When you can’t travel due to coronavirus, blog…I guess.
Welp, with my usual gift for reading
the tea leaves and spectacular timing, I have managed to finally, at
long last, launch a travel blog right at the moment when global
travel is shutting down for the foreseeable future.
That’s beyond a Homer Simpson ‘D’oh’
moment.
That’s a head-smack of such force that
you push right through your brain to the back of your skull and
beyond.
Of course, it’s not my fault. (By which
I mean Covid-19. In this case I really am innocent, I swear.)
It’s also not my fault that I ramped up
a travel blog at a time when no one (apart from some plugged-in and
utterly sociopathic
U.S. Senators) could have known that travel was going to undergo
such a dramatic shift.
Times have been weird for everyone, of
course. I currently live in Valparaiso, Chile, a town that is heavily
reliant on tourism, and the abrupt shift has been devastating to
local businesses and vendors. There was a hapless cruise ship
floating out in the bay for a good four or five days after the
government handed down with the order that no cruise ships would be
permitted to dock, but they finally must have found somewhere else
they could go.
(I imagine a modern-day, aquatic version of Sartre’s No Exitin which cruise ship passengers must spend eternity at various buffets, attending karaoke night in the Rainbow Room, and walking the Promenade deck. ‘Same thing we do every night, Pinkie: eat gristly prime rib and listen to Cruise Director Tad remind us about Sunrise Aerobics and Salsa Class.’)
Perhaps Sarte was right: hell really is other people…
And Covid-19 has been devastating for people around the world as we all know, not only in terms of the direct threat to human health, but also by grinding the entire global economy to a halt. It is an enormous mess that is illustrating in sharp, eye-watering detail the many shortcomings of the current global system we live under.
And things are bound to get worse –
at least for some of us and probably for a lot of us – before they
get better.
But despite all this, despair is simply
not an emotional texture that adheres to me very well, apart from
those night-sweating, ceiling-staring, 4 a.m. ‘O what the hell am I
doing with my life’ moments.
I can feel despair, sure, like
any sensible person living in this era who has an IQ that reads more
like Farenheit than Celsius. But I personally can’t maintain despair
over time.
I think that’s another signpost on my
personal road of life, if you will: rather than truly dwell on the
despair and loneliness that all humans feel from time to time, my
thinking has always gone to, ‘What’s next? What’s around the next
bend in the road?’
So rather than simply packing in
Dirtbag Traveler and assuming we’re all going to be spending the rest
of our lives imprisoned in underground chicken-wire bunk beds a la
the brilliant (and prescient?) Terry Gilliam film 12 Monkeys,
I think what I’m going to do is allow my native optimism to percolate
here in my personal bunker, and keep sharing posts, regardless of
whether I can actually, currently go anywhere new right now.
I have tons of material in the form of
notes from recent travels in Europe that were after all the ‘inciting
incident’ that prompted me to start the blog in the first place, and
I also have a ton of stories from back in my old hitchhiking days
that I’d love to share.
All of this I plan to do with the hopes that we will soon (soon-ish, anyway) be free to not only move about the cities where we each live, but also resume traveling the world, albeit in a different, and hopefully more thoughtful way. For starters, we will no doubt face a different kind of security inspection taking place not only in the country where our flights originate, but where we land as well, in the form of temperature-taking and etc.
Who’s the real monkey here, TSA?
Makes the recent years of silly TSA security theater stateside in which you’re forced to take off your shoes, give up your water and carry only 3 ounces of shampoo seem quaint in comparison, no?
So, whatever. I’m shouting into the void anyway, as it’s not like I had any readers to speak of even before the crisis hit, haha.
But thanks for checking this out, and I
hope you’ll keep reading!
You might be surprised who’s ultimately to blame for the word ‘gringo.’
If you’re from the
United States, there’s a word you’ll no doubt encounter if you spend
any time traveling South or Central America: ‘gringo,’ or ‘gringa.’
It’s mostly used to refer to white people from the U.S., and
sometimes white Europeans.
