My not-so-solo, but just as silly, Central American month

This is where my story becomes a lot less ‘solo’, and a lot more German. After the night buses and painful 12-hour wait sleeping on the floor of Bogota’s airport, and after the tantalising flight and Uber ride on the other side in San Jose, which dragged on and yet went too quickly, I couldn’t decide, I stood outside the hostel where I knew Paul and Lukas had booked us beds, and hesitated. I’d done a lot of scary things in the last four months, but this pretty much topped it. I was nervous as shit. This was it. I was about to start travelling with two German boys who, if I’m completely honest, I barely even knew, and one of whom I’d managed to fall in love with. We’d not even spent two weeks together collectively, and yet here I was. I’d missed a flight home for this, I’d convinced myself that I’d never been so sure of a decision in my life, and even so, I was terrified. What if things were different now we’d left Puerto Viejo? There was one way to find out. I pushed the gate open and rang the hostel doorbell.

Needless to say, Paul and Lukas were just as cool as they’d been in Puerto Viejo, and we were still as good of a team as we were back then. Upon seeing their faces I practically jumped into their arms, abandoning all bags and leaving a bewildered hostel staff member at the reception desk. Immediately, we resumed our calm Caribbean ways and went on a group shop, labelling everything, bananas, bottles and bread, with our initials ‘LCP’, and cooking a massive vegetarian dinner. The hostel we were staying in, aptly named ‘Relax’, was to become our favourite San Jose hang-out spot to date, with its ultra chill stoner staff members, free American pancake breakfasts, and absolutely tiny bunk-beds that only added to the vibe. We spent a couple of days whizzing around Costa Rica’s capital city preparing for our trip to Nicaragua, doing PCR tests, printing documents, and buying goods that we wouldn’t have access to on the rural Pacific side for a long time, and then suddenly we were off again. On the road.

And thus began our month-long journey of ups and downs, huge highs and mega lows, scams and surf. I won’t go through everything considering it wasn’t very solo of me, my own special little journey ending at Bogota airport a few days prior, but some details are too gold to miss.

Our first challenge, which obviously went wrong, was getting all the way from San Jose to Popoyo, Nicaragua’s most famous surf town that I hadn’t been to before, in a single day. That meant two buses on the Costa Rican side, a border crossing, and two chicken buses on the Nicaraguan side. As expected, with Costa Rica being the land of true pura vida and shit public transport, and after a child legitimately peed through the seat in front of us on a local bus towards the border, resulting in all three of us gripping our bags and knees to our chests and watching the urine slide around the bus floor in a horribly long trail, it didn’t work out. We got to the border far too late for anything, and barely even made it through considering most of the offices were shut. Forever in good spirits, though, and still laughing at the pissing child on the bus, Lukas managed to secure us a taxi to the nearest town, Rivas, and a place to sleep there for the night. This was the first time of many we had to navigate fitting three full-grown adults and a six-foot surfboard into a small saloon car, and each time we wriggled into our jigsaw places curved around the board crossing the entire length of the taxi, it didn’t get any less funny.

Rivas, the southern Nicaraguan hub for chicken buses and markets, is a crazy bustle of local life, and even though I’d visited before, I was still in awe of its rawness. With two men, I found myself able to do things I never would’ve before, like checking into the sketchiest local motel in town and grabbing breakfast in the heart of the town’s mercado maze, being served by utterly confused locals watching us scoff down our rice and beans and platanos. Paul and Lukas had never taken a chicken bus before, so it was my honour, pleasure, to introduce them to the wildest mode of transport in all of Central America, the old yellow school buses-turned death contraptions that could fit an entire community, all their animals, and a few ice cream carts inside. Being back in Central America felt like returning home, like entering dream-world again after the sincerity of Colombia; here, everything was hilarious, unbelievable, strange in the best way. And Nicaragua was a whopper place to start, being much less westernised than Costa Rica and much more chaotic in every single way.

We sat at Rivas’ chicken bus station, the most interesting jumble of blossoming life I’ve ever seen, for half an hour before starting towards Popoyo, just watching: Sellers calling out their goods and prices, children squealing and running, people throwing each other bags of weird snacks and cold Fanta bottles, chicken bus conductors yelling their destination over and over again until the words became blurred with one another, completely incomprehensible. The boys were in a state of shock, and me in a state of sheer pride; they’d never seen anything quite like it, and I was the one showing them. The crew operating our chicken bus to Popoyo decided they were in love with me, and I decided to start a proposal count, which was already on at least two after our stint mixing with locals in Rivas. The leader of the group regretfully waved me goodbye as we hopped off, blowing kisses as they quite literally left us in the dust, our ‘bus stop’ being more like ‘in the middle of nowhere’.

The week we spent in Popoyo reminded me just how intense Nicaragua’s dry season can be, just how sweltering and exhausting it is. After leaving the boys’ extensive arsenal of food for cooking on the top of the chicken bus, our days were spent hitch-hiking to the nearest ATMs and supermarkets for any hope of buying goods cheaper than the extortionate tourist prices in Popoyo, and for me, fending off yet more proposals from white van drivers while Lukas got thrown around in the back. Paul stayed and surfed a lot, and we occasionally joined him, but before long the temptation to return to our hostel, relax, make dinner, and soak in the dying sun after its lingering midday heat, overtook all of our ambitions. We met a group of backpackers, which included the most terrifying small woman I’ve ever crossed paths with, and who we spent the whole week trying to dodge. A trained doctor, who seemed to be simultaneously a gynaecologist, geneticist, surgeon and dermatologist, based on her loud claims to let the entire town know, she spent her time talking AT us rather than to us, telling us we would get skin cancer and barging in on me in the toilet and watching me piss. After ten unbearable minutes during one group dinner of listening to her heated inner monologue about how underestimated she is in the medical world, I hissed to Lukas out of the corner of mouth, “We have to swap, she’s sucking my soul dry.” He pouted and tried to protest, but seeing me on the verge of breaking down, engaged the tiny scary woman in conversation and flinched as she launched into a new speech.

Saturday came, and Sunday Funday in San Juan, one of my favourite Central American parties, called – as did Challis, my gorgeous American friend who I volunteered with in Guatemala, and who had finally made it down to Nicaragua only to settle on the island of Ometepe, vowing to never leave aside from partying in San Juan. Paul, Lukas and I narrowly caught the last chicken bus of the day, hitch-hiking back to the dusty bus stop signified only by a tortilla stand, and after the initial mad rush of throwing ourselves and our bags on the back, the entire crew paused, as did we, as we realised we knew each other. It was the exact same team who brought us here, and with an outcry of joy, the man who proposed to me guided me to a seat and commanded a couple of the boys to pick up some beers from a local tienda. The entire ride back to Rivas turned into a rural beer crawl, with the chicken bus stopping abruptly every ten minutes at a new shop, someone running to grab beers that were ready and waiting at the door, and launching them back inside for our group to celebrate with. I gingerly told my admirer that I was actually with Paul, and he promised the German boys that he wouldn’t take me away and marry me, as if, otherwise, it would’ve been a reasonable course of action.

I reunited with Challis in San Juan, who’d managed to misplace her phone and was now armed with possibly the worst excuse for a smartphone I’d ever seen. Together with her friend Fanny, a volunteer at Challis’ hostel in Ometepe that she had basically claimed as her home, the five of us became Guacamole, with each person’s code name being an ingredient in case we got lost in the party town. We snuck into Sunday Funday and consequently got chased around the pool by an angry security woman wanting to make us pay, and travelled from hostel to hostel via pick-ups and chicken buses, slowly getting more and more intoxicated and wild as the night ensued. After Challis left town, the boys and I spent a few groggy days trying to recover from a seemingly permanent hangover, noticing how asleep San Juan became during the week, how slow and stuck it felt to trudge around the streets, as if dragging ourselves through mud.

Finally, an open-mic night at a local bar awoke us from our joint slumber, and we met Ewald, a German rapper who could freestyle from English to German to Russian in the space of a single breath. I’ve never witnessed a mind working quite like his does, the beautiful, spiritual and wise thoughts it comes out with, and for a heavenly ten minutes, he and Lukas jammed together, Lukas being able to pick up a new beat every few verses on the guitar to match Ewald’s rapping. Paul and I danced together and cheered on the incredible scene we were watching, the whole bar coming alive at these two making music together on the spot. What was more unexpected, though, was running into the same genius freestyler Ewald in Ometepe, where we joined Challis and Fanny at Zopilote, a permaculture farm on the rural side of Ometepe where we extended our stay for a week and settled down into paradise. The farm-hostel was a hippie haven, where cacao ceremonies, fire shows, wood-fired pizzas, home-picked starfruit, and stargazing from the jungle mirador were daily occurrences.

As well as our new group of friends living or staying in Zopilote, we were joined by Pipo, a good friend of Lukas’ back in Germany. A newcomer to hostel life, he took some time to get used to the giant spiders who’d made our jungle cabin their home, and the basic simplicity of the facilities here, in this tiny little corner of the world. But I was in love. With it all. With the small outdoor kitchen, or “kleine kuche” as we fondly named it, with the daily picking of starfruit to add to our porridge or mismatch meals that we’d share with passers by, with the walk up through the side of the volcano to our beds, with the nature and the beauty that co-existed here.

