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 Exit in 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.’)
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.
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!
Cheers,
K
