James's Travel Journals
A travel journal is a collection of journal entries that make up a trip. Travel maps, blogs, and photo albums are organized by your trips so you its easy to look through your past travels and keep your current ones together.
Being home
Last Updated: Jan 27th, 2007
After 8 months of travel I have been home in Calgary since October 7th, almost four months now. I already got fired once, so good work me. I start my new job this monday. I just thought treating this time as something of note might make it seem less of a massive letdown after my trip. That and it's 6 in the morning and I can't sleep again.
The Big one
Last Updated: Jan 25th, 2007
It was one of those days that forever seems to be off in the distance. Even as life continued its orderly march through the squares on the calendar, February 6, 2006 just seemed like it might thake this yera off, rest up, and come back in '07.
The night before, I remember thinking I might prove physically incapable of getting on that plane. The fear was all encompassing. It seemed impossible that I would make it through the first week alive. Socialist radicals, malaria, yellow fever, drug cartels, wild jungle beasts, how would I survive? What was I thinking getting myself into this? Was I insane??
I had quit my job. I had packed up and moved from Yellowknife, my home for the previous seven months. The only reason I had moved there in the first place was to save money for this trip. There were some days, when my boss was launching into his trademark obscenity adorned, Quebecois accented rants that would make Tarantino squirm, that the thought of that magical day's approach was all that buoyed me through the day with out a violent incident. And that day was actually here. There was nothing else now. I was, as I saw it then, walking away from myself. Everything that had come before that venture was put to rest. And still, the fear was palpable, like a disease. I tell you they could name it after me, it could be James Elder disease. As I stepped out of my good friend's car at the airport, my knees began to buckle. My breathing was shallow and rapid. There's no way I can actually do this, I thought. Silently I cursed my best friend Julian, who had hatched the idea of this trip with me and eventually (and really, in retrospect, inevitably) ditched on the whole idea to keep his heady post as cellphone salesman extraordinaire, and later return to College. Damn you Julian, for making me go through this alone, I thought. I felt abandoned, and hopeless. But by god, I was getting on that plane. No matter what happems, I thought, you get on that damn plane. Don't let yourself become the guy that "was going to".
The plan was six months in south America, from Caracas Venezuela to Buenas Aires. My return ticket was already booked. The furthest south I ever actually got was Peru. It ended with me bussing, boating, hitching, Greyhounding, and finally driving home from Cusco Peru, all the way back to Calgary, Canada. In total I was gone 8 months and one day. Now I am in Calgary again. After a time I wanted to come home. Now all I want to do is leave. I feel freakish here. How it is seemingly so easy for everyone else to submit to this urban routine is beyond me. I feel like the one guy in the matrix who knows it's fake or something. A part of me would rather just blend in. A bigger and more relevant part of me believes that even if I really wanted to I couldn't be content with the career and all that. Yet, anyways.