But as always with me, things go wrong, a lot. This time, it was really bad. On a drive back from Playa Mangos, our sunset hang-out spot, Paul and I fell off our moped on a dirt road, and despite him trying to pull me onto my side to avoid injury, it was inevitable. Immediately after the fall I took very slow, deep breaths to stop myself having a panic attack, and the next thing I knew, after screaming “mas agua!” at the local woman gushing water over my mangled knee, I was on the back of a motorbike clinging on and trying not to pass out from the pain. The locals had rushed to our aid instantly, taking me to a local healer woman in a back-yard pharmacy who cleaned my wounds as best as she could. I laughed and compulsively tapped my unhurt foot on the ground through the pain, repeating “be brave, Cerys” in my head as she scrubbed my knee and my elbows and my hand and my foot. A little boy watched with a phone flashlight on the injuries through the darkness, looking worryingly up at me and back down at the horrible bloody mess that he shouldn’t have been witnessing. The woman told me I was incredibly strong, that others would scream in pain where I just blinked away tears and smiled at the boy. It’s funny, but in that moment I felt so alive. This was real pain, waking me up, making me completely understand my body’s ability to keep going. Paul arrived shortly afterwards on the back of a motorbike to get cleaned up, and while his wounds were much less deep than mine, he looked into my eyes as the woman turned to wash away the dirt in his leg, and we smiled at each other. We were strong. We were a team.

And we were the best team I’d ever known. I remember reading adventure and action books as a teenager and creating a dream that one day I would be as strong and brave as the female protagonist, that one day I would meet someone who was just as brave and strong as me and that we would just work together. And as Paul and I sat in our cabin, peeling off gauze to re-dress and re-clean our horribly black wounds, it struck me that this was it, this was me living my dream. Obviously I hadn’t dreamed of falling off a moped and being put out of action for weeks, potentially having to go home abruptly because of it, but the way we laughed and grimaced and shined flashlights on disgusting gashes in each other’s skin felt like a dream, a dream I’d been waiting a long time for. Maybe it was the shock or the painkillers deluding me into romanticising it, but I felt more powerful than ever before. I was so proud of myself, of us, so alive and bold.

We begrudgingly extended our stay in Zopilote again so I could regain my strength, and I started going to the public health clinic in the local town Balgue to get my injuries scrubbed and re-dressed every day. Every day, I woke up early, walked down through the jungle to the main road, hitch-hiked or caught a bus into town, endured the pain for an hour, and then hitch-hiked and walked back up to the hostel, only being able to pass out from exhaustion after the whole ordeal. It was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life, and it was relentless. Every day I hoped it would be quicker, easier than the day before, but every day it was the same, sometimes worse. First the nurses would peel off the excruciatingly stuck bandages off my skin, then use soap solution to scrub wounds all over my body, then water to wash it off, then a scalpel to dig out pebbles buried deep in flesh, then antiseptic spray, then antibiotic cream, then dressings again. It was the longest hour of every day, no anaesthetics, sometimes just a table for me to lie down on if the pain was too much, but I was strong. I would blink away single tears from my eyes, silently screaming as the scrubbing intensified, staring out of the window motionlessly, whispering affirmations in my head. Be brave. Be strong. Come on.

The nurses were very kind, and I felt like they liked me. There was a group of them and they each had a turn examining my wounds, patching me up. The service was completely free, as per Nicaragua’s surprising healthcare system, and while it was by no means NHS-approved, I was just immensely grateful for them making sure my wounds were kept clean, out of the goodness of their hearts. They didn’t have to tell me to return every day, but every day they did, and every day we tried a little bit harder to get the dirt out of the deep gash in my knee. It would leave a permanent scar, a big one, and I knew that, but I didn’t mind all that much. It was a reminder that I sat here, in this pink cement building that’s only usually used to weigh babies, in a foreign-speaking country on the other side of the world, with completely inadequate equipment, able to conquer this pain. Mostly Paul came with me to the clinic, and he wasn’t afraid of seeing wounds or seeing me in pain. He was actually fascinated with the healing process, and he watched the nurses peel off old dressings, examining changes in the wounds with them. He didn’t try to hold my hand or tell me everything was okay; he knew I could handle it, so instead he sat on the chair and watched me wriggle through the pain, smiling at me when I looked at him. We said nothing, because there was nothing to say. Just accept, and stay strong.

During this time I was able to see both Challis, who I’d missed immensely since leaving Guatemala, and Jan, who I’d volunteered with in Costa Rica and who’d met Paul and Lukas in our harmonious week of pura vida. Each reunion was horribly bittersweet, constantly reminding me of my current weakness as I had to turn down climbing a volcano, beach parties and pizza nights. Where I’d usually be thrilled to have so many of my favourite people miraculously in one place, I was overcome with a sense of entrapment – I was stuck in the hostel, stuck with a very large group of German natives who’d often forget I was there, stuck holding back my friends who constantly had to check in with me, infuriated at even being there. Sometimes I wanted the ground to swallow me up and propel me to the safety of home, Bournemouth, instead, where I knew I’d inevitably have to go soon due to my dwindling money and poor physical health. But going home was escaping the pain, entering a comfort zone, being able to see a real doctor and waiting for the next boring year of my life. No, I thought. The world is my home now. I can’t run away from it.

And so I made my last impulse decision, my last crazy adventure on this whirlwind ride of a backpacking experience. Jan, Pipo, Paul, Lukas and I sat in a new hostel on Ometepe, smoking cigarettes and watching the sun go down, discussing our options. A Nicaraguan coin sat on the table in the middle of us, on one side an old, important looking man, and on the other, the volcano, sun and lake which appeared on the country’s flag. The coin was flipped, and as the silver volcano glinted in the day’s fading light, we all muttered together. Corn Islands. It was the side for the Corn Islands, on the Caribbean side of Nicaragua, two days’ journey away. My insides tightened, with fear or excitement I wasn’t sure, and I exhaled, laughing. “Okay, let’s do it,” I said seriously, knowing the decision was already made. The table broke out into celebration, a buzz of new plans and adventures spreading into the night, and this chaotic universe made sense again. Fuck it.

That was, until Paul, Lukas and I reached Managua. Initially, we intended the stopover to be for a brief hospital check-up on my leg, to grab some antibiotics and new dressings before getting on the night bus to Bluefields and reunite with Pipo and Jan. I was not prepared to spend a second longer in Managua than absolutely necessary, given my last escapades in this horrid capital city losing my phone at night. But Paul managed to contract an awful illness and serious fever, ending up in hospital overnight with a kidney infection that delayed all our plans. I acted as translator as well as nursing my deep, infected leg, almost imploding from stress while staring into various nurses’ eyes pleading that they’d just speak a bit goddamn slower so I could have a hope understanding them with my dodgy Spanish. We extended at a hostel after Paul was admitted, stuck in this hateful city once more and only able to wait for Paul to be pumped with fluids in a Nicaraguan hospital, lying on a table in a communal waiting room because all the beds were gone. The hostel was a bizarre, nightmare-induced establishment with an unbearable set of rules, and watched over 24/7 by its creepy owner, an older American guy. For some reason, the city managed to attract the same kind of machoistic, throttle-worthy American guys, all boasting about how much knowledge they had in infuriating monologues and competing against each other over nothing.

A day after Paul returned from hospital and rested off the worst of the infection, I drew the line. I didn’t care where we went, but we had to get out of godforsaken Managua. The Corn Islands was looking unlikely, and the only other place we felt happy enough to go to was Puerto Viejo, our home in Costa Rica. Either way, it was two days of travelling, and at this point I was considering just booking the next flight back to London, but Paul chose Puerto, and my heart finally calmed. Yes, of course. So while Jan and Pipo pushed on with the initial plan, our trio, our beautiful chaotic team, headed back to the Penas Blancas border, the border I’d been to at least three times now, back into pura vida land. We drank our final beers before crossing, washed down with a painful $60 taxi to the nearest town Liberia after the buses stopped running, and found a lovely hostel for the night with writings all over the walls which we contributed to.

Smoothly arriving back in San Jose the next day, the only other obstacle left was getting a bus to the south, however this proved to be the hardest, after being horrendously scammed out of $150 by an evil taxi driver who span us a web of lies about catching up with the last bus of the day which had already left. My terrible gut feeling was right, and after escaping the taxi and catching the only bus available to Limon, a horrible place pretty much equalling to Managua, we re-grouped in McDonald’s, the only safe place in the whole vicinity, weighing up our options and internally crying over the scam. We called William, the owner of Hostal Cecilia and our sole potential saviour at 10pm, stuck in a dangerous city hours away from Puerto without a place to stay, and he arranged for a friend to pick us up and take us directly there for a small price, telling us we could stay in the hostel for free tonight for our troubles.

Arriving at the door of Cecilia felt like we’d finally escaped the battle ground, and suddenly the 24 collective hours of travelling, with my deeply wounded leg and Paul’s recovering infection, was all worth it. I almost collapsed into an emotional and exhaustive fit of tears before even entering, and being warmly welcomed by Cecilia, William and their family, we knew we’d made the right decision. We were home.

