I'm back to being alone again, after almost a week of traveling with other people, and it feels great. I was worried about traveling alone before I left on this trip, even though everyone (with the potential exception of Trenton) that I talked to beforehand said that it was the way to go. Suffice it to say that I'm over my worrying and am convinced that traveling alone is a great way to travel.
I went into the Elqui valley today. This is where they grow and process all the grapes that will become Chilean pisco. After so many days of desert, it was wonderful to see green things growing in the mountains. There are miles and miles of vineyards along the base of the valley, with a sizable creek running through them. The walls of the valley are steep and dry, covered in cactus and the usual desert plants. The first town I stopped in was Vicuņa, a smalling town of around 30,000 people. I took a short walk up one of the hills surrounding the town, which afforded a nice overlook of the town and the valley. It's hard to describe how good it felt to be seeing green things again, after two weeks of city and desert.
I walked back down the other side of the hill, and found myself at the gates to the city cemetery. Wandering through the cemetery was probably my favorite part of the visit to the valley. It felt so different from a cemetery back home. It was a very vibrant, colorful place. All of the graves had bright flowers -- plastic and real, dried and freshly delivered. There was more than one little plastic Christmas tree like you find in toy shops, endlessly singing one Christmas tune after another. The walls of the cemetery were paneled, with each pannel being dedicated to a different person, and again were brightly decorated. Sometimes it feels like a very different culture here.
I walked from the cemetery back to the center of town, and then out to one of the pisco factories that offered tours. Pisco is a type of grape brandy that's quite popular both in Chile and in Peru. The process of making Pisco looked familiar at first -- they press and ferment the grapes to form wine. Then, after two to three weeks fermentation, they go through a distillation process, leaving behind most of the water. This much stronger extract is then filtered, aged, and mixed before forming the final product. The factory tour was impressive -- the factory can produce as many as 20,000 bottles per hour when operating at maximum capacity.
At the Pisco factory I met another couple from Boulder. One of the two had been living in the south, doing a cultural anthropology project for the past three months. We talked about home for a bit, and traded suggestions about where to go. (They were heading north for vacation for a while, before heading back to Boulder).
Travelling alone is great, as it gives you the ultimate flexibility on where to go/what to do, and it's easy enough to meet people to travel with if you want. Don't get me wrong, you have to be comfortable by yourself (contrary to popular belief, I'm a total introvert), and short bursts with friends is fantastic, but nothing itenerariless travel with just your whims to guide you.
I will note though, something that has been bothering me lately is every since I spent so much time travelling by myself, all of the conversations i have with people have been a lot, hmmm, shallower, I guess is the word. Not as in being mearly superficial, but I haven't been having a lot of in-depth conversations with people lately. I think it has to do with the continual "getting to know you" chats you have on the road, but of course I may be completely wrong.
Anyways, something I've been thinking about, and need to chew on more before the new year.
NOW GET OFF THE COMPUTER AND GO OUT AND EXPLORE!
Posted by: Rand at December 26, 2003 07:57 PMI've been wondering the same thing about the conversations, only from the reverse side. I think that you're right with the continual "getting to know you" conversations, but I think that there's also another part to it.
Being in a strange environment forces you to think about things that you normally wouldn't think about at home, to try to figure out how they relate. Any number of things that I imply take for granted at home are subtly different here. I think, as a result, there are a lot more unanswered questions and half thought-out ramblings wandering around in my head here than there are at home. These tend to lead to interesting places in conversations.
Of course, I haven't had the experience of coming back home yet (nor have I really had that much of a travelling experiece yet, but I'm getting more and more every day) so I'm missing a piece of the puzzle.
Posted by: vanwie at January 5, 2004 05:20 PM