Travel is a mentality.
19 hours in an overnight bus begins as they tend to in Central America,my 11:30pm bus out of Guatemala City is cancelled and my departure time is moved to 4am. There are unforeseen delays, inexplicable and at no point, not even at a change of bus in El Salvador, am I given a physical ticket that demonstrates my right to a seat on the bus. But everyone seems to know, this gringo belongs on this bus.
My last night in Antigua at The Terrace bar, an expat from Minnesota, Angelica, quoted her friend’s travel MO, “I only travel drunk or hungover and I hate traveling hungover.” I begin this trip traveling as Angelica’s friend hates to, and feel the strain of an afternoon jam session at the Terrace Hostel, which turned six hour-nine beer concert, which apparently coincides with the amount of time it takes to play all the songs I know.
Travel is a mentality. You learn this especially when living in an expatriate town where despite living in the rest of the world’s vacation spot, your own life is cuffed with work and the galore of social life. Both things you love, but their sinister side is that they trap you in a single facet of self–you are stuck doing what you do and being who you are (which is partly contained in other’s expectations of who you are).
By freeing yourself from the context of your life, travel forces you to dig deep inside that self. Below the hangover, in the wee bus hours drifting between asleep and awake, a feeling of contained infinity tightens below your stomach. This is the unbounded stretch of road before you–you don’t know exactly who you’ll meet, what you’ll see, or even where exactly you’ll go. You only know that the transubstantiation of these uncertainties keeps you returning to the road.
In a few hours, our bus will pull into Managua, Nicaragua–where the streets have no names–and then
three Scottish medical students I’ve met on the bus and I will find the path of least resistance to Granada, Nicaragua. From here is where I’ll branch out for two weeks of exploration, making my way back to Antigua just in time for my friends and my fourth annual Marichi o Muerte, our annual pub crawl which this year we are shaping into a music festival in Hobbitenango.
I am eager to return to Granada, Nicaragua and see it with my current pair of eyes. Granada holds early influences and memories for me. I first visited in 2008 as I traveled north from Chile. At the time, I still supposed I would make it all the way to Alaska, unaware of what course-changing surprises I would meet along the way.
I stayed for 9 days in Granada, more than any other one city. There I met people and mentalities which I still carry with me. There was John Oliver, the Rastafarian poet from the Caribbean who recited anti-war poems from the rooftops. There was Duke, the counselor who had planned to travel with his partner for their retirement, but after a heart attack claimed his partner before that dream, Duke at 52 began traveling and never looked back. There was Jose, a local as eager to practice his English as he was to party. Today, Jose is a deacon, on his way to the priesthood. There was also Garry, a Canadian filmmaker who befriended me in my hostel. Garry had five years of life on me and his grounded sensibility and vision of what travel is and why it is important is one that my own has closely aligned with.
A friend from Antigua, Greg, owns an Irish Pub in Granada, so I’ll start there and see what people, stories and songs the road back to Antigua from Nicaragua takes me to.