The only news better than the free night’s stay, in my last blissful week of adventuring, was that Anna would be making a return. Yes, Anna, the crazy German legendary solo female traveller I’d met up with in Mexico and Colombia. She was now making her way up Central America after her South American journey, and would just so happen to be in Puerto Viejo the same week as us. It seemed beautifully poetic that, just as I started my trip by her side, I was ending it with her too. She had single-handedly changed my whole view on travelling, my whole life, really, with her insane spontaneity and lust for adventure. She arrived in town in the shitting rain, and we spent a lazy day laughing together, with me displaying my battle wounds which were still yellowing and grey, as we made food, drank beer and did nothing in particular other than watch the rain. I also found it beautiful that Paul and Lukas were with me during my final week, the people who had undoubtedly impacted me the most other than Anna, and who had brought me more joy than anyone else in the half-year I’d been backpacking. I watched Paul surf, read books, drank beer, cycled to Manzanillo with the others, watched the sunset from the plateau above Puerto, and slowly reflected on what I was leaving behind.

The most obvious and painful thing to leave behind was Paul, who I wouldn’t see now for at least a couple of months. Just as we fell more in love after the moped accident in Ometepe, with pride and strength in each other, when faced with my leaving it grew immeasurably more. We went on small dates, walking to the beach and watching the waves and eating veggie burgers and grabbing coffee and reading together, we talked a lot, we learned more about each other than I thought was possible. I glowed with pride watching him skate, effortlessly dancing over cement like an angel, and he watched with a smile on his face as I nonchalantly sprayed antiseptic on my wounds and re-dressed them myself, which I was getting pretty good at. I’d decided to take up surfing properly at home when I was recovered, itching to move my body and do something that makes me scared to feel alive, and he lit this passion within me with a fire that could only come from him. This was the boy I missed a flight home for, who I took the biggest risk of my life for, who I’d do it all again for.

The other thing I was leaving, which was much harder to comprehend, was, to put it simply, my whole life. Travelling had become my world, packing and unpacking and moving and exploring was my norm. For five months I’d called every new place my home, I’d left behind material possessions all over Latin America, as if they were scattered markers that said ‘Cerys was here’; I’d become so comfortable with the uncomfortable that I had my own chaotic rhythm of moving with the world, like an unsteady heartbeat. But I knew that this was exactly the reason I needed to leave. I was getting too comfortable with the familiarities of backpacking, I was feeling safety in the unknown. To leave, to change, to start again all over again, was a harder, bigger, more important challenge. I couldn’t cry when Anna and I caught the bus away from Puerto Viejo, towards San Jose, the place where everything begins and ends, the bus we almost missed because it wouldn’t be me without some chaos. Everything happened so fast, saying goodbye to Paul, rushing to stop the driver and getting yelled at to hurry up, that I couldn’t process the weight of leaving. So I sat on the bus for hours doing nothing, staring out of the window, thinking about the life I had which had just come to an end.

And so, as always with this silly little solo trip of mine, it was time to start again. Onto the new chapter, the next adventure. Como siempre, the world belongs to the brave.

Living on extra time, a lot of coffee, and apparently, in heaven – final days in Colombia

I’d never been as conscious of how broke I was until this moment, sitting on the bus to Santa Marta to take a flight, not home, but to Salento, on the other side of Colombia. The only thing I knew was that I’d rather be broke and make the money back slowly than ignore my gut, which had undeniably told me to go back to Paul and Lukas, the German boys I’d met in Costa Rica. I couldn’t explain the immense pull I had to people I barely even knew, but it was there, staring at me straight in the face, and I knew I wouldn’t regret it. So I missed my flight, flushed that money down the drain, extended my stay in Colombia for a few more days, booked a new flight back to San Jose, the place where everything begins and ends. There was more to learn, about myself, the universe, about friendship, love, hope. I couldn’t stop here. I was free, stupid, young, foolish, and ready for another wild adventure.

Just when I thought I was rid of moto-taxis at last, it became clear as I got off the bus that I’d have to get another one to take me to the airport for a cheap and quick ride. Holding onto my 80 litre backpack with all my might, swaying with the weight that the bike was barely holding, I prayed that this wouldn’t be the fatal moto-taxi ride that would end up with me dead on the side of a Colombian highway. But I survived, swore off the dreaded contraptions for life, and rushed to the check-in desk, only to find that I’d booked my flight to Salento for the wrong month. Typical. Of course, being me, I’d made this blunder. My fool-proof plan to squeeze in Salento before returning to Costa Rica wasn’t looking so fool-proof anymore. I suppressed a laugh at my idiocy and asked whether there was a flight to Salento today instead, doubtful that I’d ever live out my missing-flights curse. There just so happened to be one in an hour, quite literally perfect timing, so I paid the small price difference and silently enquired to the universe why I was so luckily unlucky with the lessons I was being taught.

A flight, bus ride, and uphill slog to my hostel later, I sat on top of my bag in the luggage room waiting for my dorm bed to become available. I was tired, weathered by my travelling experiences, and still slightly in disbelief that I was here instead of thousands of metres in the air, flying to London. I deflected some bad, heard-it-a-million-times-before jokes from an annoying middle-aged American man, made small talk with the hostel staff, and changed my clothes, desperate for a shower after my night in a tent on the beach but having to wait for the room to be cleaned. To kill some time I returned to the town’s main street and started walking absent-mindedly, only paying attention to the rhythm of Salento.

I’d read a lot about this small town in Colombia’s famous coffee region, and how much internet bloggers raved about it. On every single backpacker guide, Salento and Cocora Valley, home of the tallest palm trees in the world, are bound to feature, and I’d reluctantly given in to the resounding praise of these tourist hotspots out of curiosity. Now it was time to see what I really thought about them. And as I strolled around Salento’s colourful streets, boasting beautiful colonial architecture, small cafes, galleries and artesanal shops, and cobbled pavements trodden by horses, barely a car in sight, I relented. It was beautiful. The air was fresh, being at such a high altitude, and the aura was calm, with the soft buzz of people’s voices, street sellers and music coming from local bars following me as I slowly lapped each square. I didn’t know exactly why I felt so relaxed and happy here; I just knew that I liked Salento, a lot. I visited as many local and independent shops as I could, stopped to grab coffee (and fall in love with said coffee, thanks to the delicious blend that Cafe Jesus Martin had crafted from heaven), and people-watched in the backstreets.

When I returned to the hostel and finally took a shower, the universe gifted me with another chance second meeting in the form of Esmee, the lovely Dutch girl I’d met in San Gil. She’d suggested I hike around Barichara the afternoon I arrived and told me about her horror story throwing up during paragliding, and I’d hoped to make friends before she told me she was literally on her way out of town that night, so I let the idea go. Now, she stood at her dorm bed next to mine, having managed to stay in the same hostel in Salento at the same time, looking at me quizzically as we tried to remember each other. So funny, how the universe does that. We then went down to the hostel’s outdoor bar, showing off spectacular sunset mountain views from all around, and collected a large group of backpackers around a table, all drinking beer and sharing stories.

Esmee had been travelling around Colombia for a while and was now planning to go to Cali in the south, before entering Ecuador by land. Sam, a vibrantly happy American hiker, was wrapping up his journey in Colombia soon and heading to Peru to tick Machu Picchu off his bucket list. Ryan, a long-term Canadian traveller, worked out that we both knew the same Danish girl, Naya, who I’d worked with in Mr Mullet’s, Guatemala, and who he’d met in Mexico the year before. Tim, a German student who’d previously travelled in South America a few years before, told me stories about his adventures in the northern Colombian desert which meets the sea. Hannah, a sweet Dutch girl with a wandering spirit, had picked up another Dutch travelling companion who was beautifully batshit crazy and called us his “party people”. A lot of the group had gone to Cocora Valley today, and tomorrow they all had different plans, mountain biking or visiting a coffee finca or exploring town. Until now, I’d done most of Colombia alone, occasionally meeting a couple people but not making any firm friends, but here I suddenly had a whole group of them, all inviting me to their multitude of plans. And, while I love being solo and deciding my own adventures, I’d definitely missed this. We were all like-minded backpackers, people who’d put their world at home on pause for a while, bumming around Colombia without a care in the world for now.

I embraced the idea of a long, deep sleep, and happily missed the group’s morning plans if it meant I got more rest. By the time I woke up, appreciated the mountain views surrounding the hostel with a cup of free coffee, and leisurely made my new hyper-fixation meal, tuna yoghurt wraps made from basic tienda ingredients I’d found the day before, it was well into the afternoon, and I regretted nothing. I was still in time to join Ryan and his other Canadian friend in the finca tour on the outskirts of town, which we could not find for the life of us until the owner came to our rescue and guided us into the trees. Terrence was born in the Caribbean, brought up in London, and had ditched his whole former life to live out his dream, growing and making his own coffee in the Colombian mountains with his wife. It sounded like a good dream to me. He took us around his plantation, showing us unusual tropical plants, telling us about the different coffee grown here, picking ripe coffee beans off plants for us to try. Here, in this little slice of hidden, peaceful paradise, the rest of the world really didn’t matter. Just incredible-tasting coffee and tending to the land. There was a beautiful simplicity to it all.

