On Solo Travel and Intimacy with Mother Earth

The most surprising thing I’ve learned in my four and a half months on the road is that just like with people, we can have a chemistry with different lands. It makes sense, after all we came from the land, feed off the land, and will return to it when our physical bodies are no more.

And just like with people, there are some places that we feel instant connection with and others that take a while to open up, that make you work for their love.

Guatemala was like that. It took me a solid week in Antigua before I decided it was okay. It was shockingly expensive compared to Mexico, where I’d last been, and I didn’t like that the small city had so many tourists and white immigrants. It was these tourists who worked at most of the bars and coffee shops, while many Indigenous Mayans slept and sold on the streets. It wasn’t until I reached the village of San Marcos off of Lago Atitlan that I began to see synchronicity. It came in the form of a friendly group of foreigners, who, perhaps sensing my loneliness, invited me to share in their birthday celebrations. It was the first time I’d cooked in over a month. The following evening I was walking down an alleyway when I heard my name called by a stranger. It was Jewell, who recognized me from my Instagram profile, and invited me to her home where I met her two cats and we spent my last evening in town talking about polyamory, astrology, and tarot over french fries and falafel.

Cali, Colombia

My love for Colombia is so great that it clouds my memories of the rest of my trip. It’s like your first adult relationship that causes you to dismiss everything before it as a juvenile infatuation. I loved everywhere I went in Colombia, even Bogota with its dreary weather and notoriously stuck up residents who reminded me of New Yorkers. I remember landing in Cali during the sunset (which has been a theme throughout this trip) and seeing the moon in Aquarius rise over a dazzling purple mountain range. Despite my exhaustion from a full day of travel, I forced myself to go out that night, but me and another guy from the hostel left early and walked back. We walked alongside a river that gleamed from the moonlight and I gushed to him in broken Spanish that *this* was my favorite city in Colombia, yes, I had only been there for a few hours, but I just knew it. It turns out I was right.

My romance with Colombia has made my time in Peru all the more difficult. Colombia is like a lover I was forced to part with but who still weighs heavy on my mind and I can’t help comparing everyone else to her. Peru is that clumsy rebound who has everything going for her, but still doesn’t excite me in the same way. Perhaps it’s because I lost my credit cards and ID upon arriving in this country. Perhaps it’s because, after four months of brazenly eating street food, this is the place where my stomach finally betrayed me. It hasn’t been all bad though. I reunited with my parents in Cusco and together we witnessed one of the seven wonders of the world, Machu Picchu. A friend I met in Colombia timed her travels so that we’d reunite in Arequipa, and we both agreed that the city, with its colonial architecture and bordering volcanoes, was our favorite in Peru. Together we hiked the Colca Canyon, which is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and the second deepest in the world.

But this trip has made me realize that, at least for now, LA is home. I’ve missed my partner, my friends, and my family, but also the endless diversity and sprawling highways and beaches and mountains and warm weather. Regardless of where my wanderings take me, Southern California will always be the place that raised me and I think I’ll always return to it, like a salmon who swims upstream to the river where it was hatched.

More than anything, travel has made me realize that we are meant to be in a reciprocal relationship with the earth. Our ancestors knew this because they spent time tending to her and memorizing her seasons; they gave thanks and had celebrations for each harvest. For many of us, industrialism has stripped us of this intimacy and we no longer know or care where our food or clothes come from, where our collected trash ends up, what materials are being used to build our cities or what pollution is doing to our planet.

The most amazing and heartbreaking thing is that just like a Mother, just like a woman, she continues to give, will provide for her children until she is shriveled and starved, and humanity with her. Though her skies are congested with smog, she continues to bless us with gorgeous sunsets. Though her oceans are choked with plastic and debris, her teal blue waves still tickle our feet. Though snow melts faster each year, we’re still urged to climb her mountain tops.

But for how long? How much longer can she survive this grossly uneven exchange? Do we really want to know the answer to that question? Better to apologize now, to change our behavior now, so that we can still enjoy each other in old age. Maybe one day we’ll look back on this time as our rebellious teenage years, the time when we gave her hell, made her hair turn prematurely grey, just before we got our act together.

Categories: Blog