Quitting my job and travelling to La Pez
IN THEmid-1990s, I quit my newspaper job, put my possessions (a mini-disc player, 56 Russian novels and a terrible eiderdown made from Portuguese rags) into storage at my parents’ house and flew to Edinburgh to serve toad-in-thehole to bankers. Nowadays it’s called a gap year; then it was called Getting Away From The Parents In Order To Get Very Drunk And Wear A Lot Of Ethnic Bangles.
Once I had eaten all the 11p coleslaw I could handle and had amassed some money, I backpacked through France, Spain, the Netherlands and Croatia. I survived on bread and beer and got torn apart by bed bugs. Besides Buck, an Alsatian who adopted me in Canet-Plage, the only people I spoke to were Australians, Canadians, Kiwis and Germans. All of us were young and smelly, clutching Rough
Guides. All of us were eager to tick off the sights: the Louvre, the Van Gogh museum, the Eiffel Tower and Dubrovnik. All of us wanted to have Meaningful Experiences: eating borek while overlooking the Adriatic, drinking Pernod while watching men play boules, smoking joints in an Amsterdam café.
Last week I sat on a step in La Paz, Bolivia, watching a group of young backpackers swopping travel advice. Most of them had infant dreadlocks, most of them had cycled the “highway of death” and half of them had “done” Peru. They strode off towards the tourist precinct, babbling and laughing. Winter sun warmed the back of my neck. I sipped grapefruit juice and watched pigeons fight over a chip. A man tried to sell me an inflatable Spider-Man. A toddler played with my hair.
As I watched the backpackers disappear, I was glad to be where I was. Twenty years ago, we, too, travelled in packs – and it was a competitive business. I often found myself huddled in the corner of a bar listening to lanky Germans discuss how many Gaudi buildings they had seen or how many hours they had spent blowing up bicycle tyres on obscure mountain paths reserved only for goats.
Across the way, an Australian would brag about having found the city’s best vegetarian restaurant and a Kiwi would describe how he had drunk at the same bar as Picasso.
There was a lot of ticking off. There was a lot of backpacker banter. Knowledge of places circled around and around in these packs. The result was that young people wearing striped trousers moved across entire countries oblivious to the cultures around them, their eyes fixed on a prize.
Now that I am older and look like a fat bee in striped trousers, my approach to travel has changed.
First, I prefer to go it alone. Travelling solo means I am free to do and see what I like and don’t have to worry about swimming naked in front of beer-swilling boys from Wallawallawalloo. Second, I no longer panic about missing out on Great and Meaningful Sights (the Louvre is overrated and the Van Gogh museum is crammed with Italian teenagers). In La Paz, I have shunned the tourist precinct, with its souvenirs and stuffed llamas, and have spent hours wandering the alleys, heading deep into the crumbling heart of the city where bowler hat-wearing women sell trout and toilet seats and nail salons offer neon falsies.
Being older also means I have friends scattered around the world – from Berlin and Brazil to Antigua and Argentina. They are often more successful than me, live in nice homes (or on yachts) and attend edgy art exhibitions involving videos of reeds. They are also part of their community, so staying with them allows entry into the working mechanisms of a society.
I am fortunate to be staying with friends in La Paz and have met many Bolivians and experienced ordinary La Paz life. Hugo and Irene took me to the local market where I tasted weird fruit and got into a conversation about teeth. Anna-Maria showed me the neighbourhood and we got into a conversation about rabbits. Maria-Teresa and I ate trout and got into a conversation about dystopia.
Finally, while my feet are able to move as quickly as they did when I was in my 20s, my mind now prefers a slower pace. It wants to soak up its surroundings and find a sense of place. It likes to wander the latitudes of a city rather than race through them. It enjoys watching and feeling instead of taking cues from guide books. It notices details: the teenager waiting for hours outside Catedral San Francisco, clutching a red rose; the smell of roasting chestnuts in a peeling alley; the smoking man talking to his demons on a swing; the piece of string hooked on a pigeon’s foot.
Best of all, it revels in being among locals, laughing on the steps of a square while a toddler runs her fingers through my hair, the city a jumble of life rolling out towards the unknown: jungles, canyons, peaks and clefts. Places where people work and walk; where they dream of being here and there.