Where is Matt right now?
DECEMBER 23, 2011 - Today I'm learning to dive at Fun and Sun Dive and Travel on Malapascua, Philippines (http://bit.ly/vAoQjP). In three days, we be swimming with thresher sharks. Merry Christmas to me :)
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For the last few days I’ve been working on my application for the Glimpse Correspondent Program. I’ve gone through all of my old photos, picked out my favorites, and touched them up. I now have a total of thirty-three pictures. The problem is, I need to narrow my submission down to twenty. If you have a minute, it would be a great help if you could look through the photos and leave a comment telling me which photos you think I should keep, and which I should trash, and why.
Don’t worry about my feelings. Be ruthless. Telling me which ones you hate will help more than telling me which ones you like. But, of course, I hope you like them all.
image from Lesinge.org
When I first moved to Taiwan I was fascinated with everything. I walked around stupefied, a silly grin permanently plastered to my face, amazed at the incredible world that I had discovered. That lasted for about three years.
I don’t smile like that anymore. I haven’t for quite some time. About a year-and-a-half ago the things that once enchanted me, the incense burning in urns in front of temples, the small aluminum roofed houses, the palm trees that line the boulevards, became commonplace and I became unhappy.
I thought that I had become too comfortable in Taiwan, so I went to Guatemala. I wanted to rediscover the wide-eyed wonder that I felt when I first moved to Asia. But I didn’t. After having traveled around Asia, Central America seemed too similar to home. It bored me.
The problem, however, wasn’t Guatemala, nor was it Taiwan. The problem was me.
We travel to feel like children again, to be adrift in a an enchanting world, to discover possibilities beyond our imaginations. When I first moved to Taiwan I was caught up in this enchantment. This enchantment is what people speak of when the speak of being bitten by the travel bug.
This enchantment, however, does not come from travel. It comes from the way a person looks at the world–a special way of seeing things that most of us experience when we first step out of the comfort of our homes and leap headlong into the unknown.
We need not travel to gain this perspective. It’s simply curiosity. A willingness to learn. An openness to everything. If we can keep that perspective, then it doesn’t matter where we are, we will remain interested, attentive, and excited. But if it’s lost, then everything is lost. The world becomes drab, two-dimensional, and as stale as a b-grade sitcom.
A travel writer friend of mine recently told me about two wonderful travel books written by a french author. I forget his name. The first book was about everything that the author could see from his chair in his living room. In the sequel he gets really adventurous and walks to the window. My friend said that the books are incredible. That author had it figured out.
Some people travel. Some people don’t. That’s of no consequence. But listen to me now. This is the most important thing that I could tell you.
Never forget: there’s treasure everywhere.
Well, I finally arrived in Guatemala. When I say finally I mean that I arrived after:
- A twelve hour bus ride from Cranbrook to the Calgary airport (don’t even ask why it took so long).
- Two hours of sleep.
- Two hours detained by a mongoloid U.S. customs officer for no reason. The guy said he was afraid that I might try to stay in the USA because I didn’t have an ongoing ticket. I wittily responded, “Actually, I’m an American citizen,” which I thought would sink his argument. But he countered with the ingenious rebuttal: “That doesn’t matter,” and sent me off to the Customs Time-Out room to think about the consequences of being witty to a customs officer. I subsequently missed my flight, and had to take a later one.
- A beautiful, and expensive, but all too short four day layover in LA on Venice Beach.
- A two day car ride halfway across Mexico with Mike Sanchez, who I found on Craigslist, and who turned out to be like the smartest living creature in the universe. Really. He was Google personified — except for Google stops belching meaningless shit at you if you ignore it. So, I basically drove halfway across Mexico with an auto audio-Google machine on repeat constantly spewing whatever popped into his little search engine brain to fill the silence of his radioless car.
- A twelve hour bus ride to Mexico City, which arrived at Mexico City Central Station at 1am, and then a 10 hour wait for my next bus during which I didn’t sleep for fear of my bags being stolen, which was still way better than being stuck in a car with Mike Sanchez.
- A twelve hour ride to Tuxtla Gutierrez in Chiapas, which arrived at midnight, just in time to connect with my bus, a six hour ride to the Guatemalan border.
- A 10 minute wait in Guatemalan customs during which I saw a guy ingeniously talk the border guard into letting his buddy cross into Mexico even though he had no passport and was not a citizen, based only on the promise that they’d “be right back”.
- A four hour bus ride on an infamous Guatemalan ‘chicken bus’, during which I really had to go pee.
All to arrive in this beautiful little Guatemalan City of Quetzaltenango, which is situated in the western mountains beneath an active volcano that gushes a beautiful plume of smoke across the sky. I’ve been in touch with the Lonely Planet writer for Guatemala who lives here, and who I will meet in a couple of weeks to see if he can help me get in with them. And now, I just came home from eating a four dollar steak dinner, and I’m sitting in my six dollar room, which is attached to a Spanish school that’s currently having a graduation party in the central patio.
But tomorrow I’m leaving. I’m going to a small town on Lake Atitilan, which I can probably only get to by ferry, where it’s even cheaper. Lonely Planet speaks of rooms for two and three dollars per night. Spanish lessons for two dollars per hour and a bar that servers Cuba Libres for 30 cents apiece!
I can wake up every morning and go swimming in the lake and then I can go for a for a run up the volcano next to town and come home and study Spanish and write.
Where else could I possibly go?
A short humorous essay by Matt Gibson about the nature of travel, independence, freedom, travel scams and chicken busses.
Originally published in XelaWho March, 2009
The Mayan Nose, a peak that resembles the profile of a person reclining, looms over Lake Atitlan. When you’re in San Pedro the Nose is a more attractive peak than the volcano because, whereas the volcano always lurks behind you, this nasal peak stares you in the face, challenging you to go up the Nose.
I went up the Nose with a couple from New York. “Should we get a guide?” I asked them. “Fuck no!” They replied. “We’re from New York. We don’t take directions from nobody.”
I will never let a New Yorker lead me hiking again.
There are a few things I might trust to a New Yorker:
1. Knowing where to get a cab in Midtown on a rainy Friday night
2. Getting me from Midtown to The East Village in said cab via the fastest and/or cheapest route or even
3. Knowing how to find cheap flights to Guatemala
What I will never do?
I wanted to find the road that climbs the back of the mountain from the road between San Juan and San Marcos, but Jesse was impatient. “Here’s a trail,” he said and bounded off. Soon we were climbing steep barren slopes. After one particularly steep pitch of loose dirt and rock we began to fear for our safety. The bushes were too thick to for us to go up. We couldn’t safely go back down.
I can’t believe that Guatemalans farm this land. They’re insane.
Luckily, a farmer came along and guided us safely to the road to Santa Clara. From there we made it to the top easily.
If you want to go up the Nose without a guide, it’s easiest to:
1. Ditch the New Yorkers.
2. Walk (20 min), or a take a pickup (5 min), to San Juan.
3. Continue past San Juan towards San Marcos. Turn left onto the first, and only, intersecting paved road to Santa Clara.
4. Follow the road to Santa Clara. Take your first left at the edge of the village and follow the road to the end. Go right. The path to the Nose will be about thirty meters down, on the left, marked by a sign.
5. Shout a big ‘ol yodelee-hee-hoo from the peak.
READ THIS ARTICLE ON XELAWHO’S WEBSITE HERE
DECEMBER 23, 2011 - Today I'm learning to dive at Fun and Sun Dive and Travel on Malapascua, Philippines (http://bit.ly/vAoQjP). In three days, we be swimming with thresher sharks. Merry Christmas to me :)
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