Nothing to Prove

I have spent a lot of my twenties living and traveling in, to use some jargon from the office, “Challenging Contexts.” I’ve slept on dirt floors, bathed in icy mountain streams and the piranha-infested Amazon, squeezed into old school bus seats with entire families and their livestock, eaten insects and probably worse – often because it’s the only choice, sometimes because I'm a cheapskate, but probably most often because it’s more fun to travel and eat with the locals than to take a taxi and get pizza at a tourist restaurant.

But am I starting to outgrow this? When it took me an hour and a half in two different vehicles, both with far too many people in them, to go a few kilometers across town yesterday, I wondered whether I should have coughed up $5 for a taxi. I had the money (though if you’ve been reading this blog you know that I could spend that $5 on a whole lot of mangos) – so why not take the taxi? Because it’s more fun and adventurous to take the bus? That was my answer, but really, once you’ve done it a few times, cramming into a micro to creep through noisy smelly traffic it doesn’t feel fun and exciting. It just feels uncomfortable and slow.

Rather than outgrowing my adventurous streak, I think I’m just getting more selective about my adventures. Finding hidden local restaurants and remote villages: worth it. Cold showers: been there, done that. I think I had to prove that I could do it – I could stay in the cheapest hotels and travel in the back of pickup trucks and eat who-knows-what at bus stops and get as far off the beaten tourist track as possible. But now that I’ve done that, maybe it’s time to shell out the $5 for a taxi so I can get to where I’m going and have more time to explore and find something crazy to eat once I get there. Because food will always be on the worth-it-adventure list.

So, in the spirit of I Have Nothing To Prove, I moved into a deluxe apartment this morning, complete with soft furniture, wifi, hot water, and a DVD collection.