But if you ask
people for the ‘gringo’ origin story, nine times out of ten they
either won’t know, or they’ll subscribe to one of the common but
apocryphal stories about it.
The Meaning of
Gringo
But first, one of
the most common search terms when it comes to this strange word is
‘what does gringa mean?’
Typically, a gringo
or gringa is a person from the U.S., usually Caucasian. I’ve had
conversations with people native to South America who say that
Europeans are never gringos, only people from the U.S.
Others say that white people of European descent, whether they’re from the U.S. or elsewhere all qualify as gringos. Still others say that ‘gringo’ can be applied to anyone who doesn’t speak Spanish, or even people of Hispanic descent who aren’t in touch with their roots. So this is a point of contention that I have no intention of trying to sort out.
Howard Yanes / NPR
Is gringo
offensive?
As to the question is gringo offensive, I can only really speak from my own experience of living in Chile and the conversations I’ve had here and while traveling around the rest of South America. (In my experience, the word gringo isn’t commonly used in Spain, which in itself is interesting, when you see where this gringo origin story is going.)
But based on those
purely anecdotal observations, ‘gringo’ as it’s used today could be
seen as a tiny bit derogatory, but in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way.
It was probably a much more salty sobriquet years and decades ago.
Get the gringo some mental help, maybe…
Today it’s a word
with just a little bit of denigration built into it, a sense of
light-hearted mockery more than true offensiveness or a nasty insult.
So, yes, while ‘gringo’ is something of an epithet, for the most part
it’s used in a gently teasing kind of way – or even as a
matter-of-fact reference.
As in, ‘Did you
meet the gringa who’s also staying at the hostel?’ You might say that
in the same way you’d ask after ‘the redhead,’ or ‘the tall guy.’
Now, a HUGE caveat:
is it possible that I only ever hear the word gringo used in this
particular way because I happen to BE a gringo? Particularly, a
large-ish and rather scary-looking one with ‘resting bitch-face’ for
days?
This isn’t even my final form. kjb / Toledo, Spain 2018
Sure, of course. Nonetheless, if you’re asking me, is ‘gringo’ offensive, I’ll stand by my impression that it’s rarely if ever meant as a truly vile word anymore, like the n-word or something. It just isn’t used like that. Unless the person saying it has run out of every single curse word they know and already hit 10 or 12 ‘conchatumadres’ and they’re still angry.
Gringo Origin –
Green Go?
But what’s truly
fascinating is the myriad of legends and myths surrounding the gringo
origin story.
One of the most
common tales of the origin of ‘gringo’ has to do with the color of
the uniforms of U.S. soldiers who were deployed in Mexico during the
Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848. The story goes that the
Mexican people, quite naturally despising the invaders, shouted
epithets at them when they saw their green uniforms:
‘Green, go home!’
And, so the story goes, from ‘green, go,’ we get the shortened
version ‘gringo,’ as the letter ‘I’ as it’s pronounced in the Spanish
language has a sound like ‘ee’ in English.
It’s not easy being green-go.
¡Verde,
vayanse a casa!
Now, astute readers
might notice right away that there are a couple of problems with this
‘gringo’ origin story.
First and most
pressing, why on earth would Mexican people yell at the soldiers in
English? A more accurate phrase, assuming it were true that it
originated with angry Mexican soldiers, farmers, and townsfolk in the
mid-1800s might be ‘Verde, vayanse a casa!’
So, I guess if the
shortened term were something like, ‘verdevaya,’ we could maybe
believe this gringo origin story.
Another sticking point in this tale of the origin of gringo is that during the Mexican-American War, U.S. soldiers mostly wore blue uniforms. So even if the people of Mexico – the masses of whom surely were not bilingual – had made up a word to insult the U.S. soldiers, in English no less, it likely would have been based on blue uniforms, not green ones, wouldn’t it?
‘Vayazul,’ anyone?
Gringo Origin –
Green Coats?
