Travel

Some of my friends -- Dan, Wilmer, and Ken -- recently came back from a two-week fact-finding trip to Colombia.  They visited Bucaramanga, a town where I lived for a month on my third trip to the South American country, and I followed their exploits carefully (on Dan's blog at danschreiber.blogspot.com).

Someday, I expect to move and live permanently in Latin America. But travel itself has changed since the years when I backpacked and ventured into places not quite on the map.  

There's hardly anything left to discover.  I never wanted to be a tourist.  Even when my wife Lee and I explored Yugoslavia (back when there still was a Yugoslavia), we ate the omnipresent bean soup and spoke what Serbo-Croatian we could manage to figure out.  We went to Sarajevo, despite the warnings against it from the train agent.

"You don't want to go there," she told us.  "Go somewhere else."

No, I told her.  We do want to go there.

And we did.  And I'm glad we did.  I recently watched the movie "The Hunting Party" with Richard Gere and Terrence Howard and recognized sights and places and even the feelings associated with that country.  If we had stayed in the best hotels or used a travel agent or tour, we would have missed everything.

The last time I drove through Mexico, exploring for two weeks with my son Henry, we revisited some of the regional cities where I had lived while attending college there.  Everything had changed.  Xalapa, once a lush and rustic city of endless beauty and charm, had become a bustling metropolis.  Veracruz, once a port city with a wicked and wonderful night life, was pocked with highrise hotels and crowded parking places.  (Hurricanes still threatened; some things don't change.)  When we went to Teotihuacan, the Pyramid of the Sun, outside Mexico City, there were tour buses of Asian visitors and school groups battling to perch on the top. The magic of the place remained, but you had to concentrate to absorb it, to recognize it, to feel it under the rumble of others shooting videos and talking on cell phones. A Wal-Mart looms in the near distance.

Twenty years ago, I sought out and explored the Mayan ruins in the rain forest at Palenque.  I understand that now the place is inundated with tourists, the nearby water paradise of Aguas Azules trodden down with crowds.  Oaxaca has changed from the most indigenous and beautiful market culture to a refuge for American artists and tourists with expense accounts.

I had always wanted to visit Machu Picchu in Peru and had filed it away for a future exploration and meditation. Now I'm not sure I even want to go, it has become such a well-known tourist destination.

In Chuck Thompson's book "Smile When You Are Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer," he includes a chapter called "Why Latin America Isn't the World's Number One Tourist Destination and Probably Never Will Be."  (From his words to God's ears.)  He claims estadounidenses are afraid of Latin America.  Mostly when I hear someone tell me they "love Mexico," they've been to Cancun and took a tour bus to a nearby ruin before returning to their luxury hotel or cruise ship.  They know nothing about Mexico, but I'm not about to discourage them from keeping away from the interior, the heart of the place or the people.  

Dan had written in his blog his uneasiness about going to Colombia, the fear of kidnapping and stories of rebels in the jungles.  Someone commented on learning of his impending trip, "You're crazy."  Indeed, the U.S. State Department discourages travel to the country.

But Thompson indicates that "while middle-class Americans (tremble) through the territory of narco-terrorist blood feuds... (Colombia is) second only to the Himalayas for mountain dramas, the turbulent beauty of the Andes.. a backdrop of overwhelming grandeur."  He walked through the city streets at night and enjoyed coffee with strangers.

On my last visit to Colombia, I found it still possible to explore, to feel the adventure of being surrounded by a real Latin American culture without all the trappings of tourism. I went for weeks without seeing another American.  Certainly, Colombia might be able to use the income that a tourist industry would provide.  Maybe they'll find a way to end the violence in that country without succumbing to the devastation that tourism and the tourist mindset brings.  

It is still possible to travel.  But you have to work at it.  Some things money just can't buy.