Nostalgic Nicaraguan Nights

When you plan something for a long time, when it ceases to be your reality, it is expected that you will experience somewhat of a come down, an anti-climax and general feeling that perhaps, the best time of your life has just passed you by.

Another Christmas and New Year have come and gone, and it seems natural to pause and contemplate what the previous year held for you. For me, it held years of planning and dreams coming to fruition. It felt like a slice of beauty, served on a beautiful, ornate plate that had a few chips but those chips were part of what made the plate ,and everything on it, more endearing. A year ago, AT and I were in Nicaragua, we had just parted ways, after spending almost a month, with some of the most inspiring people we would meet on the trip. The sadness of leaving them – not knowing when, or even if, we would indeed see one another again, was exceeded by our eagerness to get to the universally loved Nicaragua.

Our time in Nicaragua was splattered with so much natural beauty, sunshine, colour, wildlife, food, architecture and rum. Oh, the rum. If I was able to endorse a product, it would be Flor de Caña, Nicaragua’s most famous export. The sunsets we watched over the tranquil beach town of San Juan del Sur were some of the most remarkable I have ever witnessed. The wash of blue, the reflection of the fishing boats swaying ever so slightly in the calm, mirror-like waters, the children kicking a soccer ball on the beach, the happy travellers sitting along the concrete boardwalk sipping Toña and holding 50c tacos that dripped down their elbows with nothing but happiness visibly emanating from their faces, AT and I sitting atop one of the best positioned bars in the world, watching the bright orange ball descend from the sky and slip quietly below the Pacific; ordering a half-sized bottle of Flor de Caña, happily handed to us by locals served with a small bottle of unrefrigerated soda water, ice and freshly cut lime splayed around a small white saucer. It is those moments that I hold close; the tranquility, the calmness I felt from within, the inner-peace that so many seek, and rarely find.

I recall our days spent in Granada walking along the river, watching baseball games and hearing the excited exclamations in Spanish of the children’s teammates; wandering the streets with Hemingway in my back pocket – the product of stumbling across one of the best English book stores we visited and feeling so excited that I had so much literary choice in front of me; quizzically admiring the contrast of the brilliant blue sky, the white-washed buildings and  the warm light flooding the sides of churches; peering inside abandoned buildings and old bell-towers; looking around my ankles to find glitter swirling around my feet; the market bursting with colours foreign to my colour wheel,  scents that were so pungent they stole my desire to inhale; laying in a hammock and reading and writing after enjoying the distinctly flavoured Nicaraguan coffee; the delicious, sweet stewed bananas, discovering gallo pinto and admiring the simplicity and inexplicable allure of the famous staple. We spent 10 days in Nicaragua, nowhere near as long as we wanted, but they were 10 of the most tranquil days I have had the pleasure of experiencing, I couldn’t have conjured similar in my imagination if I had tried.

Since arriving back in Sydney, I continue to nostalgically contemplate where we were on the exact same date last year. I’ve concluded that playing this “This Time Last Year We Were…” game is a form of denial. Denial that it is all over, and now feels like a snapshot of someone else’s life; like a movie played in fast-forward. Cliché, no? But strangely, I seek this melancholy, I continually go down a dangerous path of trying to re-live the memories that are ever-so precious to me now. In fact, they are what I take solace in.

Pieces of my heart (I’m full of clichés today) have been left splintered along Central and South American coastlines and landscapes. Explaining the infinite beauty and melancholy of our trip is a difficult thing, words do not seem to adequately convey the enormity and unescapable imprint it has left upon me – and it is not often I find that words escape me. To others, our small selection of pictures displayed on our social media outlets are the remainders of the trip, but if you are to look closely, you will that find I am a changed person; I have acquired much, much more than a pretty set of stolen moments captured on camera.

The Odyssey. Our Odyssey.

All good things come to an end. That’s what they say, isn’t it? To be honest, that isn’t true. But unfortunately, this gypsy will be home in less than 48 hours, and for me, that is one helluva good thing to be coming to an end.

Trying to explain what this journey has been like will most likely be boring for other people. So when I am asked, they’ll get one word answers, like: amazing, wonderful, incredible. Unless, of course they are actually interested.

But for AT and I, this adventure has been like a huge book in our lives;  it is on its 366th page, tomorrow begins the final page, a total of 367 (days). Like knowing you are a page away from ending a great book you don’t want to finish, this particular book of ours is, inevitably, almost over.