Now, one regiment
from Kentucky allegedly did wear green, and were known as the
Kentucky Green Coats. You may notice a sound in their name that rings
a bell. Some people have opined that this single regiment, with their
green coats, had their nickname bastardized into ‘gringo’ and that
the name was then applied to anyone from the U.S.
This is also pretty
unlikely, even if we ignore the previously mentioned linguistic leap
the Mexican people would have been required to make to even refer to
their coats as green and not ‘verde.’
That’s
because of all the U.S. military to serve in Mexico during the war,
only 5,000
total came from Kentucky, and it’s pretty clear that not even all
of those 5,000 were from the Green Coats regiment. But even if they
were, those 5,000 guys would have to have made quite an impression
among the sea of blue-uniformed U.S. soldiers for this epithet to
have been coined to refer to all white people from the north.
Gringo Origin –
‘Green Grow?’
Another version of
the gringo origin story that I had heard – and which seems
plausible at first glance – has to do with a number of songs the
U.S. soldiers supposedly sang to keep their spirits up while deployed
in Mexico.
One of these songs
is the English traditional song ‘Green Grow the Rushes, O.’ Another
is a Robert Burns song called ‘Green Grow the Rashes, O,’ and still
another candidate for a tuneful gringo origin story is ‘Green Grow
the Lilacs,’ which was appropriated and altered to create an American
cowboy song, ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’
Apparently these are ‘rushes.’ Now, as to why everybody was always singing about them, I can’t help you. Image by Lucian Aeris from Pixabay
Turns out that there’s no real contemporaneous evidence that the soldiers sang any of these songs en masse. And if enough of them were singing it, presumably singing it constantly to the point where the Mexican populace took notice and actually gave them a nickname based on it, you’d assume it would show up in contemporary records, and it just doesn’t.
You’d also assume a much shorter war, because apparently all these dudes were doing was walking around singing about grass all the damn time.
Gringo Origin: First Time in Print in the U.S.
However, in 1849, shortly after the war ended, the word ‘gringo’ does appear in print in the U.S. in two places. The first was the diary of John Woodhouse Audubon, the son of the famed wildlife painter John James Audubon. The younger Audubon joined a trek from New York to California during the Gold Rush, with a plan to collect specimens and document the mammals of North America for a book.
You could say the
expedition took the long way around, as they passed through northern
Mexico, prompting Audubon to make this journal entry in July of 1849:
‘Cerro Gordo is a miserable den of vagabonds, with nothing to support it but its petty garrison of a hundred and fifty cavalry mounted on mules. We were hooted and shouted at as we passed through, and called “Gringoes,” etc., but that did not prevent us from enjoying their delicious spring water; it was cool and delightful. Our men rushed to it, and drank two pint cups full each, hardly breathing between times; it was the first good water we had had since leaving the Mississippi.’
John WOodhouse Audubon
While Audubon’s journal wasn’t published until years later, another book that became quite popular using the word gringo hit the shelves toward the end of 1849, titled Los Gringos; or, an inside View of Mexico and California. The book was written by one Lieutenant Henry Augustus Wise, who wrote in the preface:
‘The title — Los Gringos, with which this volume has been christened, is the epithet — and rather a reproachful one — used in California and Mexico to designate the descendants of the Anglo-Saxon race.’
Lt Henry Augustus Wise
Gringo Origin: Journalists and ‘Green Grow’
It was over 30 years later in 1883 when an article was published that retroactively ascribed the origin of gringo to ‘Green Grow the Rushes, O’:
‘The word Gringo, the term applied to American and English by the Mexicans, is said to have had an amusing origin. A lot of sailors belonging to an English man-of-war at Mazatlan went ashore, and got on a rip-roaring drunk. While parading the streets one of them was singing “Green Grow the rushes,” etc. The Mexicans only caught the first two words, and dubbed them Grin-go’s, and it has stuck ever since.’
unknown, Newspaper article circa 1883
Popular journalist Nellie Bly added fuel to fire of this particular version of the gringo origin story when she wrote a piece reporting on a six-month trip to Mexico that was published in newspapers all across the U.S.:
‘People often wonder and ask why the Mexican calls the American a “Gringo,” or what the word means… When the Americans went to war with Mexico, a melody, every verse of which ended with “Green grow the rushes, O,” was very popular. It pleased almost everybody’s fancy, and was sung by old and young. While in camp the soldiers would sing it constantly, and all the Mexicans could hear was “Green grow the rushes, O.” They immediately began to call the American soldiers by the first two words as it sounded to them, “grin go,” They made it into one word, by which they will ever know the American — “Gringo.”‘
Nelly Bly
Whether the song ‘pleased everybody’s fancy’ or not, Bly’s gringo origin story turns out to bullshit.
