Isla Bastimentos - Day 2, thoughts on travel
Trip Start
Mar 14, 2008
1
8
12
Trip End
Mar 24, 2008
Bocas del Toro,
Panama
Friday, March 21, 2008
An hour later now. It just keeps raining, HARD. We are waiting for it to stop so we can walk down the beach to get some breakfast. A little rain is no big deal, we don't mind, but when it's coming down in tropical buckets we just can't really do much. We are talking about Keli's essay for school, regarding use of color in a film about the genocide in Rwanda. Quite a juxtaposition discussing that while lazing here in tropical paradise.
One way to know if you really love something is to see what happens when that something does not go well. For example, no matter how difficult writing is sometimes for Keli, she is still a writer. Even those times when the frustration of writing was unbearable and she wanted to quit, she did NOT quit, she knew that she was a writer through and through, and that she still loved writing, even when she hated it. I have had many surf sessions that from an objective perspective were bad - badly shaped waves, icy water, too much wind, too tired, I was freakishly uncoordinated, etc etc. And even during those surf sessions all I can think about is how much I love surfing and how I can't wait to do it again, and how the next surf session will undoubtedly be much better.
I love this trip to Panama. It's not the most pleasant trip I've taken in my life, but I just love it. I love being here, I love being on vacation, I love seeing things I may never see again, I love meeting fellow travelers and all of us feeling that we have time to chat and ask where the other one has been. I love traveling!
What is travel? Why does it mean so much? What is important to Keli and to me in traveling? What will we do in our future trips to make them the experiences we want them to be?
This travel blog keeps returning to that same question: What is travel? It's a big question, and hard to answer succinctly. But here's one part of it: Travel is a break from routines. I value my routines back home, I enjoy them, I strive to execute all my responsibilities as perfectly as possible, that's fun for me. I am an organization freak with my desk computer calendar synced to the calendar in my phone, with a place for every meeting and every task in its place. I love getting things done! And after awhile I start to HATE my organized life, it feels like a prison where I never get enough time to do the things I LOVE to do, because I spend all my time doing what MUST be done. There are too few surprises and too much predictability, too much sameness from day to day.
But I am the one who chooses to live that way! The routine I make for myself feels familiar, safe, and comforting to me. It helps me deal with the stresses and uncertainties of life, and when I am most stressed you can bet I am also at my most neurotically organized state.
But on trips, especially those lasting more than 3 or 4 days, the neurotic organization falls away, I intentionally drop it, leaving my phone/PDA at home. One of the things I love most about travel is the feeling I always mention that "everything I need fits in my backpack." Leaping outside the confines of my self-imposed routines is exuberantly liberating, I feel awake, aware, and alive. I notice everything around me and hardly miss even the smallest leaf on the side of the path. I don't have a million things to get done and a million things to plan for tomorrow, I am much more in the moment, taking deep breaths, my mind calm. I feel capable, strong, filled up with everything I am seeing and excited for the next stop on the trip.
What about the issue of repeating things you've done before? For example, we rode horses on the beach in Costa Rica and it was really excellent. Do we ride horses again here in Bocas, will that be fun for us? Surfing comes to mind, it will be fun over and over in each different country, without a doubt, even though it's sort of "the same." Do we try a zipline again someplace? Or will that be just the same as the ziplines we did in Monteverde, CR? We agree that ziplines would have to wait awhile, we wouldn't want to do that again right away. It would be a lot like what we already did. Horseback riding is something we will come back to many times, it is very fun especially for Keli. We could do that here in Bocas, but it's too soon after our wonderful experience in Costa Rica galloping horses on the beach at Manuel Antonio. This brings us to the issue of tropical beaches in general. Dave could happily see a tropical beach on every trip forever, to Keli they look all the same. Compromise!
In all, we agree that some things are OK to repeat more frequently and closer together, some things we would not repeat for awhile longer. And there are certain things we might never repeat - certain shining memories which would likely only be diminished by repetition.
