Already throughout our travels, we’ve had a variety of experiences: teaching English in Cusco, living in the Amazon…Currently, we’re on a large, bright orange passenger truck with eleven others, driving across South America.
I’ve spent copious amounts of time driving cross-country in a vehicle with some dozen-or-so other people before, so you might say I’m somewhat accustomed to calling an automobile home. Yet, I’ve come to learn that nothing can quite prepare you for the spontaneity and randomness of life on the road.
Take, for example, a couple of weeks ago, when we pulled into an abandoned village in the middle of Chile, where we set up camp for the night. The village had an eerie, ghost-town feel as if custom-made for a murder-show crime scene. The wind rattling through loose tin roofs helped complete the effect. Headlights bounced across a distant road, splashing lights at odd angles across our tents. Still, the haunting surroundings and chilly weather could not dim the spirits of weary yet enthused travellers, tightly gathered around a campfire, hope intact for the camaraderie yet to be shared.
Camaraderie like that experienced while on tour at a winery in the heart of Argentine wine country. High on life and full of Argentina’s richest vineyard produce, we laughed and howled as we lunched on delicious food. Cheeks reddened from laughing (or drinking, or both), stories were shared, and characters more fully introduced.
Characters further emerged in moments such as when I moonwalked across the dusty ground of another bush camp, in the name of winning a game of charades. Many other hilarious/inappropriate sounds and motions were made in the name of the competitive, battle-of-the-sexes camp game, of which the female group members eventually emerged victorious. Isn’t it true that when you do something you wouldn’t ordinarily do in front of others that you begin to feel more comfortable in your own skin?
New experiences such as horse riding on an Argentinian ranch. Galloping across the rolling hills of this private property, one got a sense of what life as a gaucho (an Argentinian cowboy) might have been like. The thrill of riding was topped off by merry singalongs, much wine and mountains of barbecued meat. Life on the farm certainly offered a different experience to the cities and towns we passed through.
Nothing quite compares to life on the road, music blaring and windows down. As you drive through varieties of scenery and environment, you feel as if you know your own world just that little bit better. You feel your world-view grow in perspective. Yet, as big as that world begins to feel, it shrinks to a tiny little rock as you stare up at the night sky, alight with stars and planets and lights far distant.
It's Tolkien who posited that "not all who wander are lost". And it’s true that not all cross-continent ventures are about getting from point-A to point-B. The value of a day’s travel becomes immeasurable the instant one views the sun’s rising or setting, colours splashed across the sky, clouds dancing around the sun’s last beams.
In this sense, travel is less about where you end up, the destination in most cases is irrelevant. Rather, travel can be about how you become better as a human being, how you integrate all these incomparable experiences into who you are. It’s not about where you go, it’s how you get there. And if you want to get there, wherever “there” is, as a better person, then what better way then by a large, bright orange truck?