People were already pushing back against Bly’s explanation of the origin of ‘gringo,’ even in the late 1800s. Unfortunately, they pushed back with their own dubious versions of the gringo origin story. Another journalist, S.E. Roberston, wrote in 1889 in the Washington D.C. Evening Star:
‘”Nellie Bly” makes more errors still. Her explanation of the word “gringo” — a familiar native designation for the American — is absurd. Instead of attributing its origin properly to the “green coats” of a Kentucky regiment stationed in Mexico during the war of ’40-47 she says it came from the popularity of the song, “Green Grow the Rushes, O,” in the American camps.’
s.e. Robertson
Gringo Origin – It’s all Greek to Me
But turns out Robertson was just as wrong as Bly. In 1889 American scholar William Dwight Whitney published the ‘G’ volume of his Century Dictionary which included an entry for the word ‘gringo,’ attributing its origin story thusly:
‘[Sp. gibberish; prob. a pop. var. of Griego, Greek.]’
William dwight whitney
The basis of Whitney’s explication of the origin of gringo as a bastardization of the Spanish word ‘griego,’ meaning Greek, came from a Spanish language dictionary that was published in 1787, a good 60 years before the Mexican-American War.
The reason for this is that it turns out English-speaking people aren’t the only ones to call any unintelligible language ‘Greek,’ as in ‘It’s all Greek to me.’
In El Diccionario Castellano, Esteban de Terrero wrote:
‘Foreigners in Malaga are called gringos, who have particular kinds of accent that deprive them from easy and natural Castilian speech, and in Madrid the name is given especially to the Irish for the same reason.’
From the 1600s through the 1800s, Irish soldiers of fortune often went to Spain to fight in the Spanish army, so the Spanish soldiers and townsfolk would have been acquainted with what was apparently their mangling of the Castilian accent.
So if you’re looking for someone to blame for the origin of the word gringo, you need look no further than the Irish, and their ‘particular kinds of accent.’
My first time setting foot in Europe at
long last was…effervescent. From head to toe, those first few days
were like having a fizzy drink bubbling inside my brain, just
wandering around giddy. Like, I imagine I looked like Danny Devito’s
character Martini from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” just a
permanent idiot grin plastered across my face and a little giggle
perpetually on reserve, one that could come tittering to the surface
at any moment.
I was in Europe at long last, the
Europe of my ancestors, the Europe of so much western history for so
many millennia, the place where Shakespeare and the Romans and Don
Quixote and Beowulf and Monty Python came from. The place where so
many had lived and died, where so much had been built and torn down
and rebuilt, over and over again.
I think this is in Parque Retiro. kjb / Madrid – 2018
Part of my joy was simply the notion of
finally being on this other continent – this was 2018 and I am
very, very old – this continent that I had read so much about and
longed to visit for so many years. I wonder if my feeling was similar
to the sense you still get from native Europeans about their desire
to come to America.
But I wonder if it matches our reverse
longing to visit Europe. It seems like it might be a bit different;
their longing to come to America seems like a hopeful, wide-eyed
springing forward, even at this late date. On the other hand, our
desire to see Europe seems more like a longing to look backward, a
need to touch the glory of the past, an expression of our national
insecurity, a declaration of fealty to our betters. Both attitudes
are hopelessly bound up in romanticism and delusion, of course.
Accordion player in Parque Retiro kjb / Madrid – 2018
The other giddifying factor (yes, it’s
a word, but don’t look it up) that enraptured me was that I had just
come from four years in Chile.
