Wannabe World Traveller

This summer, I fell in love with the world. I know, it sounds cliche. I actually got to experience something outside of the Southeast. I hadn’t done much of that before, not when I was old enough to really enjoy it or understand it. I’d read about far-off places, dreamed about them, but that’s as far as I had gotten. I had visited Vermont, Seattle (and the Washington coast–I don’t remember much, but I did love the beaches there. So gorgeous and drastically different from what we have here), and a few other places before I can remember at all (Toronto and San Francisco and New Hampshire and Texas before I was four, so I don’t actually remember that). I don’t count that as real travel experience, though, because what I remember mostly is whining about the long car ride and staying in a hotel with a swimming pool. Plus, it was all domestic travel (not to discount domestic travel, it’s just way more familiar). This summer, though, my grandparents took me on a three-week trip to England and Spain. We started in England, and moved on to Spain. I’ll blog about England later, but right now I feel like remembering Southern Spain–specifically, the town where we stayed, Calahonda.

We flew from London to Malaga, but we didn’t actually spend any time in Malaga. I helped them navigate the airport in Spanish, and we got our rental car and drove to our hotel in Calahonda (between Marbella and Malaga). It took us a couple of tries to get there, especially because I hadn’t yet adapted to the Andalucian accent (most of the Spanish I hear here is Mexican, and I had a Colombian teacher) and so had some difficulties understanding the people I asked for directions! This was the first of several experiences which make me think that Mapquest is not too reliable when it comes to directions in Spain. We drove around aimlessly quite a lot. I didn’t mind it, but my grandfather has kind of a short temper.

Calahonda isn’t a very big town, and I don’t know that I saw all of it, as most of our time there was spent going on day trips. I saw a lot of British tourists (actually, this applies to a lot of Southern Spain; I guess the English like to go on holiday where there’s lots of sun, as England can be kind of dreary), and the town itself was not particularly special; lots of hotels and resorts, a couple of supermarkets, some bars and restaurants. But I did love the beach.

The woman at the reception desk didn’t give particularly clear directions as to where the public beach was, but I set out on foot to try and find it anyway. I got kind of lost, but eventually ended up at the sea; however, I had to find a gap in a fence at a restricted and deserted beach to get there (I never did find the public beach). I’m glad I did. It was gorgeous; a narow, deserted, rocky beach on the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean is so different from the beaches on the Atlantic that I’ve been to, in the Southeast. So gorgeous. I can’t even describe how amazing it was. I am not usually a fan of the beach, but I didn’t want to leave this one. I had to, as my grandparents were waiting for me back at the hotel, but I sure didn’t want to. That was my favorite beach ever (a close second would be the rocky beaches on the Washington coast where I saw bald eagles and sea otters as a child); something about that beauty just makes white sand seem so boring and generic. I could spend days wandering up and down that particular bit of coastline. Except that my grandmother thinks that if I go to a deserted beach I’ll get kidnapped. Now, I close my eyes, I see it, I feel it again, I remember that hike in the hot sun up and down the steep hills not knowing where I was going was so, so worth it.

Calahonda is full of steep hills and twisting streets and people who give directions that are mostly “go up the hill” or “go down the hill” and thus not particularly helpful. It’s also full of drunken British tourists watching football on television all up and down the main street (though that’s not too different from any pub in England I saw, anyway), and African immigrants selling pirated DVDs and designer knockoffs (which I saw a lot of in the whole area of the Costa del Sol). And the only place I could find to access the internet outside of the severely overpriced coin-operated hotel computers was a PC in the back of a little shop selling random junk. Walking away from the street of little tourist shops and restaurants (several Chinese restaurants), down the hill, are the chain supermarkets and the like. Up at the top of the hill is a restaurant called Miel y Nata, which my grandmother loved so much that we ate there four times that week (and, in the same strip, a little convenience store and another restaurant). They very nicely gave us directions and were pretty reasonably-priced, if not amazing food. I would have liked to have gone someplace else, but, well, when travelling with other people I guess you can’t make all the decisions. Lots and lots of tourists in the whole town; there were resorts and hotels everywhere. Still, it was a nice enough town, and I enjoyed wandering down the less touristy, more residential streets.