In the past year we have: walked, boated and bused  our way through 15 overland border crossings; taken 14 flights; visited 22 Countries; taken 77+ long-haul bus rides (exceeding eight hours each ride);  slept in 116 beds; made wonderful new friends, a few of which are the beginnings of lifelong relationships; spent time learning a new language; dealt with at least 3 sets of horrendous food poisoning; been mugged once; and accrued memories that not even old age will take from us, no matter how hard reality interferes.

I left Australia with a boyfriend and on Wednesday morning will return with an incredible fiance. AT has been the best travel companion and friend I could ever hope to share such a life-changing year with.We both know how lucky we are, to be privileged enough, to be able to experience what we have.  I don’t know what else to say. Except, it has been grand.

Parisian Bliss

A week in Paris. An apartment in Montmartre that overlooks the rooftops of the city. A city that is filled with sunshine until 10pm in the summertime. Time spent sheltering under poster shop awnings to escape the rain, lighting a long, thin French cigarette and being completely content. Paris is a city like no other, out of the cities we have visited this year, it is my favourite (Buenos Aires a very close second). How cliché: I love Paris. Paris, like New York, is a city that is almost universally admired, no one visits and says “Oh, it was okay.”. It is, put simply, an extraordinary city.

Paris made me want to forget about my determination to continue learning Spanish and take up French, immediately. Ditch the rest of our trip and live in a cheese and wine induced haze for the rest of our lives. Forget money, and careers, we could live the lives of struggling artists, like so many before us.

I feel like I could write a love letter to many of the places we have spent time, but none would be quite like the one I would write to Paris.

People of the Road – Part Two

Yesterday I met a girl called Ann*. I went to a tiny little massage place on the side of the road on one of Thailand’s southernmost islands. AT had gone in for one earlier in the morning and was raving. The price was standard for the island,  ฿250 baht ($7.50AUD) for an amazing hour long traditional Thai massage. So, I thought I’d treat myself and was looking forward to it. Ann had a massage and beauty treatments shop that consisted of four mattresses for clients, but she is the only one currently working there. It’s low season you see, but in high season she employs three other girls to help with the demand.

After two hours, and one of the best massages I have ever had, I had learned a lot about Ann.

She was quite timid at first, but very smiley and friendly. It was about 30 minutes into the massage when we began chatting, I think there is nothing more beautiful than hearing about someone else’s life. At first it was trivial, where do you live? are you from here? how long have you had this shop? – type of questions. She explained that she had the shop for three years, had learnt her massage skills in Bangkok, and discovering she was not from the south, she was from the north of Thailand where her family still live; she had moved down to the islands to work where there are more tourists.

We then began talking about her previous job. She had worked in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, for one of the biggest technological manufacturers in the world, producing goods for companies like Microsoft. Ann told me that it is very common for people from Thailand, the Philippines and greater China to work on contracts in these factories. It was rare that people ever worked over their three-year contracts, but Ann was great at her job, her bosses told her she learnt quickly and she was offered a 12 year contract in the factory. Financial and job security like that is rare, particularly in countries such as those mentioned above. She accepted and continued her work. Ann and her thousands of colleagues worked 12 hour days, with one day off a month. Yes, one day off… a month. She described the working conditions to which she had to adhere, and her daily life, as I heard more I just couldn’t believe that the same person had lived such a different life.

Ann told me that everyone lived on site, there were rooms that housed workers, and she had slept on the fourth bunk of the eight beds on top of one another. In each room there were six of these similar bunk beds, so she was sharing a room with 47 other people. Everyday. Her days were long, and the workers were not allowed out after 9pm, they were locked out if they were not inside the premises. There was even a 7Eleven inside the factory, to discourage people from leaving the factory. She spent the first week in tears, speaking no Mandarin or English, the two languages spoken at the factory.  She told me she realised she needed to learn fast, so that was what she did, she can now speak Mandarin, English and Tagalog in addition to the two languages she already knew, Thai and Lao. If staff were ever late to work, they were docked the Taiwanese equivalent of  ฿1 000 from their pay, (AU$32), an unreasonable 5% of their monthly pay for being ten minutes late. They were paid  ฿20 000 a month (AU$611) and worked over 80 hours a week, with no day off. After three years, they were permitted two weeks holiday. Ann did not take her holiday and return to Thailand, she explained it would have taken too much time to get from Taipei to the north of Thailand by means of travel that was in her budget.

