Any Road

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there"

- George Harrison (from the song Any Road)

Just a day before we sail from Panama to Colombia, I can't help but feel madly excited about the upcoming continent and all the adventures we'll have. The lure of South America has always been in me; even as a little girl I dreamed of the Brazilian amazon. Now with hours until we sail, and just days until out feet find solid ground on the Cartagena beaches, I'm thrilled.

Our plans for Colombia - and the whole of South America - are pretty vague. We do have our general direction, and certain cities we won't miss. But when it comes to how long in what place, we are intentionally keeping our plans open.

The road is nothing if not unpredictable. Embracing the unpredictability of the road means being open to all people, and all places. It's easy to end up in a place you never intended to visit, simply upon the recommendation of another traveler. I learned that first-hand when in France in 2006, and I ended up unexpectedly doing the first three days of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela upon the recommendation of a friendly girl I met in the hostel. Destinations become fluid and so do the reasons for visiting.

The photo above is from Cahuita on the east coast of Costa Rica, after hearing that it was "beautiful" from a girl with whom we shared a short bus ride. We hadn't even heard of the city, and within 24 hours we were there.

The joy of motion, being en route, and just simply not knowing is a big part of what makes traveling so immediate and so rewarding. You find a place to go, and then you get there.

For us, right now that place is South America.

of rice and beans (or "the magical fruit of central america")

since coming to central america three weeks ago, i've been eating a lot of gallo pinto. gallo pinto is rice and beans mixed together with seasoning, and it's a vegetarian's dream food.

fantastically yummy gallo pinto with an omelet and toast in little corn, nicaragua

the gorgeous presentation prize goes to cafe liberia, in libera, costa rica

the best gallo pinto i've had yet has to be this one pictured above, from a restaurant in the tiny coastal village of cahuita, in costa rica. a pile of rice, beans, tortillas and salsa topped off with fresh guacamole? well, if you insist...

a bit part of traveling is trying local foods, and now that we're in panama i'm already longing for costa rican gallo pinto. of course we're still eating rice and beans, but they aren't quite as ubiqutous as they were across the border. i've heard that the rice and beans trend continues in a variety of forms throughout south america too, and i certainly hope i can keep eating this delicious food.

have you tried costa rican gallo pinto?

share your thoughts on the rice and beans below in a comment, or on Twitter @expatkerri

What did you do on Monday?

Just strolled in a national park watching monkeys in the trees.

Cahuita, Costa Rica

swimming with sharks

Jake's Place, Little Corn Island, Nicaragua

"you're probably wondering who jake is..."

this is how the dive briefing began for my second day of diving in little corn island.

"...jake is a friendly nurse shark."

a friendly shark? friendly and shark are two words not usually used in the same sentence, at least outside of the diving community.

this dive was actually my second time seeing sharks underwater, so i had a small idea of what to expect since we had seen a few nurse sharks on our dives the day before.

the first time i saw a shark while diving, it was sitting still under a coral shelf. lying on the ocean floor, it looked calm, resting and waiting for night to come.

i expected to see jake in the same way.

as i handed my fins and weights onto the boat, i casually asked my dive master how big jake was.

"about 7 feet."

when our boat arrived out in the middle of the choppy waters, i wondered if jake would be resting under his chosen coral shelf. securing my mask and air, i rolled back off the boat and into jake's place.

as soon as we got down to the coral, our dive master turned to us and gave the shark signal (a hand gesturing a shark fin on your forehead). within moments, just feet below my fins, jake swam through.

we stayed still to watch him, and he had no interest in our group. he swam out of sight and we kept going along the coral. after a few minutes, other divers signaled the shark hand gesture. jake swam by again in the other direction, close to the coral. he kept on appearing and disappearing throughout our dive.

i was not scared, but more amazed to see this creature moving peacefully through the water below us. the shark appeared perfectly in balance with all of the other fish and life we were seeing under the sea, and accordingly didn't feel threatening. there were even two foot-length blue fish following the shark around, as little ones might follow around their older siblings.

the underwater social hierarchy in balance, right before our eyes.

upon surfacing, everyone commented how good the dive was. how lucky we were to see a shark.

and i feel lucky too.

