Making friends (Cartagena: Aspect 1)

I haven't been able to keep up with this blog as regularly as I would have liked over Christmas break, but it's all for a good reason: I've been traveling a bunch! My itinerary went something like this:

December 18-19: Armenia

December 19-20: Salento and Valle de Cocura

December 20-22: Pereira and Santa Rosa

December 22-24: Manizales

December 24-27: Back in Cali

December 27-January 1: Cartagena

January 1-4: Back in Cali

January 4-7: Pasto

This unfortunately is not what it's like to ride on an Avianca flight.
It's like.... opposite.

I then had a few days rest before my friend Amy came down to visit, which brings us up to now. So as you can see, I've basically been living the dream. My bank account can definitely attest to it. It's looking haggard these days.

I've already written about my trip in the coffee region (all the cities between December 18 and December 24), in which I attempted to live out a Doctor Who inspired fantasy of adventure. I actually still think about that rope bridge, even now, weeks later, and I wonder if I might go back there and try it again. Maybe... If I have time...

This week, however, I'd prefer to write about the magic kismet that happens when you travel alone and why you shouldn't be afraid to do it. Most of the travel I have done, I have done alone. A few times I've attempted to travel with others, and unless I knew them well (several years), it never really worked out. I dislike traveling with others for the same reason I dislike guided tours: I don't like others deciding how my experience should be. When you travel with other people, especially friends or family, it's easy to feel obligated to alter your plans to compromise and really, you should. You should make sure everyone gets to do something they want to do, but like most compromises, it's a bit like spreading the jam on your toast thin. Wonderful for material things like the distribution of wealth, pretty sucky for non-material things like enjoyment.

When you travel alone, you can do exactly what you want to do when you want to do it without feeling pressure from others to divert into plans that you might find useless. We all have different ideas of why we're traveling. For some it's to relax. For others it's to party. And there there are all sorts of ways people like to balance the two. It's rare, I think, for these to match up in perfect sync. I think what keeps people from traveling alone is a fear of loneliness. We're afraid we'll go somewhere unknown and foreign and have no idea what to do, where to go, who to keep company with, and we want the support of another to make us feel safe.

Forget that. You're not safe. You never were. You're going to die.

Eventually.

Or not eventually.

Whatever.

I know, we like to feel safe, and while I recognize how important it is to feel secure from time to time, going to the same places and doing the same things make it hard for new and interesting things to happen. Perhaps one of the most rewarding things that occur is that you meet new people.

You should without a doubt add this to your arsenal
of friend finding techniques while traveling...

In Cartagena, I stayed at a hostel called La Quemada. It was an absolute dump, and it cost about double what I'm used to paying for a hostel. When I arrived late Saturday night, I wasn't sure if I was the only one checked in, but it seemed a pretty fair assumption. It was only on the second day that I met Sandra, a woman from Peru who had come, like me and many others, to spend New Year's Eve in Cartagena. She ended up coming along with me and Jorge, a guy I met on Grindr, to a beach off Cartagena's coast. We spent the day there, and when we got back, two others had arrived: Markus from Austria and Alessandra from Brazil. We all introduced each other, and eventually went out into the night where we met some friends of Sandra's from Holland. In the bars, there was a rotating cast of people from England, Australia, Argentina (though we'll avoid talking about how much of a spoiled brat she acted like...oh wait, oops), Scotland, and various other places. It was a kind of night that I had often had in Spain, where you make friends, even if just for the night, and if you're lucky, like I was, they become friends for much longer.

By the time I had left Cartagena, I had found out that Markus was also planning to go to Pasto and had an extra bed in the hostel he had made reservations at. Since I could only find a hotel that was a bit expensive, I made plans to meet up with him there. But we'll get to that next week.