Of her monthly wage, she sent  ฿15 000 home to her mother, so had a mere  ฿5 000 (AU$150) to live on per month. She worked for six years, without a holiday. This means, receiving one day off a month for six years, only 72 days of 2 191 were spent not working; 96.7% of her days in Taipei were spent working.

After six years, half way through her contract, the company paid for a return ticket for Ann to Thailand for a one month holiday. She said she visited her family for the month and that on the day of her departure from Bangkok, she arrived at Suvarnabhumi airport and decided then and there she was not going to return to Taipei, “back to hell”. She threw her ticket in the rubbish bin at the airport and stayed in Bangkok. She didn’t even tell her mother, she was too afraid of the response and shame it would bring on her family that she had deserted a paying job, something many people in Thailand would be grateful for.

Her boss called her on the day she was to resume working, furious that she was not at work, she told him she would not return to hell, she was staying in Thailand, and after his second phone call, she snapped her sim card and threw it away so the company could not contact her again.

It was in Bangkok, just over three years ago, that she began her massage course, she spent three months getting qualified, and also worked for two months in the infamously sleezy coastal town of Pattaya at a hotel as the massage therapist for experience. After that she decided to head south, on a holiday, her first in almost seven years. It was then that she found the perfect place to start her own business and own and run a massage and beauty therapy shop.

Ann now lives out the back of the shop, showing me where her bed was she explained she earned around the same money she was earning in Taipei and still sent the same amount home to her mother. The difference was now she had her own business she could work the hours she wanted and got the opportunity to meet people, and if she was sick or tired she was able to have the day off, as well as her regular days off. It also means that if she needed to return home for any reason, she could get to the town she grew up in, where her family currently reside, very easily. Not only were all of those things important to her, she enjoyed what she did, and liked her work. By the time my massage was up, conversation was still flowing, it had been over two hours. She apologised for talking so much and asked me to apologise to my husband (she had assumed AT and I were married) for keeping me so long.

I was not naive enough to be unaware that this is a reality for many factory workers in China, and other parts of the developing world. In fact a few years ago, AT and I had done quite a lot of research about FoxConn, who supply many of technology’s leaders with their products, Apple being the one that gained a considerable amount of controversy when it was discovered that their factory workers had an extremely high level of suicide and the conditions employees worked in were as appalling as the factory Ann worked in Taipei. You can read more about that here.

I still can’t believe the conversation I just had, I had heard and read much about the factory conditions in China, but it was completely different hearing it from someone who had actually experienced such a life. If she had returned to her job, she would still be over two years off finishing her contract. I am certainly glad she managed to escape the clutches of the corporation that held her captive for six years. Ann said that those years were like being in prison.

The last year has changed me as a person (I hope!) and speaking to people who have very different lives to the one I lead is part of what I love most about travelling. Meeting people like Ann, someone who has changed their own life for the better, is inspiring. It also makes me realise just how much people born in the western world take for granted. I feel incredibly lucky, and am so happy that Ann can now enjoy her life and has been able to choose the path that she has now forged.

I hope I see her again, I will send anyone I know who is visiting this island her way for an incredible massage and to meet an even more incredible person.

*I have changed her name to protect her anonymity, but I assure you she was a real (and beautiful) person.

Nature (Peruniverse)

I liked nature before we left for this trip, but I liked it enough to kind of steer of clear, too. I loved visits to the National Park, but I also loved arriving there in a car. With aircon. I liked going for walks, but those walks were usually around one to three hours, be it at the beach or in the bush; I liked small doses.

One of the reasons I wanted to travel for a decent amount of time was to challenge the ideals that I previously possessed; to do things I hadn’t before and to learn new things, whether they be about the world, the countries I had perceptions about, AT or myself.

This particular learning is, selfishly, about myself. I was both looking forward to and dreading our Machu Picchu trek. Excited to challenge myself and my physical capabilities, I expected to be a bit of a metaphorical wet blanket. Not exactly a girly girl but I’m also no tomboy, either. I thought I would complete our four-day trek grudgingly, complaining if we got wet, if my feet were sore, when the hiking was too tough. To my own surprise, I did none of those. Even though we got soaked down to our undies on our first four hours, biking in the pouring rain when the weather was between -2 and 5 degrees (celsius). I had blistered, bleeding and wet feet for two straight days while walking over 40 kms, so the rest of the time they were aided with band aids. I didn’t shower for three days because the place we stopped over either had no water at all, or it was cold, which was actually freezing (literally). I also couldn’t wipe the smile from my stupid face.

