The last BFB article

Here is a reprint of the last article I wrote for the Ecuador Reporter. Does anyone know if it is still being printed in Quito? I hope so.

Also, I still have WAY more people checking this blog, than checking my new blog about Turkey. Maybe more folks are traveling to Ecuador, but, eventually, this page will stop getting updates and everything will shift to

www.nargileistan.blogspot.com

Until then,

The BFB…slows it down

I’ve been in Ecuador for two years now. In those two years, I’ve been to Otavalo once, I’ve never been to a beach besides Canoa, and I’ve never set foot in the jungle. I leave Ecuador in 25 days and have no regrets about any of this.

There are many tourists who come to Ecuador for two weeks and manage to see more than what I have seen in two years. But do they really? I remember a course I took in college, called “Traveling the world, from Gulliver to Kerouac.” In it, we studied travel, travel literature, and our own travel habits. One of the more salient points of the course was that travelers move with purpose; they have a specific destination or goal in mind for their escapades. Travelers also move slower, and spend more time getting to know the areas and communities they visit. It’s actually a movement now in the travel community—slow travel. The philosophy revolves around less use of the guidebook and passport, and more use of language and observation.

Three years ago my wife and I decided to embrace this philosophy in a six week trip to Nicaragua. Instead of spending our six weeks collecting passport stamps in Central America, we opted to stay in one town for our entire trip. In San Juan Del Sur we fell into a routine. Every morning we would catch a dawn patrol of surfing with our new friends. In the afternoons we would take Spanish lessons. Every night we would go to the same restaurants where we would sit and get to know the owners and locals—marveling at their stories and their sentiments. When the ocean swells were low we volunteered at the local library, taking books to kids who lived deep in the Nicaraguan jungle. On our last night, we danced till sunrise in the local club. It seemed that we knew everyone there. We may not have seen every corner of Nicaragua, but the corner we did see was one to remember.

As I look back at my time here in Ecuador, I realize that I have been lucky enough to travel through it slowly. As a climber, I was immediately enveloped into a community from the first day I arrived. Through my climbing community, I’ve traveled through Ecuador. We’ve stayed at flea-ridden cheap hotels, we’ve summited snowy mountains, and we’ve soaked in hot springs after a long day of climbing. I’ve hosted Polish-climber students from Yale at my house, I’ve traveled to Colombia and stayed with friends of friends at the foot of an amazing three-mile cliff, and I’ve learned every single filthy word in the Spanish language from the “juevons” at the local climbing gym. These are the experiences I will take from Ecuador; not the time I got an indigenous woman in Otavalo to drop her price 50 cents on an alpaca blanket or the time I took my photo on the equator.

Of course, divorcing yourself from Lonely Planet and buying a climbing harness isn’t necessary to travel slowly. The first step is to take a hard look at your vacation itinerary. Will you be spending more time on busses than in towns and villages? Where are you staying when you travel? Are you staying in a hostel with a bunch of other gringos surfing facebook—or are you staying with a family in a homestay or couch-surfing with a local? Finally, and most importantly, what’s the purpose for your trip? Finding purpose is often what tips the scales from tourist to traveler. The ultimate slow-travelers I met in Ecuador are a group of mountain bikers who are sloooowwwwlllly (without ever using paved roads) mountain biking from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Their purpose is to travel the length of two continents under their own power, and on their own schedule; reaping the intrinsic rewards of slow travel along the way. It would be nice if we could all take three years off and slowly ride down the continents, but it doesn’t matter if your purpose is a mission trip or a mountain bike adventure. The key is to have one, and then follow it passionately…and slowly.

This is the BFB’s last column for the Ecuador Reporter. He is moving to Turkey where he hopes to find his purpose in whirling dervishes and hookah pipes. His blog is at www.esteecuador.blogspot.com