Now, I have a great love of Chile, and
especially Valparaiso, as I hope to share with you on these pages.
But the simple truth is that the South
American standards for a lot of things, and especially public
facilities and cleanliness are significantly different than those of
the US or EU. There are of course economic factors; colonizer states
that spent centuries conquering other peoples and extracting wealth
from them are by definition going to be more wealthy, and are thus
likely to have a better standard of living.
But there is a certain grim ugliness in
Chile when it comes to providing anything for the public, a sense of
doing just the barest of bare minimum necessary to get by. I suspect
that this attitude comes straight out of the Dictadura years and the
brutal crush of the Chicago Boys neoliberal economic system that was
imposed on Chile in the 1970s.
‘Fuck the people,’ in a nutshell.
According to this economic model, all public goods are to be
extracted, exploited and sold off.
Thus, things like public restrooms,
public wifi, parks, buses, the metro, street cleaning and garbage
pickup, the nation’s Social Security administration – ownership of
the fucking water of the entire nation – pretty much all of these
things are run with the very visible hand of a not-at-all-free market
guiding them. Public places and public services are kept at just the
bare minimum of functionality in Chile; wherever there is no money to
be made, no one in charge gives a shit about how shabby things get.
Even down to something as pedestrian as
walking out to the baggage claim area after passing through customs
in the Madrid airport I was struck by the comparative opulence of the
place: clean, roomy toilets, hand driers that work – my God, hot
water! You can’t get hot water in a public restroom sink anywhere in
Chile.
Atocha Station in Madrid kjb / Madrid – 2018
Even stupid things like the comfy,
plentiful chairs arrayed around the baggage claim belts in Madrid
were a joy – things like benches and seating in public waiting
rooms in Chile always seem to have been furnished begrudgingly, as if
they searched out the very cheapest, shoddiest, oldest furniture that
they could find out by a dumpster – and there it remains until it
literally falls apart underneath you. And that is only if they have
seats at all. Baggage claim in Santiago has none.
All of this has something to do with
money, of course, and those colonizer coffers that have been
overflowing over the course of 500 years of exploiting the resources
of places like Chile. But it also has to do with the attitudes about
how to spend what public money there is.
Not that the people themselves, the
actual public wouldn’t prefer things to be nicer; just that the
public in Chile always seems to be the last to get any benefit from
public funds, and then only with the maximum of resentment from the
state or whatever subsidiary, for-profit entity is providing it.
But that’s of course not where the
differences between Chile and Spain end.
There is a buoyancy and a freedom that
permeates the Spanish crowds; people talk loudly and laugh out loud
as they navigate the sidewalks in an open, easy manner that Chileans
would never dare. In Chile there is often a furtiveness, a sense of
gloom and a barely-concealed hostility as you maneuver in the
streets, always in a rush to get somewhere, always worrying about
money, always fearful, always suspicious. (All of this of course goes
out the window when Chileans, especially young Chileans, are drunk.
Then it’s like the cork has been let out of a bottle of baking soda
and vinegar that has been held in check for a very long time.)
Metropolis Building from afar kjb / Madrid – 2018
Please, please understand that these
are overly broad (and slightly ridiculous) generalizations that don’t
apply to every single individual. But I think a point about a Chilean
cultural norm of blending in can be illustrated by how prevalent
clothing that is the color black, gray, or dark navy blue is in
Chile. There’s a grayness to the faces and oftentimes a black look
that crosses them when you’re out and about making your way through
the city streets. There’s a sense of not wanting to stand out, of
laying low, of getting your business done and getting on with it, of
getting away.
Not to belabor the point, but I think
it’s not at all crazy to view these observations through the lens of
nations that were conquistadores versus those who were conquered. And
especially in Chile, where first the violence and cruelty of the
Spanish, then later the Dictadura and the imposition of stark
austerity and the monetizing of public goods and services have all
served to crush so many people’s economic hopes for so many years, it
just makes sense that a logic of avoiding trouble underlain with
sublimated anger and despair would bubble under the surface.
