I suppose it’s time to do one last blog post about my South America time, now that I’ve just finished my time in the continent. In August 2016, 3 years ago, I arrived to Quito, Ecuador. I spent about 3 weeks in Quito taking two weeks of language classes, exploring the city, and getting food poisoning. 🙂 I traveled around briefly, including a few hours away at the Volcano Cotopaxi, then a 2-week workaway in the coast of Ecuador, then 16 days in the Galapagos Islands, perhaps the highlight of my entire trip! So much scuba diving, lots of walks around the middle islands, and even two days of diving (hammerheads and schools of barracuda).
After that, based on the recommendations of everyone in the hostel, I explored Colombia for 4 months – and would have kept going except that I realized “oh CRAP, I’m missing the summer of Patagonia! – so I hastily booked a flight down to the “end of the world” (Punta Arenas, Chile) where I spent the next 4 months exploring Patagonia, from the bottom to Coyhaique (small city basically halfway), camping and hiking in tons of national parks and hitchhiking mostly to get around! 🙂 I also worked 2 months doing workaways (a tourism ranch, a cow ranch, and a micro-brewery).
Basically, I did half of Patagonia in 4 months. 🙂 And other people do it in two weeks!
After 11 months of traveling, I wanted a break from going place to place and wanted to have a routine, my own apartment, and feel “settled down” for a little bit. After looking around, I decided to teach English in Colombia for 6 months in Manizales (coffee region) and a year in Bogota.
When I had finished (now in Jan 2019), I went back to Patagonia, flying to the same Coyhaique where I had left off, to finish it out! 😀 It took me another 3.5 months to finish the second half, and I ended up meeting a wonderful Belgian girl, Anne-Marie, at the very end of my time (Bariloche, Argentina), with whom I spent the next 4 months! After renting a car together, we decided to take a leap and bought a car together which we used to travel in and live in for 2.5 months exploring the rest of Chile. Then, having sold the car back in Santiago, we decided to continue exploring Argentina for two months together – without a car.
While in Chile, we visited the Canyon de Maipu (gorgeous), Reserva Nacional de los Cipreses, Villarica and Pucón (including 3 parks there and a traditional Mapuche dinner), a week working the harvest in a vineyard in Peralillo, a weekend surf trip at Pichilemu (Chile’s famous surf town), a few days at Valparaíso and Viña del Mar (where we got robbed), then up north to La Serena and the observatory near there, a famous pisco vineyard there (Pisco Elqui), a little bit farther north in Parque Nacional Nevado Tres Cruces (reaching a chilly -8C which froze our battery and gave us problems starting the engine), and finished the trip by leaving the car in Caldera and traveling upward via bus to San Pedro de Atacama where we rented a 4×4 SUV to explore that area for 4 days. The region is dotted with salt flats, lakes, and really interesting clay formations that look like Mars and the Moon.
In Argentina, after we had sold the car, we spent 2 months traveling all throughout Argentina, including two weeks doing 3 hours/day of Argentinian tango lessons in Buenos Aires, Iguazú Falls, the solar eclipse and visiting a friend in Rosario, and then renting a car to see the desert/colorful mountains of the northwest region in Salta and Jujuy! Even though the tango is very different from the other dances I’ve done (salsa, swing), it is incredibly fun. 🙂 Now I’m all alone without my dance partner! *cry*
For me, this South America journey has changed me in a lot of ways, a few of which I’ll mention here.
First of all, I’ve realized that I don’t just worry about the coming climate change crisis. It’s not something I’m intellectually-engaged with. It’s something that I am completely changing my life around. I truly believe it’s coming, it’s going to be big, and it’s going to change everything. Therefore, I am not working on a career, or even learning programming or something that might help me change and have a better career. I don’t want to spend 4 years doing that! I am taking jobs that are, within my limited constraints, high-paying and low-expenditure, so I can save money and continue traveling to see nature before it goes away. This is why I made sure I visited the Galapagos Islands, Patagonia glaciers and ice fields, and the Amazon jungle while in South America, despite how expensive they were. It turns out that I love exploring and seeing nature way more than I thought I would when I started the trip!
Secondly, I’ve done a lot of things, and experience brings confidence! I’ve worked closely with a lot of ranch animals – horses, cows, chickens, ducks, hens, dogs, and cats. When I envision my future, I envision me having a small poor ranch house and a small plot of land with animals and tree and plant-bearing fruits and a vegetable-growing greenhouse. 🙂 Most of which, to be honest, I envision having made myself! I worked on a coffee farm for two weeks, a vineyard for three (including 3 days for the harvest), a microbrewery, and a cow ranch. I have a lot of common-sense experience when it comes to construction or ranch work or even just small-town stuff. I really love smart people who think creatively and outside-the-box, and I feel that I ask better questions when it comes to understanding how things work and what I would need to do to fix them.
Thirdly, I remembered why it’s so important me to speak the local language. If you don’t speak the local language, in most places of the world, at least, then you just can’t understand the locals’ perspective on life, on their country, or on the future. Surprisingly, I have spent 3+ months in a few countries (China, Indonesia, and then South American countries) and I have always learned the local language enough to talk with the locals! I’m even going back to these countries to re-learn the language (and hopefully maintain it for the future). And because of this, I can say that I now know linguistic, cultural, and even food differences between Chile, Argentina, and Colombia (the 3 countries where I lived the longest and explored *basically* the entirety of). Even though I spent two weeks in Bolivia and two months in Ecuador, I still wouldn’t consider myself to be an “expert” enough in those countries to really say that I know them that well.
As I said, the advantage of speaking the local language, and being super-friendly with strangers as I am, is that I know quite a bit about these countries. Most travelers, especially those who are a little more introverted or, more importantly, don’t speak the language, could never have such a depth of understanding of these countries and their people that I have. 🙂 And besides, most travelers don’t spend 3 years living and extensively traveling in a foreign continent.
As I reflect on my future plans for China, I’ve got to say I’m pretty excited. I feel ready to leave and start a new routine! (You know me, I love routines.) I think the Shane English school will be really good, that I’ll learn a lot (from the training and from the hands-on experience), and I’m excited to play with kids age 4-12 while teaching them English! I also really want to do cooking classes, a non-official “food tour” of provinces near borders with other countries and maybe expand my cooking repertoire, maybe even pick up biking again while there, and get good at Mandarin again! I will probably need to find a Mandarin teacher to give me private lessons because I’m very focused on vastly-improving my Mandarin, not just being content to have travel-Mandarin like I was in 2009. 😊
And of course maintain my Spanish! 😊
Anyway, that’s pretty much it for this update. My last one involving South America! The next one will be about my new life in Yangzhou, China – about 2 hours bullet train from Shanghai. See you then!
Exploring the Good Life 