I was stunned that I actually liked this whole trekking jam. I liked the hard bits, sure, they were hard, really hard at times, but they were the kind of hard where you feel better for doing them, mentally and physically and I knew this WHILE I was doing the trek. I also thought my muscles would fail me after 24 hours, instead I woke up excited each day, albeit it a little sleepy, (who can blame me at 5.30 am, 5am and 3.30am) but my muscles weren’t in such bad shape. Before we left, I had decided I was ready to put my pride aside if I was struggling, I was willing to say “I’ll catch up” if I needed to, but the only time I struggled was on the four hours uphill on our second day; I felt out of breath but was not lagging behind or holding anyone up, and I certainly didn’t want to stop.

I had discovered about myself. It was the first time where I had really surprised myself. Of course I had been surprised at myself at other points during the trip, but this was something different, a self-discovery of sorts; I liked hiking! I appreciated what I was doing and seeing as they were happening, not a year later, or in my old age. I was appreciating them right then and there, and that is one of the very best things about travelling.

Robbed in Rio

When we told our families, friends and colleagues that we were going to be spending a considerable amount of time of our one year trip in Central and South America, it feel like a collective cry (minus a few people) screaming at us: “Those places are so dangerous! You’re going to be kidnapped or mugged!” We scoffed and laughed and assured them that actually, although some of these places have a bad reputation, they’re over exaggerated and most people escape the clutches of this wild west unharmed, the only thing they have seemingly lost is their desire to return to reality as they knew it or to leave these incredible countries.

We weren’t beheaded or shot in Mexico, it stole nothing from us except part of our hearts. We were expecting Guatemala to maybe be an issue; when it gave us nothing but hospitality. We thought that the capital cities of Honduras and Nicaragua might be troublesome; leaving our weapons in the cloakroom of the restaurant was the only thing Tegucigalpa required from us. Bolivia took a little of our money, not for nothing of course, in exchange for some fake currency. Colombia didn’t find us blindfolded in the back of a truck, being held for ransom for a hefty sum, it found us regretting we only had a month there.

We were in Rio, where we were to spend part of our last 10 days in South America. It was going to be a short but sweet stay of three days. Naturally after our first day we extended it by one day, and after that day passed, then by another. It was that fourth day that found us parting with a decent amount of cash on a main road at knife point.  To be completely honest, we had expected it would happen at some point on our travels, but it hadn’t so far, and we both felt proud that we would be able to defy our families and friends and go home saying we had no trouble at all. Unfortunately, now, that can no longer be said. Sure, some punk took our cash and did so forcibly with a knife, but he neglected to take our credit card, camera, more cash and my phone, all of which were on us at the time, and more importantly, we weren’t hurt.

The thing is that it happened in an affluent, tourist-friendly area. We had been through the least safe parts of Central America with everything we owned on our backs: laptop, passports, camera, credit cards and iPad – all of our most valued possessions, and sure, we felt intimidated but were not even stopped except when people wanted to sell us something. Yet in Rio de Janeiro, a city most people who would never visit many of the places we had over the past eight months for fear of ‘something happening’, would have no hesitation visiting–we found ourselves faced with a guy donning a knife and demanding cash. AT has actually been mugged twice in Sydney, and once in Amsterdam, so this kind of thing is common all around the world. But it did make me glad that even though we’d recently been to the ATM, I’d hidden two-thirds of the cash and our credit card, so my caution was, indeed, warranted; I no longer feel like a paranoid fool for being somewhat cautious over the past nine months.

We spent our last day in Rio exploring the favela with an American Ph.D. student who was studying marginalised communities and their use of technology. He explained that while the favelas have now been pacified and there is no longer and drug-related violence in the favelas, it has had somewhat of a domino effect and now means a lot of younger people are without their previous illegal jobs (e.g. drug runners, lookouts etc.) so are turning to petty crime in greater Rio. We still loved our stay in Rio, and actually felt safer in the favela than we did on the streets, unfortunately it did leave a somewhat sour taste in our mouths.

Latin American Love

Our time in Latin America is all but finished. Over the period of eight months, we have made our way from the west cost of the USA to Brazil, mostly overland; I feel rather melancholy about flying out of Sao Paulo tomorrow. It has been eight months that I can compare to no others. The diversity of the landscapes, people, food, transport, dress, artisans and everything in between have shaped our experience and I feel mighty lucky to have been able to travel through this beautiful part of the world. It seems an impossible task to sum up our time in these incredible countries in only one blog post, so I’m not going to even try.