how special to witness a moment of life for a creature so misunderstood, to the tune of my own breath. i felt no fear, but rather peacefulness and a longing for the underwater dream never to end.

but like sleeping dreams, all dives have to come to an end.

even dives with sharks.

my philosophy on love

i believe any man could be the right man for me, at any given moment in my life. i also believe that people come into our lives for a reason, be it to teach us something, to help us through something, or to just enjoy the great times together.

in all of my past relationships, something hasn't quite been in line to keep us in love for the long run. accordingly, i have spent a lot of time looking back on what i consider my most successful relationships. i examine which parts of the relationship were fully satisfying for me, and which parts could have been improved.

now at 27, i think i've finally got a theory that seems to hold water for me, as well my friends who i've explained it to.

love has three elements: mind love, heart love, and sex love: for lasting love, all three of these elements must be in line.

first, mind love. mind love is having stimulating conversations, and being able to make each other laugh. it also means being able to understand each other, and be patient when things aren't alright. mind love is the insatiable adoration that you have for your partner's brain. you want to hear that person's thoughts, and you enjoy the way the express themself. of course, your partner should also be as interested and crazy about the way you think, which gives you the energy for those amazing into the night conversations that just make life feel so worth it. think before sunrise.

next comes heart love. heart love is missing your partner, and the happiness and enjoyment that comes simply from being near that person. wanting to spend more time with them, having a hard time saying goodbye, and staring at your partner's photos are all signs of heart love. it's also that feeling inside you when you hear those three magic words. heart love can lead us to do silly things, like midnight drives in the rain, and it's probably what romeo and juliet were feeling when they snuck away together.

now we come to sex love. sex love shows itself after a long day out in the world, coming home and embracing as soon as the door is closed. sex love is the throw down, the i-need-you-now, the groceries-in-hand kisses. the passion, when you stare at your partner and just admire the little idiosyncrasies that make them yours. when the hedonists in you both find paradise in one another's arms, and never feel it is enough. sex love is exclusive, primal, and absolutely worth losing sleep over.

so what happens when one of these loves is out of line? the relationship is so close to perfect, but part of you is left a little unsatisfied.

if mind love is out of line, you might end up fighting where understanding is needed, or resenting the logic of your partner's decisions.

if heart love is out of line, someone might be too busy to make the "goodnight" call, or you might start wondering if your partner still has feelings for a former fling.

if sex love is out of line, your once passionate kisses could turn into pecks.

i realize this is a grand simplification of relationships, and that there will be many people who could disagree with my three concepts. However, when I look back on my own life, I see relationships which start out with two loves strong enough to overpower the missing link. As time goes on, though, the third missing love starts to show itself, and by the end of the relationship, it comes to overshadow the other two loves.

i like to think of them as the chakras of love, three glowing hot spots that everyone has in them.

it just takes the right person to light them all up.

big in granada

big skies

big avocados

big trees

big colours

big friendships

Just two days into Granada, Nicaragua with my beautiful travel partner Brenna, I can't help but feel we're at the beginning of something amazing, something life altering, something unforgettable, something big.

This morning over breakfast, we discussed an idea I've wondered about before. Whether you travel for a week or a month or a year, after the travels are over you feel a specific range of feelings when reviewing your photos.

It's easy to think of the pictures from early on in the trip as being less informed and lacking the worldly wisdom of later pictures - your clothes tidy and clean, your skin unworn and not yet blazed by the sun.

Around the middle of the trip, the photos are happy and care-free: the mark of a traveler truly amid the journey, thinking neither of the beginning or the end of the travels. For me, this is where I usually find my favourite travel photos.

When it comes to the final pictures of the trip, they seem to hold the knowledge, sadness, and already nostalgic feeling of a trip coming to an end. Sometimes you even stop taking pictures for days at a time.

Every trip has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And though this trip through central and south America together begins now for us, it's hardly the beginning of our journey as travelers together: we've traveled Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Japan, Thailand, Burma, and South Korea together.

And it's certainly not the end.

the evolution of a backpack (& the legend of the woman in the black dress)

My first extended backpacking trip was around Europe back in 2006, where I managed to see 22 countries in 4 months. I began the trip hopeful and naive with a bag weighing 12kgs (not including my carry-on), and I came home with a full heart and a dirty bag weighing in at a hefty 17kgs. It was getting hard to lift near the end of the trip, with gifts and ticket stubs and moments of life all fighting for space in my bag.