We returned to the hostel feeling calm and doused in nature’s rich aroma, where I made more tuna wraps and we were greeted by our backpacker group. Within 10 minutes we were back out again, all spontaneously deciding to walk up to the town’s mirador to watch sunset. On the way, Sam managed to find a German girl and drag her along with us, and I introduced myself, instantly feeling like I’d known her for years. Her name was Mona, and she was 19 years old, young, crazy, careless, on a gap year after school, with the most infectious smile and bold outlook on life I’d seen in a while. She’d been living in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, for months, and had decided to take a little break to travel Colombia for a few weeks before returning. I laughed and told her about my Costa Rican adventures, and how I would also be going back to the land of pura vida. We were both in love with the nomadic solo lives we’d created for ourselves, both so in tune to the fear and excitement of having no plans, both incredibly brave and alive, both completely detached from life at home. Mona and I shared incredibly similar stories, about boys and dangerous situations and a lot of missed flights, and I laughed at how quickly we’d become firm friends.

Sitting on top of the mirador, drinking beer, watching the sunset, talking about the huge risk I’d taken by not catching my flight home and instead chasing love by going back to Costa Rica for Paul, looking at the girl who’d managed to become my best friend within the space of an hour, I tried to pinch myself. A few months ago I didn’t even know what Salento was, or that I’d end up in Colombia, or that I’d go back to Costa Rica, but somehow it all made sense. Mona and I made friends with a French Canadian and Swiss guy and recruited them to join us for Cocora Valley in the morning, and after this small success, we all returned to the hostel for a few drinks.

It didn’t feel like a success at 8am the following day, though, when said French Canadian and Swiss guy rolled their first cigarette of the day and cracked open a beer at the entrance to Cocora Valley. It felt like an embarrassing bachelor party that Mona and I had accidentally intruded on, and now we were stuck with it for the day. Initially, after saying they wanted to get up and out at the crack of dawn to beat the tourists in the morning, we’d had to drag them out of the hostel and into the centre of town so we’d make it in time to catch one of the Jeep taxis that ferried people to Cocora. The four of us volunteered to stand on the back of the pick-up for the journey, hanging onto the Jeep bars and leaning back with a rush of excitement as the vehicle hurtled through the forests, swaying and holding on as much as we could. There’s nothing quite like an adrenaline rush first thing in the morning, and while I feasted on the exhilarating Jeep ride for breakfast, the boys accompanying us decided to dine on cigarettes and beer in celebration. I couldn’t judge them, really – the views awaiting us justified this and much more.

It’s true what they say about Cocora Valley: It’s a real life Jurassic Park, something you just can’t quite wrap your head around, or believe that you’re witnessing. Directly above us, vast mountainsides gave way to the tallest palm trees in the world, whose comparatively skinny stalks seemed to defy gravity as they creaked in the gentle wind. They were dotted everywhere, giants among the neatly trimmed green hills, and wild horses calmly grazed around them. We staggered around with our heads permanently craned to the sky, gasping at each viewpoint during our short hike like it was ten times better than the last, when in reality we just couldn’t fully believe what we were seeing. It was all too much for the boys, who demanded a zoot break to truly appreciate Cocora, so Mona and I sat next to them with our pots of squished fruit (we’d both developed an unhealthy obsession with the small fruit stands in Colombian towns) and reflected on the morning.

We’d tolerated, and even had a laugh with, the boys in our group for an impressively long time, but a line was crossed when, on the way down from the hike, they excitedly stopped at the tourist-trap valley of fake Jeeps, Colombian flags and insta-inspired swings. Mona and I exchanged a glance and ploughed straight on down the hill, occasionally glancing back at the French Canadian and Swiss duo taking turns to sit in the drivers’ seat of the fake Jeep, don sunglasses, smoulder, and take dead-serious photos of each other. “They’ll probably caption it ‘not all those who wander are lost’ or something,” Mona giggled. We marvelled at how well the tourist photo traps actually worked, watching flocks of people gathering around the artificially decorated swing for their ‘candid’ insta pictures when they could just walk 10 minutes and find equally amazing views with much less people, and instead got talking about how amazing travel can be without searching for the most aesthetic reels backdrop.

Having basically settled into local life in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, with a whole makeshift family and social circle, Mona told me how easily she’d been able to uproot everything she knew about life in Germany and embrace a completely new journey on the other side of the world. This felt uniquely her, it set her alight, Tamarindo was her place with her people; for the first time, she was utterly proud of where she called home for now. But she also craved the adventure of moving around, the thrill and fear of dotting from place to place with no plans, which she did intermittently around living in Tamarindo, like this little trip of hers to Colombia. Having also ‘popped off to Colombia for a bit’, a seemingly casual move until you remember how fucking large this country is and how dangerous it can be, I felt immense pride in us both, two young women completely unafraid to chase their fears down and rebuild from strength to strength. While I didn’t have a Tamarindo, I shared with Mona stories from living on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, and how amazing it felt to be integrated in local life in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, appreciating the uneven rhythm of slow and fast, daunting and comfortable, sociable and lonely, that all travellers experience differently in different places. Not one of us has the same story anywhere. We are the only ones who make our stories what they are.

We returned to Salento on another whirlwind Jeep ride, just in time to grab coffee and a souvenir package of ground beans at Cafe Jesus Martin and then hide in the hostel while the heavens opened. We’d had suspiciously nice weather until now, which was unusual for Colombia’s coffee highlands, famously lush and green for a reason, so I accepted the sudden turn as a natural response from the universe and retreated to my laptop, writing furiously. Tonight was the night – tonight was my final night in Colombia, tonight I would take a bus to Bogota then fly back to Costa Rica, tonight I would embark on the next adventure instead of going home, tonight I would be just within arms’ reach of Paul and Lukas. But even though I’d spent a good few days hanging out in Salento, it didn’t feel like enough. I really, really loved it here. It felt mellow and lively at the same time, friendly, beautiful, grounded yet surreal. Mona was here, our backpacker group was here, there was always more to see and more funny karaoke nights to be had at local bars. And while I knew all of this, and knew that I would miss not only Salento but the whole of Colombia, it was not a painful goodbye. I didn’t wish I could stay. I gracefully accepted the end, silently saying farewell to my last days as a purely ‘solo’ traveller, and waited in anticipation for the next journey to come, pouring out my heart and soul into words on the laptop screen.

To celebrate my last night in Salento, and most of the group’s final days together, we gathered at a pizza place in town and treated ourselves to local red wine by the bucket. I quizzed Sam about the PCT, the famous hiking trail I’d read about in Wild, and he gave me recommendations for if I ever ventured over to the northern end of the Americas. He would be spending this summer working in Alaska when he got home, his life being a seemingly never-ending adventure, and I wished him the best. I was completely taken by Sam’s camping and hiking stories, as well as his kindness and enthusiasm for life, and made him promise to at least stay in contact through social media in case we ever bumped into each other again. The same could be said for everyone: From Esmee’s hit-or-miss attempt at surviving election weekend in Cali before the hit-or-miss Ecuador border crossing, to Tim’s sporadic breaks from studying in Stuttgart by slowly ticking off every country in South America, and from Ryan’s eternally nomadic lifestyle hopping around the world, to Mona’s constantly changing plans, none of which involved going home for very long. I understood these people and their predicaments, and they understood me. We were all chasing different versions of the same freedom we felt while exploring, while pushing boundaries and growing out of comfort zones. I was very lucky to get to know them, if only for a short period of time.

I’d impressively managed to squeeze both hiking boots and trainers in my backpack this time round, and didn’t fancy disrupting my meticulously, aeroplane-proof packing method enough to dig them out, so instead decided to firm it and rock the fluffy socks and flip-flops look. While we were in the restaurant no one seemed to notice, but as we left and I strapped the rucksack to my back, preparing for my long night-bus journey, the whole of Salento stared in disgust at my footwear. It didn’t help that I was wearing my comfiest trousers, comfiest fleece, and carrying everything that could possibly make this journey the slightest bit less painful, because now I just looked homeless. I laughed with the others at my own impeccable sense of backpacker style, too full from pizza and buzzed about the journey ahead to care what people thought of me, and started my goodbye hugs before walking to the bus terminal. Esmee and Mona cheered me on, telling me to get the guy and live out my movie-worthy love story in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and I assured them I’d give it my best shot.

Before the romantic reunion, though, there was a couple of buses and a 12 hour wait in the airport to get through. Too excited to sleep, I curled up next to the window on the bus to Armenia, where I’d change for a night bus to Bogota, and blared my music while looking out into the darkness whizzing past. I would truly never get over the thrill of moving from one place to another, I thought to myself, of leaving one journey behind and setting off on an entirely new one. I could stare out of the window thinking about life on buses for hours, remembering the things I’ve done, thinking about what on earth I’ll do next, listening to the songs that all have a memory attached to them from my travels. Four months is a long time. My memory bank was getting pretty extensive. And funnily enough, some of the times where I’d felt most elated was doing exactly this: Sitting on a bus, watching the world go by, just reflecting on everything. And so, on to the next. We go again.

