The First One
Introduction to the chaos!
Imagine I’m a small chameleon sitting on a stick. But in this scenario, I’m a chameleon who can natter to strangers on the street, stick out my small claw to hitchhike across countries and continents, and clutch onto the roof of a chicken bus as it barrels down a dirt road. A chameleon with a passport, a questionable relationship with time, and a mild addiction to road-side mangoes. And a chameleon who can hold a pen.
It’s a strange time to finally start this Substack - it's been on my to-do list since I quit my job in 2023 to commit to vagabonding - but life, the chronic shortage of laptop plugs, and the absolute illusion of having more "free time" while traveling meant that sitting down to translate my scrawls into an LCD-tinted page was the last thing I felt like doing. So now, I'm sitting with poor posture at an incredibly messy desk, my toes furling in my childhood carpet, finally starting.
I guess you could say I’m having a small pitstop. After a year of chaotic hostel beds and sharing snores and stories with at least six people in my room at all times, this solo traveler has starfished magnificently across her own bed for the first time in a long while. My laundry is washed every few days instead of every few weeks, weakly in a hostel sink or scrubbed in the cold-water shower. My cat has finally decided to forgive me for abandoning him for years at a time. I’ll be off again soon, but for now, life is quiet, full of predictable morning coffees and nights where I can hear the clock tick.
One of my close friends once called me a chameleon. She said I had the ability to fit in anywhere, morphing and adapting into wildly different contexts and activities. And it’s true - over the past years, I’ve been a chameleon in many skins. One week, I’m a fervent believer in the healing powers of volcanic water; the next, I’m sipping a beer at a local cowboy festival, dodging horses left and right. I’ve been gifted fireflies in my hands by fishermen out fishing late at night, danced wildly at parties where I lost my shoes, and had existential crises over whether to spend my last few pesos on a cheese palito or an Uber Moto.
But over this year, I’ve carried a lot of weight. My backpack, Gregory, is a 65L green monster I picked up for free from a woman on Facebook Marketplace back when I lived the sparkling but restless city life of a twenty-something in London. The lady said nothing to me as the bag changed hands, except that it had never been used. Then she shuffled back inside her house, leaving me standing in the icy street, unaware of the feeling and opportunity that this bag had just handed me. Gregory sat in my cupboard for two years, waiting.
Eventually, I got rid of most of my belongings, laid my life out in front of me in packing cubes, and walked out the door with my entire existence weighing just 12kg on my back. By the end of my first year of traveling, it had swollen to almost 20kg - and my spine felt it. In my second, smaller backpack (which I could no longer even wear on my front), I carried seven books, gradually gathered from friends and hostel bookshelves (where, inexplicably, the books were always in German), and four battered journals, stuffed to the brim with stories, memories, and pressed flowers. But while I could crash down to earth and take off the weight of the backpacks, I haven’t quite been able to shake the weight of the thoughts I’d been thinking - the stories I couldn’t begin to recount as soon as I caught up with friends and family, who inevitably asked me:
"So, how has it all been??"
How could I begin to explain that I held giant toads in my hands under the moonlight, spent my nights under siege by fire ants, and set my own face on fire? That I raised four kittens while living in a tent in the sky for a month? That I thought I was going to be shot in Bogotá by a man who broke into my room - and my first panicked thought was that I hadn’t renewed my travel insurance, meaning my ashes might not be repatriated? That I somehow ended up (unwittingly) in what was basically a sex cult? That the earth seemed to stop moving when I stared at a volcano every evening in the most magical lake on earth? That my heart flipped over for people I’d only met days before? That I met a soft heart in an ex-meth maker and sang Ed Sheeran with a truck driver (who spoke no English, only Ed Sheeran) who I hitchhiked with down a long, winding road? That I danced a single dance on a Thursday evening that sent me right to the stars and back?
I'll never be able to share it all. I don’t want to share all the best parts - some are just for me and the sand I left underneath my feet. But welcome to all the bits in between.
I can promise that my writing style is going to change wildly. You might get a poem, some absurd misadventures, some ill-advised advice on traveling, but mostly sporadic chaos. If you recognize yourself in my writing - no, you didn’t!! It’s probably not you. (But it might be.) This will have absolutely no consistency and will be stories from the past and the present, full of half-truths and an unapologetic dose of poetic license. Maybe it’s a washing machine cycle of writing stolen from my Instagram captions, which were initially stolen from the torn pages of my journals. It will oscillate between badly written and beautifully written and dashed out in the bumpy backseat of a bus with nosy locals peering over my shoulder and cheese chips on the floor, but always, unequivocally, me.
Or, I might write this one entry and forget about it for a year.
What is a writer if not deeply dramatic?
Either way, thanks for reading. See you at the next one :)