But back to Madrid. Whatever parallel
sense of being crushed by their own dictatorship the Spanish people
may have had as a culture before it ended in the 1970s was not
terribly evident (at least not in Madrid. That’s a very different
thing in Catalonia, as I later learned.) No, what I observed was a
people much more open and free with themselves, chatting on the
streets not only with their friends and family but also with
strangers, passing the time of day in vast, green parks, strolling on
broad, pristine, well-maintained sidewalks, sitting at overflowing
sidewalk cafes every night of the week drinking, chatting, eating in
voices loud, triumphant, free.
Hanging with my homies in the park. kjb / Madrid
Truth be told, I was terribly confused
when I first sat at table at a little cafe in the neighborhood where
I was staying (near Metro Embajadores or Las Delicias, if anyone’s
interested. Very cool hood, not fancy but not run-down either, with
plenty of shops and restaurants and bars, and easy access to a number
of tourist destinations.) That was my first night there after rolling
off the plane early in the morning all jet-lagged and sleeping for a
few hours that afternoon in my Airbnb.
I sat at a table in the
plastic-windowed tent set up on the sidewalk and ordered a beer. The
old man server – one of those wiry, tough, beef-jerky old men who
operate without a single wasted motion and have been waiting tables
for decades – brought me some tapas with my beer and I was puzzled.
And then a second beer, and a second
plate. And I was worried I was being suckered into paying for
something I didn’t want, haha.
Sunset in Spain kjb / Madrid 2018
Of course in Madrid the tradition still
stands of serving some kind of tapas along with each round of drinks
you order, as I quickly learned. The bars often have serving lines of
cafeteria-style, glass-covered pans displaying the various tapas that
are on offer that day, and you can choose among them if you want, or
just take your chances with whatever the beef jerky server man
decides to bring. Some places have a full-time chef or cook on hand
to whip up new batches of whatever strikes their fancy throughout the
course of the shift as various tapas run out. It’s kind of a cool
system, and really nice to have a snack with your beer.
I admit I ate more than a bit of meat
while I was there, trying the Iberica ham and other tidbits. I’m a
bad vegetarian…
Let’s think for a moment what the actual act of travel entails.
You voluntarily yank yourself out of your comfort zone, cram a tiny percentage of your stuff – stuff you really like and have spent years quite deliberately accumulating, by the way – into a bag, head out of your cozy home where everything is just the way you like it, and fight through traffic to get to the dystopian hellscape that is the modern airport.
Like, you go to the AIRPORT. On PURPOSE.
Right from the get-go, this is just all kinds of wrong.
There, you will fight through packs of strangers who are similarly stressed and tense and nervous about being late, just as you are. Then you will be subjected to a humiliating series of pointless ‘security’ inspections of varying degrees of theatricality, herded through an array of corridors and chutes – which are alarmingly reminiscent of those you find in cattle slaughtering facilities.
Next, you are met by overworked flight attendants whose impatience and loathing is barely disguised by practiced, glassy smiles who herd you into jamming yourself into a tiny seat fit for a child or a dollhouse inside a ridiculous metal tube that should in no way be trusted with your life while hurtling through the sky at 600 miles per hour.
Finally, you’re off the ground. Hooray! That’s where you’ll spend the next several hours breathing stale, germ-laden air while your body has every bit of moisture sucked out of it – along with every bit of your patience and goodwill toward your fellow humans.
Your only diversion that you don’t provide yourself, aside from the passive-aggressive struggle over the armrest with the massively overweight gentleman next to you (or alternatively, praying to all the gods that ever existed and never existed that the screeching infant in your row will fall into a food coma) will be that you are offered bad, overpriced food that, despite being bland, flavorless cardboard, is far too meager.
But don’t worry, you’ll also get thimblefuls of water or warm, overpriced beer to wash it down with.
You can look forward to having all your routines completely shredded, which for some people that means your bowels will be stopped up altogether – or possibly opened up like a horrific firehose reminiscent of Jackson Pollock if he had gone through a Brown Period.