I leave Latin America with nothing but love for all it holds. We will be back, soon.

Tomorrow, we are Paris bound.

Time, or lack there of.

That is the thing about travelling, before leaving, time seems like some kind of foreign entity you’ll begin to get to know once you embark on your trip. You envision hours of leisurely reading, picture yourself with so much spare time you don’t know what to do with it all except sit in cafes and watch people pass you by. Sure, that does happen sometimes, for us it happened quite a bit in Nicaragua and Panama, but otherwise, who knew there would be so little ‘spare time’ while actually travelling? I sure didn’t.

My blog has lain dormant for the past month as we have made our way, very rapidly, from Bolivia to Argentina, including a three-day stop-over in Chile and have now, finally, arrived in our final Latin American destination, Brazil.

We greatly underestimated just how large the continent is, once we arrived and began the 18 hour+ bus rides in Colombia, we realised just how many more of those bus rides we had to come. We decided that six weeks was to be dedicated to a huge expanse of beautiful land, divided between Argentina, Brazil and very briefly, Chile. We knew it would be difficult. In just under four weeks, we covered almost 6000 kms, overland. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when a large portion of that time is spent in buses, unable to make use of the time in any productive way, it feels as though the world has stopped and you are waiting for it to resume at your next destination. While that time could usually be filled with reading, writing, listening to music or watching a film, there are plenty of reasons why those usually wonderful activities often aren’t feasible (other shifty looking passengers, bumpy and winding roads, devices running out of battery, movies dubbed in Spanish… to name a few).

Our longest bus ride now stands at 29 hours, from one part of Patagonia to another. The bus ride from southern Patagonia to Buenos Aires was 40 hours; we booked a flight.

It’s a strange thing to think that all I have at the moment is free time, but the free time is usually spent doing things like sight-seeing, hiking, trying to learn another language, plan our future or organising how to get from where we are to our next location as well as AT working a few hours a day.

I couldn’t be more content, except perhaps if there were a few more hours in the day to read and drink wine and do something crazy, like have a bath.

Salar de Uyuni

As a llama crosses the unpaved dusty road, it seems as though the desert may stretch on infinitely. It doesn’t. The road grows more rugged and the seven passengers of the four by four vehicle tire slightly. But are never left to slumber, the rocks under the tractor-like wheels mean our backs are jarred and the occasional sip of water is hazardous. Once the sandy brown dust begins to lighten and form a crust on the top, the colours change to lighter hues of their former selves. Eventually, all you see is white, blinding white. Hexagonal shapes form for no apparent reason and the tour guide/driver/cook explains in Spanish that Bolivia may be home to the world’s best natural shaped football if the desert was so inclined to be sewn together, so symmetrical are the hexagons. It’s a shame the nation’s teams fare so badly on the international stage.

Over the next 72 hours, we spend more time in the car than we do out of it. AT and I in the back-back; the fold down seats in four-wheel drives like Land Cruisers and Pajeros. There we were knees bent, figures squished, but luckily our views were unobstructed and we could open our windows without anyone but ourselves receiving a face-full of desert dust. Ostriches run along side the car, later flamingos walk away from us as a different, but a group of nine men arrogantly scare these beautiful, tall enigmas away from us. Our group of six is silent, and somewhat seething. The stench of dead animals hits us like someone walking into a glass door; unaware of its presence until you are immediately able to sense it. We untangle ourselves from our seat belts and bags and clamour out of our silver Land Cruiser to explore the oddity of the shallow lagoons surrounding us.

The mountains with crowns of snow glistened in the still lagoon and you felt for a moment that perhaps you aren’t looking at water but at a natural mirror that enabled you to see everything around you without needing to stare it directly in the face. But in those landscapes, you can’t avoid their glares. The large, once volcanic mountains demand to be noticed; the geysers scream with steam, they want to be smelt, they want everyone to know they exist; the flamingos softly screech, it’s like they are confirming with themselves, they are not alone out there in this huge, unimaginable expanse of incomprehensible land; the lagoons mirror their surroundings in the hope that maybe they themselves may be noticed, their beautiful colours compliment the montañas that line their shores; the llamas silently stand and masticate in a form of solidarity; chinchillas scamper away, peering at you wisely with their long, straight whiskers, it feels as though an old man lives inside each of these fascinating Andean-dwellers. It is here that nature speaks the loudest. The four by fours seemed out of place in those entirely natural formations. The rocks we drove over, the creeks and dykes our wheels imprinted upon for only a moment, the unexpected wildlife stared us, to them we were the attraction. The indigenous people welcomed us into their temporary homes which, in reality were built solely with the purpose of housing tourists, still feel authentic. They are built with a mixture of mud and grass, the foundations of which held little warmth from the bitingly cold temperatures when darkness fell. And even there you feel more than one world away from the lives you see glittering before you.