“This is the last moto-taxi”, “I’ll take the flight home this time”, “this will be enough cash”, and other lies I tell myself

I got off the bus at Rio Guachaca, or rather, on it, being literally in the middle of the bridge over the rio, and waved away the confused-looking locals peering out of the bus windows at me, a white woman standing in the middle of nowhere with a massive 80 litre rucksack on her back. Completely self-assured, I made light conversation with the men who had also stopped on the side of the road on the bridge to fix their cars or stock up their food-selling carts. I glanced around at the beautifully empty, lush green fields and rivers on either side of me, the Sierra Nevadas in the distance, where I’d just come from, and watched as cars and trucks whizzed past on the highway inches away from my face. Then, taking my time, I set off at a slow plod over the bridge and into the outskirts of Guachaca, the local town where I’d be staying the night, and where there was not even a whiff of tourism.

The bus conductors had been utterly confused when I told them my destination, assuring me I must mean Buritaca instead, where there was a popular backpacker hostel, or even Palomino, the famous beach-party town where young people flocked on hot sunny weekends like this one. But no, I pointed again to the town name on my map, Guachaca, and gave them a confident smile. I left out the part where even I didn’t know the location of my hostel, aside from the fact that it was in Guachaca next to the river, but I thought this would just stress everyone out needlessly. So I got off the bus, walked across the bridge, and turned down a dirt side-road that ran parallel with the river, convinced that in between the ramshackle houses belonging to locals I would stumble across a clearly marked, obviously signposted hostel.

I did not, so it was Plan B time. I asked a frail old woman lurking in her garden and watching me if she’d heard of my hostel. She hadn’t. Then I asked a young mother who has half guiding, half yanking her toddler away from me. She pointed in a vague direction and scurried off. That’s when I started to panic. What if this place just doesn’t exist at all? What if Booking.com had sent me on this stupid, endless mission of lunacy just to convince me I was going mad? The sweat was coming with the heat of the day, and my bag straps were getting increasingly painful rubbing on my shoulders. It must exist, I thought to myself stubbornly, and started circling the town’s residential streets aimlessly without knowing what paths I’d already taken. After passing the same man smoking in a rocking chair twice, I gave in to my silly plan and begged him to give me some clue as to where this hostel was. He pointed in the same direction that the woman had earlier, convincing me that this was an evil plot by the whole town to send backpackers off into the wilderness clueless and alone, but as I opened my mouth to protest, he said, “further.” The way he said it was like there was something mysterious about this place no one was telling me. “Five minutes more, I promise. You’ll see it.”

I believed him, and walked further down the river. The road ended and a vague dirt track trailed off through the trees. I heard what the man had said echoing in my mind, further. There was still no sign of a hostel, so I kept going. I walked, and walked some more. Finally, I understood why he’d told me that it was not hard to distinguish. A perfectly constructed and painted wooden pirate ship suddenly towered above me, unexplained in the middle of a clearing of trees right by the river, like a massive playground with no kids playing. Next to it, an old American yellow school bus sat parked, becoming one with the tree roots and leaves that seemed to be growing through it and slowly concealing it in the jungle. Utterly confused, I walked through a timber arch that signified the hostel’s entrance and wordlessly let my bag slide to the floor. There was no way I could even dream this up. This was like one of those times when real life is crazier than the imagination. Surrounded with palm trees and tropical plants, the hostel consisted of a main building constructed of what looked like bamboo and timber, an open common area with 70s style sofas, outdoor mirrors and coffee tables placed randomly among the dry earth, a basic outdoor kitchen, and, coolest of all, a cement toilet block with glowing neon paintings of skulls covering every inch.

It was without a doubt the most interesting hostel I’ve ever set foot in, a true hippie hideout creation designed to make you completely untraceable, and yet in a bizarre paradise of your own. But an eerie air still lingered; I was completely alone. No other guests. An English woman, the owner, appeared out of nowhere and ran up to me with one of her staff to check me in, clearly excited to see another white woman among the jungle and local life. She was covered in patchwork skull-like tattoos, had a head of dreadlocks, and told me with extreme satisfaction that the Wifi password was “pirates of the Caribbean”, obviously reflecting her fantasy of the weird little life she’d built for herself. In a strange way, I loved it.

But I couldn’t hang around for long – as per my jammed itinerary for the remaining time I had in Colombia, if I wanted to finally try tubing, it would have to be today. Tomorrow I would wake up bright and early to enter the Tayrona national park and sleep there overnight, so my stay at this hostel would remain a fleeting visit, almost like I had dreamed up the whole thing. I’m still not fully convinced I didn’t. So I dumped my stuff, walked to the main road of Guachaca and browsed the local tiendas while I waited for the public bus to take me into Buritaca. Picking up two unidentifiable bread creations, one which happened to just have lumps of pure sugar in it and the other which had a faint taste of cheese accompanied with the same lumps of pure sugar, I once again grimaced at Colombia’s awful cuisine and gave them to a child on the bus, signalling for the driver to stop at the entrance to Rio Hostel.

Tubing, to put it simply, is a way of combining drinking, partying, sunbathing, swimming and generally fucking around on a river. It’s usually great to do with a group of mates, but considering I was on my lonesome in this area of Colombia, unknown to everyone, and still very keen to try it out, I figured I could make friends on the way. And it didn’t take long; I was soon chatting to Dylan and Patrick, two friends from London who were taking a mini sabbatical from their effortlessly cool arts careers in the big city to backpack around Colombia for a while. They’d joined forces with a Belgian couple, also effortlessly cool and hippie with their long-term travel stories and ideas for the future, and together they’d stocked up with a lot of beers in preparation for the tubing. I knew I was in safe hands.

An afternoon of jumping off rocks, swinging off ropes, drinking beer and trying not to get washed down the river later, the sun had gone down, the buses weren’t running, and my next challenge was being able to pay for the tubing tour as well as a moto-taxi back to my hostel. The only ATM in this northern region of Colombia was unhelpfully in Santa Marta, meaning that both in Minca and here, I’d had to take out wads of cash to prepare for my trips, only praying that I didn’t run out. Except this time I had. I counted my peso bills and reiterated to Rio Hostel’s reception staff that I seriously didn’t have enough for both the tour and a taxi, panicking as the night got darker and the tour leaders got progressively more angry with me for not being able to cough up. How on earth I was going to survive until going back to Santa Marta, let alone where on earth I was sleeping tonight, was beyond me.

My moto-taxi man just so happened to save the day, telling me to give my remaining cash to the tour guides and that he’d stop off at a shop where they did a small amount of cash-back, so I could survive the night. It just about justified taking another dreaded moto-taxi, but this time I internally swore to myself that this was definitely the last. Definitely. That was until we were off, flying into the night, and my fuzzy brain, intoxicated from all the beers, lit up with happiness as I watched the stars blinking, the blurs of people and cars whizzing past. At the shop I flirted with the cashier, a handsome and funny local who threw in some free peanut butter with my purchase, for a better cash-back exchange rate, and bumped into another dread-locked westerner who appeared to have settled in this random corner of Colombia. As I jumped on the back of the bike and we continued along the highway, I decided drunkenly that I liked it here, a lot. It was weird, unexpected, beautifully different and mismatched in an intriguing way that you just can’t put your finger on. Or maybe I was still dreaming, I wasn’t sure.

The next morning I was definitely sure I wasn’t dreaming, because I currently had about 10,000 pesos cash to my name (about £2) and could only hope that the entrance office at Tayrona accepted card payments, because otherwise I’d be stuck again. I had to save my cash for the bus ride to Santa Marta, so I only had one option when it came to basic nutrition for the next 24 hours: Make all the food I’d been stock-piling, carry gallons of water with me to the national park, and survive off as little as possible. A challenge I was willing to accept. Regretfully, I stuffed the huge stir fry and mango porridge portions I’d made the night before into a couple of the hostel’s tupperware pots and, checking no one was watching, hid them deep in my bag, replacing the pots I’d stolen with one from a previous hostel as if it balanced out my karma a bit. At this point, I’d been couriering different assortments of tupperware around various Colombian hostels like Royal Mail, dropping off one container as I stole two more in each location. I hurried out of the hostel to avoid any unwanted suspicion or conversation with the owners, who no doubt thought I was as much of an apparition as they seemed to me, having been and gone within the space of 24 hours without a word, and jumped on a bus to Tayrona.

Tayrona national park is one of northern Colombia’s main attractions, with its unique, mountains-meet-sea, jungle beach landscape and abundant wildlife. Small indigenous communities still inhabit the vast natural area and, as a protected site, it is one of the best places to experience Colombia’s authentic beauty. All of which obviously mean that it’s crazily popular with tourists, and if you want to stand any chance of making it in by a reasonable hour, you have to be standing at the gates at the crack of dawn. Even at 8.30am, the earliest I could possibly drag myself there, there was a hefty queue already waiting. I organised my accommodation for the night, a single tent on the beach at a campsite near the entrance, so I could shoot off in the morning without getting lost hiking for hours, but not without some problems. The card machine decided not to work for a while, and after explaining that this was literally my lifeline, the staff member jabbed the machine buttons a little bit harder and we both manifested the shit out of it until it worked. Thinking the shuttle to the nearby campsites was free, I then had to sprint away from it into the trees when the driver started asking for money as I stepped off. And it was barely even the beginning of the day.