Now you get to navigate the cattle-slaughtering chutes and further inspections and humiliations of another airport. Notice as you await your turn to be digitally prodded and poked – fingers crossed in hopes that your bag made it to the same destination as you – that although wifi exists at this airport, you are inexplicably unable to connect for some reason. ‘WiFi available’ is only theoretical, or perhaps it only says that to mock you and doesn’t actually exist at all.
Either way, forget about communicating with the outside world. You are airport people now.
Eventually, you step up to the counter and smile desperately through your fatigue at stony-faced customs and immigration officers, hoping to display a benign, inoffensive demeanor that will mean you’ll be able to pass through hassle-free. But far from putting on a cool and casual show of a sophisticated traveler at ease, you actually appear to them as a greasy, exhausted, jittery freak, completely wrung out, smelling terrible and with worse breath. The immigration guy shuffles you through quickly, yes, but just to get rid of the foul, sub-human abomination before him.
All the while, you’re wondering where the nearest toilet is and what the fuck ever happened to water fountains.
Finally, exhausted, you shove through the mob of bovine gawpers who gaze slack-jawed at the baggage going round and round yet insist on standing right next to the belt even though theirs hasn’t arrived. [Sidebar: I suspect that every airport has groups of locals that come out just to watch the bags go around. They aren’t traveling anywhere; this is just their entertainment, so of course they want to get up close to watch. ‘Get in the car kids, we gonna go watch the suitcasey merry-go-round! Hooray!’]
Yee-haw! Looka them bags go roundy-round y’all! I told ya this was better than the water slide! the travel lady
You are eventually able to make a lunge for your baggage – if it turns up at all, that is – and lug it out to the street in a strange city where you may or may not know the language and you almost certainly don’t know your way around at all, there to be accosted by alleged cab drivers and hucksters of every stripe.
You manage to grab what you hope is a legit taxi in which you won’t be mugged and dumped on a side street without your passport, bags or money, or you climb on a bus, just crossing your fingers that you’ll be able to figure out where you’re going. And of course, assuming you do actually get there, just hope that your Airbnb host will be waiting to let you in, or that you’ll be able to figure out some way to get in touch with them because no wifi/no cell.
And, you know what?
I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Rose man kjb/Buenos Aires, 2018
Like anything else, the more places you go, the better you get at traveling. You learn shortcuts and tricks and methods to minimize the inevitable emotional abrasion and wearing down of your soul as you navigate the hard edges of modern travel. You chat with other travelers, you make jokes with the various workers at various counters, cafes and shops, you hide behind your headphones as needed, you read.
You figure it out.
And once you do get settled in your room or apartment and take a moment to breathe, maybe grab a shower — definitely grab a beer — that first time you head out into a brand-new city or town, wander among the crowds, smell the odors of unfamiliar food, hear the sounds of music and laughter and conversation in another language, see all the faces and the shops and the buildings and the streets — well, it’s just the best.
“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.”
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Whenever people ask me where I’m from and I’m trying to give them more than a perfunctory answer, it always starts something like, “Um, well…you see…” or something like that.
My relationship with where I’m from? It’s complicated.
I have only rarely if ever felt like I was someplace I would call “home,” and even then it never seems like it’s going to be a permanent thing. Even when I do stay in one place for a long time, there’s always a piece of me somewhere deep inside that is prepared to leave. Like in the old blues song, “Got one foot on the platform, the other foot on the train…”
Moving a lot as a kid has without question colored my attitudes and my life: whatever sense of belonging somewhere and with certain people I have ever had has always been fleeting. I’ve always felt somehow separate; there but not there.
I think this may be part of why I have always been enamored of journalism: the journalist naturally adopts the perspective of the observer. He or she isn’t a participant; the journalist is by definition outside the action. And when you don’t feel like you truly belong anywhere, there is a comfort in observing. It’s a position that allows you a connection – of sorts – with whatever is going on, but at the same time you get to keep your distance because after all you are here to observe.
