and I did “Cool River,” a sort of inner-tube white-water rafting experience which naturally had Mom panicking as we got pummeled in the face by water and her contacts fell out.

Doing what we do best!

Sam and his friends also invited us to an asado, or barbecue, which was amazing, even for a non-meat lover like myself.  After all, the evening consisted of all of my favorite things: friends, conversation, eating and drinking.  Only being in Argentina for a week, I didn’t get too much of a chance to mingle with the locals, but from what I can tell, Argentinians like the following: ice cream, fancy shoes, making out in public, barbecues and babies.  There was a lot of all of the above. 

There's the meat, including sweetbreads, yum.

The asado crew!

Our next stop: Santiago, Chile which is 183 kms, or a 5 hr bus ride, from Mendoza, not including the hour and half border crossing.  I pretty much ate my way through Santiago.  The first day I took a bike tour of the city, which included a stop at the market where I tried mote con huesillos (dried peach nectar with cooked wheat) and sopaipillas (fried pumpkin flatbread/tortilla things) with salsa.  Mom ordered the same dish everywhere we went, pastel de choclo, a blended corn dish baked with meat, chicken, olives, raisins and maybe even an egg!  My favorite was porotos, beans with pureed pumpkin, corn and basil, which you sometimes got with a big ol’ sausage  plopped on top, and at the fish market I ate chupe de mariscos, seafood stew.  Now Mom and I are both chomping at the bit to host some Chilean-themed dinner parties!

Amazing street art in Santiago

After Santiago, we set off for some R&R in the beach town of La Serena, which is apparently the place to be if you’re Chilean and on summer vacation.  Since we were in Chile, and it was summer vacation, we were surrounded by thousands of babies and ice cream cones and teenagers making out (Chileans are much like Argentinians in this respect).  Luckily, we operated on an “early bird schedule” and due to a combination of me traveling with people who fall asleep while reading at 9pm (Dad) and us being North American, we generally did everything about three hours earlier than anyone else in town, so avoided any kind of high-season rush.  By the time restaurants even opened at 8pm, we were usually waiting outside, starved, watching everyone stroll around with coffees and ice creams to tide them over until 11pm when it was actually time to eat.

The kids in La Serena are just getting started

Because we are on our way north, we made a little pit-stop in San Pedro de Atacama before heading into Bolivia.  Aaaah, now San Pedro is my kind of place!  Plenty of hippies sporting the legendary dreadlock mullet and busking on the street with homemade instruments for their dinner and probably lodging.  Luckily I made friends with a girl who knew some of these characters and I got to spend an evening swilling 40oz beers while watching an impromptu marionette show and attempting to follow along a conversation in Spanish with 8 South Americans.  It sounds like I’m joking, but I actually love these bracelet-seller types, with their abundance of free-spirit, if not jobs.

Anyway, next stop Bolivia!  I’ve tried to adequately prepare my parents for the craziness of it but I have to ask myself if anyone can actually be prepared for Bolivia?