I was surprising myself at just how mentally prepared I was for this segment of the trip, hauling myself from Minca to Guachaca and then from Guachaca straight to Tayrona, before a cheap domestic flight from Santa Marta to the other side of the country, Salento, tomorrow. It had all happened so fast, so chaotically and yet systematically, that I couldn’t decide whether I was proud of myself for being successful so far or incredibly stressed at the sheer amount I’d planned for myself. Checking into my beach campsite and being shown to my pop-up tent in the sand, furnished with a mouldy mattress and 10-year old sleeping bag, I internally made a note of the fact that my tent was a clearly identifiable bright red contraption, and that both men at the reception desk gave me creepy vibes, so decided to be on my guard tonight. The good news was that directly in front of my little home for the night was the most beautiful view I’d ever sleep in front of: miles of glowing Caribbean sand, swaying palm trees, lapping waves all the way into the horizon. Admiring it silently, I gobbled up half of my stir fry portion, packed my day bag, took all my food to the kitchen and asked them to store it safely in the fridge, so the thriving ants’ nest underneath my tent wouldn’t decide to pop their heads inside and say hi while I was out. Then it was time to hike.

After a very therapeutic half an hour of solo hiking, keeping pace to build a sweat in between marvelling at the friendly monkey families jumping around the trail, I noticed a certain French man had been silently tailing me for a while. He’d stopped to take photos of the monkeys when I had, and we’d awkwardly smiled at each other as we laughed at the babies’ playfulness, but now I wasn’t able to shake him because he was annoyingly keeping my pace too. Eventually I turned around and introduced myself, because it seemed like all he really wanted was company. I was right. The French man sparked up conversation with me instantly, and while I was enjoying my peaceful and reflective walk, I had to admit I also liked chatting to him. He was interesting, a bit weird, the kind of person you’d never expect to hang out with but actually end up having a lot of fun with. We took the piss out of other loud French hikers, talked at length about Colombia, and became each other’s designated picture-taker when wildlife was near. This is what it must feel like to actually travel with someone else, I thought to myself with a small laugh, noting how unusual it felt to me.

After a couple of hours of fast hiking and extensive conversation, we reached a playa that had a restaurant, so decided to scavenge some free drinkable water from the servers. We weren’t going to stop, but as we passed the table area, my eye caught something and I reflexively did a double-take. Standing there, lanky and smiley, armed with a massive Canon camera, was Dylan, the very same English boy I’d met the day before on the tubing tour. Patrick turned around too, and we exchanged confused laughs and looks at each other before abandoning all plans to plough on, and sitting down to catch up. The universe has a funny way of gifting you second meetings when you least expect it, when you could be anywhere in the world, and they could be anywhere in the world too, but you just so happen to be in the same place at the same time. In my opinion, when these second meetings are gifted to you, you cannot pass them up. I was very happy to go with the wind, to let the universe throw me together with Pat and Dylan for a fleeting afternoon.

We stopped at the beach, ran at the sea, and after swimming spent a while warming up in the sun, chatting about life. The boys were only visiting Tayrona for the day, for Pat’s birthday, while I had my cozy, ant and sand-infested beach tent to look forward to tonight, so as the afternoon drifted on around us, we begrudgingly packed up and started the trek back to the main trail. The boys were both starting to think about their lives back in London, where Pat would be headed soon and Dylan after a trip to Mexico, but I admired their fluidity, the ability to drop life for a while in the depths of Colombia, truly experience something so different, before heading back and picking it all back up. Mentally, I was in a completely different space to them – I was so deep into Colombia, into backpacking itself, that it occurred to me that I had nothing at home. I’d essentially dropped my whole life, and apart from a university degree that I wasn’t sure about completing, there wasn’t much waiting for me on the other side. And I was so enjoying not thinking about what would happen when I went home, that chatting with Dylan and Pat was almost an inevitable wake-up call, something I needed to hear. Even if it wasn’t time to leave yet, it was time to start thinking about the next life I would build myself when this one ended.

I hugged the boys and waved them goodbye as they hopped onto a shuttle to the exit, silently thanking the universe for another brief lesson. The rest of the evening and night was solely, deliciously, all mine, and I embraced my alone-ness on the walk back to the campsite by talking aloud to myself and smiling at the nature all around. I went to the weird flirty guy at reception to organise a moto-taxi to the entrance of the park at 7am the following morning (“Now, this is the last moto-taxi I’ll take”, I promised myself yet again), and then realised how hungry I was. I scavenged a can of beer from another weird flirty staff member at the campsite’s ramshackle bar, and asked the chefs if I could grab my food from the fridge, which turned out to just be a massive cool-box that had frozen half of my noodles and kept the other half very warm.

As I devoured some of the noodles while waiting for the rest to thaw, relishing the sips of warm beer in between, I got talking to the staff who were living here. I was obviously not their typical guest, refusing to spend money on food and helping myself to their cutlery for my own, sitting alone among the groups of Colombian families or travelling couples, unconcerned about my oddness. One of the women’s curiosity piqued and she finally asked me, as nicely as she could, what on earth a white girl like me was doing here. “Is your boyfriend joining you?” she asked, and I shook my head with a smile. “Do you have a boyfriend?” Another no. “So, you’re alone?” A nod. I finished my mouthful and explained that I was a solo traveller. “You go everywhere alone?” Yes. “But why?” I laughed, and she laughed back, utterly confused. “It’s better,” I explained in my basic, shitty Spanish. “I love travelling alone. Right here I’m free. I can do whatever I want.” She paused, soaking in my words, finally understanding them. “But aren’t you scared?” she asked, a question I would never be rid of apparently. “All the time,” I replied. “That’s even more of a reason to do it.”

After chatting to the women sitting at the staff table, answering their endless questions and asking a lot of my own about their life, their work, I bid everyone goodnight with a flutter of pride in my heart, not only at being able to finally get by with my Spanish, but feeling empowered in the presence of more strong women. While the men working in this campsite were all incredibly weird, at least the women were cool. I walked back to my tent on the beach, phone flashlight in hand, and scanned the insides for any ants still kicking around. There were mercifully small numbers and I decided to keep them alive, trying to transfer them back to their nest in the sand. After falling asleep to the sound of the Caribbean ocean, flicking sand away from my face at random points in the night but sleeping positively soundly considering the conditions, I awoke to a beautiful sunrise from the east. I bounded out of my tent and towards the sea, throwing my arms wide and gazing up at the endless sky above, the endless water to the horizon. Pink and orange swirls scattered the fading stars, and as I ran back and forth around the beach, feeling utterly alive, I stopped and laughed aloud.

Today was the 9th March, the date of my flight home. But instead of taking it, here I was, waking up for sunrise on a beach in north Colombia. And as I thought about the decision I’d made, to not catch the flight, to stay in the adventure, to heavily eat into my student overdraft, to wing it like I’d never winged it before, I couldn’t be happier that I’d chosen this path. This freedom.

Is there something in the coffee frying everyone’s brains here or am I just a sceptic? A gripping mystery

After a very rough night’s sleep on the San Gil – Santa Marta night bus and numerous mysterious stops, where the driver would meet a random man on the side of the road and load or unload big brown packages, which seemed to be suspiciously common in Colombia, we rolled into Santa Marta and were instantly bombarded with taxi drivers and terminal workers all shouting something different in Spanish. Nadine, Evie and I managed to determine where to catch a bus from, and crossed a busy motorway to an unmarked spot where buses were apparently stopping. My chances of saying goodbye to Nadine and Evie diminished when I realised, via the ever-shouting taxi drivers swarming us, that my bus didn’t go from here but theirs did, and I’d have to reach another mysterious terminal. In the midst of my panic surrounded by hagglers, the girls’ bus arrived and I meekly waved at them, watching it drive away and longing for something to be easy for once.

Now I was alone and surrounded by at least 20 shouting men in a city I’d never been to before, and all I could do was stand in bewilderment and try to think through the chaos. I couldn’t figure out where the real Minca bus station was, and didn’t trust any of the answers I was getting from these people. I finally remembered my hostel’s email with instructions on it, and hurriedly scrolled through to find the best way to reach Minca from here. In this moment of weakness I was lured in by a particular motorbike taxi driver, and was about to blindly follow him before his mater pulled him into a huddle ahead of me, sending alarm bells clanging in my head. I backed away and towards a legitimate yellow taxi, confirming that he wouldn’t scam or kidnap me before finally letting him take me to the bus terminal. It was only on the colectivo ride, involving 12 people crammed into a mini-bus that was reminiscent of my days in El Salvador and Guatemala, from Santa Marta to Minca, that I realised how incredibly tired I was. Despite having no space or legroom in the tiny vehicle, I passed out for the whole journey, only to wake up to more shouting men, but this time in a little town in the jungle.