Don’t fence me in kjb/San Pedro de Atacama 2018
One thing I have done nearly all my life is to write, whether as an actual journalist or not. So as travel writing has blossomed, I’ve been lucky enough to bumble into gigs writing for various travel-oriented websites and contributing to them in a variety of ways. But writing for someone else – and not incidentally, writing for a paycheck – of necessity tends to dampen your true, wild, free and full-throated voice.
Enter The Dirtbag Traveler.
Step-dog. kjb/San Pedro de Atacama 2018
This blog lies at the nexus of my sense of rootlessness, my perpetual desire to see whatever the next place around the corner might be, and my love of writing. I came up with the name when I realized that a dirtbag traveler is exactly what I am – not much imagination needed to connect the dots there. And though I call myself that with at least a bit of tongue in cheek, nonetheless I contend that there are varying levels or tracks when it comes to travel, and not just in terms of economics or style either.
By my definition, the dirtbag traveler is the opposite of the safe or mundane vacationer. The vacationer or mundane traveler is the one on the guided tour, yapping away only in his or her native language at other people from his home country. He or she is the one who is always in clean clothes, the one who eats in nice restaurants — preferably chains he is already familiar with — every single meal, the one who gets excited about going to the shopping mall.
So, yeah, dirtbag travel is indeed contingent on budget constraints. But it has more to do with attitude, I think, and being okay with and even eager to spend time sinking down deeper into a place, allowing a place to seep under your skin rather than skating across its surface. It’s the difference between being in an airboat skimming over a swamp versus stripping naked and jumping in the bubbling, brackish water just to see what happens.
Portal to the unknown kjb/Valparaiso 2017
The dirtbag traveler sees new places through the lens of the scratched and dirty Plexiglas of a city bus, jostled and bumped, mired in the sweat and breath and funk of locals. The mundane traveler only catches glimpses of the cityscape from behind the tinted windows of the air-conditioned shuttle van.
I think part of my sense of being a certain type of traveler versus the other stems also from having read and fallen in love with Kerouac’s “On the Road” when I was in my teens. It is not only a book about travel itself, it is also a story firmly rooted in the tradition of Steinbeck and the working class and the people who had been systematically denied the American Dream. And it is about how those people were slowly waking up to the fact of that betrayal, their eyes opening to the nakedness of the emperor and realizing that There Is No American Dream, not for people like us anyway.
So coming from that tradition of travel, when I read most travel blogs I find them to be annoyingly chirpy and false. Everything’s too clean, too well-mannered and too tame to encompass the reality of travel. Most travel blogs read like extended Instagram posts or model auditions: vapid, devoid of context and serving no honest purpose other than to portray the protagonist in the best possible light, always having THE MOST FUN EVAR, YOU GUYS!
That, and to make money.
So while I’m not planning on making this solely about shitty circumstances that sometimes happen when you travel – nor am I planning on making any money – neither am I going to airbrush what I’ve seen or attempt to paint it in any light other than the cold reality of my lived experience.
People forget that the Beat Generation was so named to acknowledge the weariness, the shabbiness, the dirt and sweat and the un-fun parts of their lives and especially their travels. “Beat” meant beaten down and weary, but it also meant “beat” in the sense of some thing or place or experience itself being tired, boring and dreary: “This party is so beat.”
This is what beat looks like. (Kerouac )
Hence the drive to go, go, go. Get going to the next place, then the next and the next. That particular piece of the Kerouac puzzle may well be the part I can most relate to.
The Need to Get Gone.
But perhaps there’s a kind of Zen there as well: Kerouac went on to add new layers of meaning to the word, in later years suggesting that Beat also could imply upbeat, or beatific in the sense of reaching a kind of nirvana, or the sense of being “on the beat” or in time with music.
I think all of these definitions fit in nicely with my sense of dirtbag travel. So I’m hoping you’ll enjoy reading about my thoughts and experiences as I share stories about where I’ve been — and maybe even a few travel tips shoehorned in to rambling, disjointed nonsense like what you just slogged through.
