TRAVELING WITHOUT DESTINATION

Did you ever book only one way flight ticket? Did you ever travel without plans of where to go, what to visit, what to do?

I think that when you travel with your job, kids, bills waiting for you it's hard not to organize: you know you have one week vacation in that beautiful country and will make the most of it.

Now imagine someone who answer "Yes" to both questions above. That's me. I like to go with the flow and ask locals what to do. I like to wake up pack my stuff and leave to a sunny place when it's been raining for 2 days straight. That's what I call freedom and that's the main reason I adopted traveling as my lifestyle.

Booking one way flight is the best thing to do when you have a bunch of time to travel, when you don't have any responsibilities back home. Sometimes we're having a great time traveling and still money left and if you have an obligation of being in the airport that exact day, that exact time can be strongly heart breaking, like someone taking the wings away from a bird. Ok, ok let's not be so dramatic, there are non economy flights you have the option to change dates but you don't want to deal with this kind of stuff while traveling, do you? Well, I don't.

 Not having a date to leave sounds awesome but sometimes feels like a nightmare. I'm going to tell you about my current experience: we started traveling South America almost 2 months ago and I'm not lying if I tell you we changed routes and travel plans 50 times, at least.

First we thought about going to Venezuela after Colombia, we heard so wonderful things about the dreamy light blue Caribbean and Ohhh the biggest waterfall in the World Salto Angel. But why taking the risk to travel a country that is currently dangerous? Seems that the police is taking dollars and electronic devices from tourists, so if you ever get robbed, where will you communicate the robbery? Who will help you? The police?

Then we found a great deal of 350€ flight from Quito (Ecuador) to Madrid (Spain) so we planned to travel Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia through the coast and then go back to Ecuador for the flight, through the mountains. This plan sounded great for the moment but something felt wrong.

Just to have an idea: me and Bruno decided to go to Baños after Quito. When we arrived in the Bus Station we changed our mind and went to the coast instead. We decided to change travel plans again in the last minute because we started thinking and if we wanted to go back to Quito for the flight, we could explore Baños after - it's closer to Quito.

Few days ago we were with our friend Sam (the very first friend from Portugal who join me in a trip!! yeh!!) and after discussing and brainstorming we realized we had to come out with a better plan. Our conclusion: you only go back to a country in the same trip if you really love it or have a feeling your "mission" there is not completed. In the other hand, you are traveling a country emerging in the culture, learning about it, connecting with locals... doesn't make much sense to interrupt this process to start all over again. And in this case would happen twice: in Peru and Ecuador. Our solution: to find a cheap flight from Chile, Argentina, Paraguay or Brazil - all Bolivia's neighbor countries - so we don't have to go all the way back to Quito.   

This was messing up with my mind for a long time, really. This wouldn't happen if we had booked a roundtrip flight or if there wasn't deadlines (Bruno has Uni exams in March).

Our flight will be booked today from Sao Paulo, we are pretty much done. Something I learned with life is: if you aren't happy about your situation change it. But changing with ideas is not enough, you gotta take action!

Have a wonderful week full of actions! :)

Much love, warmness and light

Marta xx