I was sick of being in vehicles, sick of hagglers, and ready to finally take a shower and brush my teeth, but first there was a big hill to get up before reaching my hostel. It was called Casa Loma, quite literally meaning ‘house on the hill’, something I was very aware of when I booked it but thought, at the time, I’d be able to manage. Now, feeling battered as if I’d just come through a war, I had no choice but to walk uphill, and I knew it, so I begrudgingly started climbing. It felt like the longest climb of my life, longer than even the Uran summit in Costa Rica, longer than the hill in Maderas, longer than even Fuego at some point, but I finally reached the top and threw my 18kg backpack on the ground angrily, as if it was the bag’s fault, or the hill’s fault, and not my own, that I was drenched in sweat and exhausted after choosing a hostel in the mountains. The heat was sweltering compared to the cooler highlands climate, and I desperately tried to fan myself to stop the sweat escaping every pore of my body, watching the owner sensing my anger and timidly approaching with a glass of water.

Finally, I calmed down and looked around me. It was a hippie hostel for sure, with the smell of weed and incense and coffee clouding my senses like a mystical drug in the air that was zenning people out. Everyone moved in slow motion and with absent smiles on their faces, carrying yoga mats or exclusively vegan food or massive joints from table to table, mingling in the same rhythm as the calm music playing faintly in the background. I knew it was a beautiful place, with a beautiful view and a beautiful chance to connect to nature, but right now, still sweating and worked up from my journey, I refrained myself from rolling my eyes. I really wasn’t in the mood for hippie-dippie shit right now. Give it time, I thought to myself as I went to check the hostel’s notice board for a yoga class to stretch out my bus-burdened muscles and clear my head. There was a class down at the local river that afternoon. Perfect. Scenic, relaxing, immersive in this gorgeous jungle and its nature. The proper introduction to hippie life in Minca.

At least, that’s what I thought the yoga class would be like. Yes, it was all of those things, but ‘immersive’ also turned out to mean being uncomfortably close to a nest of massive, angry-looking ants, and being crawled on by an annoying great black wasp, a species I was scarred by after my experience in Nicaragua. The bugs were evermore relentless as the sun started to go down, making my zen yoga practice much harder with the constant wafting and itching I was doing in my paranoia. Not only that, but what I thought would be straight yoga class ended up being a mix of stretches and hypnotic, nonsensical dance movements, the kind that hippies do when they’re around a bonfire and tripping off their face. I tried to embrace the flowing arms and rhythmic side steps, but fought to conceal my laughter and thought on how strange this all was. If I thought I’d turned into a spiritual nutjob with my experiences so far, I was consoled now in the knowledge that I still had some scepticism left. I could only look around at the beautiful river setting as someone smoked a joint on a rock in the sun, and paddle in the crisp waters, splashing my face with after class, at last happy and relaxed after the intense travelling it had taken to get here.

That night I treated myself to some local sushi, a bold but desperate move after months of abysmal cuisine, and returned to the hostel, collecting a sweat on the way up as I raced to catch the sunset. The rumours were right: The views of the mountains and Santa Marta and the sea beyond really were magical, and the sunset’s colours seemed more powerful and beautiful than they’d ever been. As I approached the top of the hill, I heard the faint mellow sounds of live guitar music coming from the hostel bar, and smelled weed in various clouds wafting through the air. I smiled, letting myself fall into this peaceful environment head-first after the chaos of the cities. Approaching a table of chatting backpackers, I instantly recognised a couple of faces in the sea of new people. Emma and Vera, two Norwegian girls who’d been at Lake Atitlan while I volunteered, had surprisingly ended up in the same hostel as me in the middle of Colombia’s northern countryside. We hugged each other in surprise as I started catching up with them and meeting other people around the table.

I’d wanted to get up early and do a long hike the morning after, since Minca was a notorious spot for beautiful jungle treks, but the only problem with the infectiously chill and hippie vibe of the area was that it made it a hundred times harder to do literally anything at all. I tried to make the 9am morning yoga class, but was so sleepy and happy waking up that I completely missed it. And after that I couldn’t seem to drag myself out of the hostel to do a hike. I wasn’t alone; Anna and Joanna, two friendly women from Latvia and Germany, rolled their first joint at breakfast time as they sat with me, and buckled in for a whole day of rolling and smoking continuously until it was time to sleep, only moving a few times to find a new comfy spot like cats. They were so permanently baked that I wondered if I ever really got through to their real brains, and the same could be said for most people at the hostel. When everyone and everything went in peaceful slow motion like this every waking hour, it felt completely impossible to snap out of it.

Which was obviously lovely up to a point, but I reached my point quite quickly, getting restless at my inability to move or do anything significantly productive. It dawned on me that my non-existent plan going into the future didn’t just mean where in Colombia I’d find myself next, it also meant what I would do each day, where I would sleep, how I’d get from one place to another, how to financially support myself, and whether I was staying or going home. While I rarely stressed about anything anymore, in the moment I remembered all this information I realised that now was a very reasonable time to be overwhelmed. I’d got so caught up in my freedom that I was dangerously close to just becoming a headless idiot instead, and as I bolted upright in my beanbag chair and stared down at the panicked thought snippets jotted down on the back page of my journal, I finally felt myself revive from my carefree slumber. Sure, I could chill out and do yoga and smoke weed and be happy on a hill for a few days, but it was time to really think about what I wanted again.

I called my family, booked some flights and bullet-listed a rough itinerary for my remaining week in Colombia. I’d been completely annoyed at myself for not even managing to leave the hostel today and instead relentlessly overthinking everything into a spiral, but now I reminded my thoughts to be kind to myself, to let myself breathe and clearly the musty fog that had clouded my mind this morning, to ground myself back down to earth and feel secure in my body again. And yes, while the morning was now gone, there was no point letting the negative thoughts stay – they, too, should be gone with the morning. So I looked down at my plan, pictured the lovely faces of my family, looked around me at this lush, mystical jungle, and decided to just start walking. I took the main trail to same famous waterfalls, down the hill and into the trees, tying up the shoelaces on my lighter, smaller trainers and starting to walk away from Minca.

Ten minutes in, I looked down at my feet again, but not just to tie shoelaces. My step faltered as I thought about the trail, about how evenly inclined and declined it was, about its mostly sturdy terrain. And then I thought to myself, I could just start running. So I did. My feet started colliding faster and heavier with the ground, my breath quickened and deepened, my lungs burned slightly, sweat rapidly gathered on my forehead and neck. I breathlessly looked up at sunlight flashing through the trees and suddenly felt at one with nature, like a powerful force was tugging me towards the trees and rivers and even to the ants creating highways on the trail. I hadn’t trail ran since Guatemala so I was in full knowledge that this wasn’t my fittest, but regardless I pushed on, not entirely sure why. I passed locals and tourists on the trail, all of whom stared at me with the same bewildered shock and sometimes cheered me on in Spanish. At times my legs burned too much and my lungs felt too small, and I slowed to a walk again and winced into the sunlight, before taking a deep breath and beginning again, daring myself to run further and faster.

The walk up the hill to my hostel almost killed me off after my afternoon of quite literally chasing waterfalls, where I’d eagerly jumped in each cold, fresh pool to wash the sweat off before repeating the whole process again. My legs were jelly, my heart was bursting from this electric alive-ness and the beautiful nature I was surrounded by, and, not wanting it to end, I’d stubbornly refused to take a moto-taxi back to Minca as the sky started to darken, instead running as fast as I could to not get stuck in the jungle at night. But now, trudging up this god-damned hill, all I wanted to do was find a comfy bush and turn in for the night. When I finally made it up, completely conscious of how disgusting I must look and smell, Joanna and Anna were there to greet me, their eyes barely opening and their smiles coming from another planet. I breathlessly explained my amazing adventure and they nodded without really hearing me. They’d sat and smoked all day, they said, like always, and were about to smoke again by the looks of it. I laughed with them but quickly left to take a shower, glad I’d decided not to join them. My head was clearer, my body healthier, and my mood drastically improved from this morning. The universe had also answered my prayers and made a bed available for the next two nights in this hostel, so I could extend my stay in Minca.

After a bizarrely sweet live music night, and a very interrupted night of blocking out the loudest sex noises I’ve ever heard coming from one of the hostel’s private huts, I had a slow morning taking a yoga class and wandering the small streets and local craft shops of Minca. I treated myself to my hostel’s vegan chocolate pancakes for breakfast and more sushi for lunch, relishing in being able to have genuinely nice food after so long, and somewhere along the way decided to spend the afternoon visiting one of the fincas up in the mountains, where they did coffee and cacao tours for tourists. With my legs still feeling like they’d fall off from yesterday, though, I didn’t fancy the rigorous climb to get me there, and the road was so rough that cars couldn’t make the drive, so instead I concluded that my only option was to flirt with death and take a moto-taxi.

Now, I haven’t fully explained the concept of a moto-taxi yet, I suppose half in denial that I even partook in such a terrifying mode of transport. In Colombia, it’s popular for men in possession of motorbikes to act as taxi drivers, for a cheaper price and more access to tricky, remote places. At first I thought this idea was downright insane – why on earth would I ever trust a man with a motorbike promising he wouldn’t murder me if I got on the back? But the more time I spent in Colombia, the more legitimate I realised this enterprise was. There are actual moto-taxi companies who employ drivers and own offices in towns and cities, and boys are literally raised riding motorbikes to prepare for it. Still completely in denial, partly due to my absolute terror of not being in control of the bike and putting my life in someone else’s hands, and partly due to the insanely real possibility of being kidnapped, until now I had pretty much refused to take one. But after seeing so many tourists hopping on moto-taxis at the waterfalls yesterday, seemingly without a single worry in their brains, I managed to convince myself that I would be safe, and it would get me up to the finca much faster, and besides, it was only one time.