Down by the resort pool on night, they had a sort of free community theatre production of Mamma Mia. That was interesting, to say the least. The weather was gorgeous, though, so I was glad to be outside. I loved the weather the whole time, actually. Brilliant. Warm, breezy (rather than the humidity at home), just amazing. Anyway, this was a very low-budget production, obviously, and it was also bilingual. Sometimes they spoke Spanish, sometimes they spoke English. The songs were in English, obviously. I am not actually sure they sang them all. I think they were lip-synching a lot, even, oddly, to some of the dialogue. And the costumes were kind of weird. I understood the whole thing, and it was weird for me–it must have been really weird for the people who only understood half of it! It was kind of fun, though. I really enjoyed it, despite (because of?) its weirdness. And the weather, I must restate, was gorgeous! Spain at night was probably one of my favorite things about the whole trip, both because that’s when all the exciting stuff happens, and because it was so cool and breezy and wonderful compared to what it would have been at home!

My main images of Calahonda now are the gorgeous beach, getting lost, lots of Abba songs (they had someone just performing those songs another night, and it drifted in through the window to the room with the weird coin-operated computers) and the steep hills! And the many times that directions said “up the hill” and “down the hill” — even directions from the internet.

I am planning on taking a year or two off between high school and college to see the world. The real world, outside of the education system that thinks it is normal to lock thousands of teenagers in a building with no windows for 8 hours a day and attempt to control them and “prepare them for the real world” by forcing upon them all sorts of arbitrary rules and regulations that in no way support independence or even thinking. Mass production is the doctrine of the American educational system.

Anyway, unless I’m really lucky, I’m probably going to have to start out at home, where I have a place to live (although perhaps I’ll stay with my grandparents instead, just for a change of pace), working a job in retail or as a waitress, to save some cash to start my travels (hopefully I’ll also be able to find some work on the way). Once I’ve done that for a few months, I set off to see the world (not for the last time in my life, with any luck).

For part of my trip, I want to stay in Spain, teaching English to a family for room and board (and improving my Spanish) through this program: http://www.geovisions.org/pages/320_hableme_teach_language_to_a_spanish_family.cfm. Not only will I get to work on my Spanish, I’ll also get to really experience Spain. I had a taste of it this summer (I travelled a bit in the Costa del Sol, and also visited Madrid), and I can’t wait to go back for more. With any luck, I’ll be able to find a bit of paying work there, too–just yard work or babysitting or tutoring English or something, as I won’t have a real work permit, I don’t think.

I’ll also spend some time backpacking around, probably starting in Europe (seeing as, if I start out with the Hableme program, I’ll already be there). I think my best friend is planning on joining me for at least part of this, which will be great. This will be really, really budget travelling–WWOOFing, camping, Couchsurfing, hitchhiking, and hopefully also finding work as we go.

I’m pretty flexible and adaptable; the one thing about me that will hold me back while travelling is that I’m quite shy. I’ll have to work on that, and will probably be forced to be more outgoing while on the road! Another issue might be that I am a vegetarian and sort of a picky eater, though I guess I’d have to learn to get over being picky, and I guess it’s probably not too difficult in most places to manage as a vegetarian; easier, probably, because meat is expensive!

The backpacking will be largely staying in one place for a good chunk of time, I imagine, although travel will probably be easier (cheaper) in cheaper parts of the world. Outside of Europe, I know I want to spend some time in the Middle East and South/Central America (got to put my knowledge of Spanish to some good use! This will probably be the last part of my trip, as it’s closest to the US), and India, and I hope I’ll get to visit Asia (I hear SE Asia is relatively cheap, so I’ll probably go there if I’m running low on cash) and Australia/New Zealand as well (though they’re not as high on my list). I don’t know about Sub-Saharan Africa; everyone I’ve ever known to go there has been for safaris, which, I’m sure are awesome, but maybe too expensive for someone like me.

This is by no means anything like an itinerary; this is just a vague plan based on a little bit of reading and research, but I plan to do far more of that as I get closer to this trip. Although I doubt I’ll have anything like an itinerary for the entire trip. I don’t even know how long it’s going to last; as long as financially possible, I guess. After that’s up, I’ll go to college. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do the career thing, though. I don’t know if I could settle down for more than a year or two without being miserable. That’s why TEFL is a good option for me! I can just go for a year or two in each place. However, I don’t think that’s really a long-term career for most people. So I don’t know yet. But I do have awhile to figure it out!

Hi, everyone! I am a sixteen-year-old who has always wanted to travel, but that desire became way more intense this summer, when I spent a few weeks travelling, mostly in England and Spain (but also visiting Gibraltar, an English protectorate, ... [Continue reading this entry]