I blame you, media.

You hear stereotypical, mixed reports about everywhere. A travellers word can be both wonderful, and evil. There are two places that receive a much worse wrap than they deserve, and not from people who have travelled there. The American media, I feel, has a lot to answer for.

During our travels through Central and South America we have encountered a decent number of American travellers, most of them excited to explore the beautiful countries they have decided to spend time in. In Central America particularly, which is somewhat less developed than South America, there are a notable amount of American tourists/travellers, and with such incredible countries at their metaphorical doorstep, why wouldn’t they take the opportunity to visit their neighbours? I sure as hell would. It’s like saying there are a lot of Australian’s in South East Asia and Indonesia; of course there are, they are but a short distance from our home, they are diverse, interesting and beautiful countries with new cultures to explore, and they are a cheaper alternative to traversing our own land.

Mexico and Colombia have been two of my favourite countries, if not my favourite countries we have visited. They are both remarkable in many, many ways. I loved all of their quirks, landscapes, as well as the local people who, in both places, were the kindest we have met and were working extremely hard to change their international reputations. There seemed to be one thing that I noticed was missing: American tourists.*

The fear campaign headed by the US media has left an indelible mark on the tourism industries in both Mexico and Colombia. Unfortunately both of these countries have international reputations that have been long tarred by drugs and drug-related violence. I’m not saying that in the past these reputations were unfounded, but it is now 2012 and the 80s are still haunting Colombia; the days of Pablo Escobar are over, he has been buried for almost 20 years and his name is one that most of the country is still trying to extricate itself from. In every hostel, hotel and guesthouse we were met with a more than warm reception and after chatting with the staff, and store owners, the topic of the Colombian people trying to shed their long dead skin was almost always bought up. The discussions were always variations of “Colombia is a good place, the people here are kind, we don’t all sell drugs, we don’t like violence, we want people to see our beautiful country. Please tell your friends that this is a good place.” It made me sad to think these people even felt they had to justify to me, someone who was visiting and thoroughly enjoying their trip in Colombia, why people should visit their country.

Mexico, on the other hand has had more recent problems, for example it is home to the most violent peace-time city (Juárez, bordering El Paso, Texas) but unlike the American media ‘informs’ the public, the entire nation is not all like this one city. In fact, the parts of the country that I spent time in over the space of five weeks, I felt far safer than I did have in Sydney and if AT and I ever needed help, seeing our puzzled faces, the locals were the first ones to offer it. It’s upsetting to think that this beautiful country is suffering at the hands of an unjust and ill-informed source of information. There were less backpackers and certainly less ‘holidayers’ (with the exceptions of the Yucatán Peninsula, and from what I have heard, also the Baja Peninsula) than any of the other Central American countries we visited and after speaking with numerous Americans in other parts of Central America, as well as Mexican friends, the thing it was always put down to: bad publicity.

I understand that these countries still have issues, if you go looking for trouble in these countries, I’m sure many people could point out exactly where to find it, but there is certainly not a high level of violence towards ordinary citizens or tourists, as the media suggests. The power these outlets wield is such that one article about gang-related violence in a small province of Mexico is enough to incite fear into anyone who even considered visiting their friendly neighbours. One lady informed us we were crazy for having visited Mexico and even suggested we had death wishes. When we asked where she got her information, she was not ashamed in saying that ‘the news’ was her source. I pitied her, she has no idea of the beauty she is missing out on and even though her incredulity at our visiting such a notoriously dangerous place (in here eyes) was made clear, hopefully we planted the seed that maybe, just maybe, these sources may be misinformed, or at the very least, selective about what they report and that perhaps she was missing out on something wonderful.

*There are, of course, exceptions and the Americans that we did meet who had travelled to these countries loved both Mexico and Colombia. Surprise, surprise.