All posts filed under: Travel

The nomads of Mexico: how to afford a life of travel

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How can people afford to spend their lives travelling? It’s a question I’ve been asking ever since I experienced my first months’ backpacking and the wonderful, heightened state of existence they allowed me to access. Even now, out in the world again with my life on my back, the question is ever-present, seductive and unanswerable: how can I sustain this? It was only when I found myself staying at Junax, a small hostel in San Cristóbal Mexico exclusively for volunteers, that I began to understand how it could be done. There we found a very different kind of traveler – the kind you need to become to make travel a sustainable lifestyle. These were people staying in the city for long periods of time and working with charities, some of these placements arranged by the owner of the hostel herself. Most were also working on their own side projects – one author, a couple of PHD students – and this hostel, deliberately low cost to encourage volunteers, made a long-term stay more than affordable. Combine …

Lost in translation: linguistic challenges in Chiapas

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A definition of intelligence: the ability to adapt quickly to new environments. I have never felt less adequate of this definition than last weekend as I sat for an hour in meditative silence beneath the impenetrable Spanish of my five new Mexican companions. Despite spending around £600 and at least five hours each week on my language learning effort to prepare for this trip, my Spanish level is still little more than inebriated toddler. And that’s when I can work up the courage to speak. Early last week in one of my rare moments of bravery I wandered into a torillaria in the beautiful city San Cristóbal where we’ve been helping our latest project. I wanted to establish whether they made tortillas with corn or flour, and therefore if I could eat them. My questions were met with amused bafflement and I ended up abandoning the mission and leaving the shop empty handed. Elliott turned to me wearily and asked if I wanted him to try. He returned with a stack of tortillas and the …

Disorientation: our arrival in San Cristóbal de Las Casas

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A bewildering fourteen-hour overnight bus journey takes us far from the relentless bustle of Mexico City and into the tranquillity of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, high in the mountains. Cars wait in lines to greet us, adorned with bunting and bright balloons. The sun extends their colours to dance in arcs through the clear air. Uplifted by this exquisite welcome, we stumble into a taxi and watch the sleepy streets pass. We’re staying at the artisan’s commune Kza Libertad, the House of Liberty, on the recommendation of a volunteer on our second project, and approach it with more than a little apprehension. We find a ramshackle and not altogether structurally sound building with hammocks in the open courtyard, friendly dogs and a bleary-eyed household, whether from the morning or the smell of marijuana permeating every wall and fabric, it’s difficult to tell. We drop our bags and leave for a more appropriate moment to explore our living quarters. San Cristóbal is just waking up. After some negotiation with the unfamiliar roads, their colourful houses, …

Our road to Mexico: the real cost of budget travel

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During university I mastered the art of finding bargain travel tickets. At first it was the necessity of maintaining an ambitiously long distance relationship in the poverty of my student years, but gradually it became more of an obsession. Even now my stubbornness to find the cheapest possible way to travel without hitch hiking rears its head whenever I’m planning a journey, however small. Such was the case as my latest trip crept ever closer. I began to shun the outdoors, spending my precious lunchtimes on Skyscanner and its various counterparts, watching the prices intently. When we finally got the go ahead to book flights among the logistics of finalising volunteering plans, direct tickets to Mexico City were near £800. But with a short stop in Madrid and an overnight stay in Cancun, we managed to cut this down to £400. It was in about the seventh hour of our second flight, with no on board entertainment and conversation, patience and all possible distractions exhausted that I began to question this decision. I took another …

How to quit your job for the next adventure

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“When life gives you lemons, just say: fuck the lemons – and bail.” I’m 25 and I’ve just been through my first divorce. Okay, not actually a divorce – not legally, anyway. But take the breakdown of a four and a half year relationship, a property dispute and the ultimate abandonment of my largest friendship group, and we’re getting pretty close. Walking across the park opposite the property in question, adjusting to the news my childhood friends no longer wish to own it with me, and for the first time in my life I wonder if there really could be some kind of divine being out there… divining. How could such a year, such a progression of rejection fall to me at random? There must be a cruel and masochistic orchestrator. That, or I’ve recently developed a repellent quality, unknown to myself, so abhorrent people run screaming from my presence. A lingering smell, perhaps. I’ve been advised that the latter fear is ludicrous, and I can’t quite bring myself to believe the former, my atheism far too …