Here in 2012, I begin my second extensive backpacking trip, as I head off to Nicaragua to meet up with my friend to navigate our way through central and south America until we get to Rio de Janeiro. We're planning to be on the road for a few months (but it could end up being longer if we love a certain somewhere). I vowed to myself not to bring too much stuff, and in particular not too many clothes.

Having recently moved out of my apartment in Jinju, Korea - where I had lived comfortably for 2 years - I parted with a lot of clothes. Some were old vintage items I just wasn't wearing, some were new items that I hadn't quite worked into my wardrobe, and there were lots of colourful scarves and pretty skirts that just fell somewhere in between. With the simplicity of fewer things in my apartment in Korea, I also seem to have adopted a bit more of a simpler wardrobe in the past month. Fewer costume changes, and more well-liked clothes on repeat. It is with this principle that I packed my backpack for my upcoming travels.

What clothes did I pack? A pair of jean shorts, a black skirt, a white skirt, a blue button up collared shirt, 3 pretty tops, a longsleeved shirt, a cardigan, a short dress and a pair of leggings. Just one dress, and this is odd for me, since my four-season wardrobe consists of at least 50% dresses. The reason is that I know I will find dresses I love down south.

Yes, there are other items in my bag, and that's what makes up the other 6kgs. I have a netbook and terabyte of storage for videos, a 1068 page guidebook, a GoPro camera plus the user guide (since I have yet to memorize it), a silk bed liner, a pair of blunnies and a bunch of other little things which I want to have with me. Of course I want to have dresses with me too...

But, when I'm traveling in a new city, and I find a dress that I love, I buy it. These clothing items are my souvenirs, and when I wear them I'm filled with the memories of the music, food, and the city where I bought it. Going to the land of floral dresses and handstitched patterns only makes my heart pine for beautiful dresses, and I know I'll find ones that suit me perfectly. This way, the dresses I wear on my trip will be of that area, and I can create memories and take photos wearing items from that region.

At the airport en route to Managua, Nicaragua, my backpack weighed 8.8kgs (with a carry-on at 4kgs). Here I have a much more organized and well-prepared backpack than the one I carried in Europe, and as a bonus I'm starting at a lighter weight. Remember, my first backpacking trip was 6 years ago, and I was pretty much as novice as a backpacker can get (I'd been to Paris and London for 2 weeks each on a high school exchange, but high school exchanges are far different from solo traveling, oh and that one trip to Barbados when I was 16 with my family...). I've picked up a lot of tips and tricks throughout my other travels to places including Turkey, China, Burma, Vietnam, and Thailand.

My very first time leaving Korea in 2007, I rode by boat past this bridge while it was under construction. The bridge stuck its half-contructed spine out into the sea then, weak and unready. Leaving Korea most recently in 2012, we rode along the very same bridge, now confidently providing commuters a more convenient road to reach the airport.

No umbrella, wearing my heaviest shoes instead of keeping them in the bag, using air compressing plastic bags to organize clothes, and carrying fewer liquids are some of my current strategies keeping my bag lighter. But another strategy is just simply having fewer clothes. When traveling Europe in 2006, some clothes in my bag would go a month or more without being worn, which is too long to simply be carrying clothing on the road. This time, I plan to wear everything in my bag in the span of a week, and just wash what I wear every other day in the sinks (with my handy traveler's laundry soap sheets).

It's a new strategy in practise for me, but an old concept. I remember reading of the legend of the traveling woman in the black dress who carried no backpack. They say she washed her dress and underwear every night to have it ready and clean for a new day. Sounds pretty amazing to me, and I'd love to try that on my next adventure - after I stock up on Peruvian alpaca sweaters.
Now, to you dear reader, what's your strategy when packing your travel bag? Are you a notorious overpacker, prepared for every rift of inclement weather? Or do you bring less and adopt a more frequent washing cycle, as I'm going to try? Please share your tips and ideas as a comment here on the blog, or tweet your tips and ideas to me on twitter @expatkerri.

I'm already imagining all the beautiful things I will find in Granada and beyond. I guess I'm not ready to be a legend in a black dress just yet.