Fast forward half an hour, after the most hair-raising journey of my life spent clutching at the driver so hard that my nails had started to dig into his skin and mentally accepting that this was the end of my life, I stood wind-blown and shaking at the entrance of the finca. At one point, on an almost vertical incline, I’d really thought the bike would give up and roll all the way back down the hill, squashing both me and the driver. I was instructed to push the ground with my feet while the man revved the bike as much as he could, both of us making running motions while the motorbike spluttered and struggled to make it up. I’d blinked away a tear of petrifying fear as the bike jumped into action again and almost toppled a few more times, before miraculously making it up alive.

Also waiting for the next cacao farm tour at the entrance were a group of three friendly backpackers, two English men and a pretty Canadian woman. They looked almost as shell-shocked as me at the hellish journey we’d just made up the mountain, and I quickly established that they were staying in my hostel too. “Did anyone hear those people shagging last night?” I asked conversationally, laughing as I recalled the porn-worthy shrieks coming from one of the jungle huts. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman being that unrealistically loud during sex.” My remark was met with awkward silence, and as I looked around at the group, my heart skipped a beat. One of the guys let out a snort while the other two looked at each other sheepishly. “Yeah, I think that was probably us,” the Canadian woman said, looking mortified.

In that moment, I really wished I had died coming up that wretched hill on the moto-taxi.

After frantically apologising and trying to divert the conversation as much as humanly possible, horrified at my own ruthlessness, I managed to deduce that the two English guys had started travelling together but were unexpectedly joined by the Canadian girl when she’d fallen for one of them. I felt bad for the third wheel, who seemed completely upbeat about his situation but nevertheless must have been putting up with a lot of shit in addition to the sex noises. We awkwardly shuffled behind the finca owner as our tour started, trying to think of anything other than the shagging situation last night, and feigned utter intrigue at the different kinds of cacao plants he was showing us.

After a cacao facial treatment, hot mug of real cocoa and a demonstration of the ancient machines that this family still used to make chocolate, I was finally starting to feel better about my comment. We played with the family’s dogs, discussed how awful mainstream milk and white chocolate companies are, and admired the stunning plantation mountain views together in bliss. If anything, I think my bold introduction made the trio warm to me more. They invited me to walk down the mountain with them (there was absolutely no way in hell I was getting on another death contraption), and when we’d reached the town of Minca again, I found myself following them into a local snooker bar. The sweltering room stank like the 50-strong exclusively male crowd that had gathered there, with no method of ventilation in sight, and in between fending off creepy Colombian men and watching the English guys get stroppy over a game, the Canadian girl and I sank some beers and stood outside to breathe again. Being able to watch such an organic local scene, albeit a dodgy one, was refreshing compared to the high-as-kites hippies on the hill, and as we watched, we chatted about solo travel, love and taking risks for it. I confessed to her my German boy problem, and she told me that life was short. “Take of that what you will,” she said with a wink.

Back at the hostel, I made the cheapest meal I could think of, mango porridge, which at this point was at least 60% of my body weight, and got an early night. My new shagging friends were leaving in the morning to another hostel higher in the mountains, via moto-taxi of course, and I was leaving to the coast, so without even catching their names I let them disappear to their separate rooms and have sex a bit quieter this time. Anna and Joanna looked more vacant than ever as I waved goodbye to them at reception the following morning, their reactions delayed as they wished me luck while keeping one eye on the joint being rolled, and Emma and Vera, the Norwegian girls, were nowhere to be seen. As I thanked the hostel’s stoner owner, who’d been so kind to me for letting me extend, and started my final walk down that dreaded hill, I reflected on my time in Minca.

It was so stunning and peaceful here that I’d ended up staying longer than I’d planned, giving me a beautiful chance to slow down, get into yoga, settle into myself and roam barefoot, grounded, in this magical spot of the Sierra Nevadas. I was more in tune with who I was spiritually, and better off for the experience. But as I took some more steps, and the faint wafts of incense and twinkle of the hostel’s calming playlist faded into jungle noises, I breathed a teeny, tiny sigh of relief. Being here had also been like being in an alternate hippie universe where everything happens in excruciating slow motion; everyone seemed brain-dead, stuck, too zen to feel anything in particular. I was immensely glad I’d dodged that bullet, that I’d forcefully stayed awake, even if it meant being alone most of the time. And now, as the next exciting adventure in my Colombian chapter began, I’d never felt more awake. I hopped on a colectivo back to Santa Marta, and, looking through my next spontaneous hostel booking, mused on how exactly I’d find it if it appeared to not even exist online. It was good to know I’d never run out of problems, I guess.

Emmy-winning indecisiveness, Oscar-winning hostel hair dye jobs, and the Golden Globe in awful Colombian food

Two days after arriving in Medellin, that feeling of being separated from Paul and Lukas lingered like a lump in my throat, and I realised my gut was trying to tell me something. I sat in my hostel in downtown Medellin, a dodgy establishment full of both young and old men bragging about how many prostitutes they’d shagged since arriving, and suddenly, seriously, contemplated booking a flight to Panama. I was so confused at how I could be surrounded by such good friends, with Conal, Paul, Josh and Anna coincidentally all being here, and yet feel such a pull to the silly German hippies who made me so unbelievably happy.

After arriving in Medellin at 3am and sleeping off the rest of our hangovers, Anna and I had gone on a stroll around a fruit and artesanal street market in the morning before I went solo to admire the works of Botero, Latin America’s most famous artist, in Medellin’s galleries and sculptures scattering the main square. The day after I’d gone on the search for more art at the beautiful museum of Antioquia, and then joined a walking tour of Comuna 13, a famously ex-violent neighbourhood that had undergone a transformation of street art and dancing in the last few years. It had been so lovely to explore the city’s culture, of which there was copious amounts, but now, sat at the hostel’s large stone table, I opened up my laptop and stared at Kayak’s ‘flights’ screen furiously.

I was annoyed at myself for not falling in love with Medellin as much as I’d wanted to. It had such a fascinating and sad history, so many tales of cartels, of guerrillas controlling favelas and police bombing innocent civilians trying to catch criminals. Of the tiny staircase mazes in comunas such as 13 being the havens and secret passageways used by drug smugglers to be unreachable by cops, of the turnaround after relentless street wars, of arts and culture replacing violence. I’d loved looking at how Colombia’s proud artists so incredibly painted pictures of the country’s resistance to crime and its growth, the way that local painters and hip hop dancers told the same story on the streets. And yet everywhere I walked alone was clouded with the same dirty, loud, unsafe atmosphere as Bogota, with the horrible thoughts in every man’s head etched on their faces like it was in permanent marker – including the men at my hostel. Colombia’s hooker and cocaine culture may be slowly subsiding, but it was still evidently here, and as a result I couldn’t shake my discomfort.

My saviour once again was beautiful Anna, as well as being able to reunite and spend a night with Josh, Paul and Conal, during which we called Kurtis, where it was about 5am in Spain where he was, to laugh about the good times at Christmas. It was so miraculous that all these incredible people were here at the same time after taking completely different paths, and if Colombia wasn’t proving to be as freeing as I’d hoped, at least I had them. Anna and I had gone on a Pablo Escobar tour in the morning, detailing the famous cartel leader who’d operated in Medellin and started a drug war to maintain control after being discovered, and visited his grave, a memorial for assassinated victims, and the ‘prison’ Escobar built for himself in the mountains. For some unexplained reason, a techno DJ duo were recording a set on its helipad, high on the hill and in between clouds, and Anna and I exchanged utterly confused glances before bobbing our heads along with the music.

But back at the hostel, with Kayak open in front of me, I had a big decision to make. Do I jump on the next flight to Panama to meet Paul and Lukas, or do I ride it out alone in Colombia and then catch my flight home in nine days? Considering the burnout, illnesses and relentless travelling in the last month I’d been feeling pretty ready to go home, four months after starting my trip. I’d done enough, I kept telling myself, and besides, the idea of having a wardrobe, my own room and good food again was incredibly tempting. But now, panicking at how little time I had left and trying to decide what to do with it, I realised I no longer had that feeling of missing the little things at home. I was finally immune to such material comforts. To try and figure out a plan of action, I enlisted the precious help of a friendly German boy and a lairy, slightly creepy English guy, writing down exactly how I could reach Bocas del Toro in Panama, where the boys where staying. Before long a crowd of hostel guests were arguing each other about how Cerys should handle this crazy situation, all completely invested in my tragic tale. I tried to listen to my gut but it had gone unhelpfully silent, and in the end the deciding factor was simply logistics; that it would take an overnight bus and at least four flights to get to Panama and back in time for my flight home. I couldn’t abandon ship, and a defeated knot settled in my stomach as I realised it.

Just as I was starting to wallow in self pity at the result of my quest, Anna arrived with a questionable box of hair dye, sporting a picture of a white girl with Photoshopped purple hair on the cover. We had no idea what colour it truly was, and absolutely no clue how to apply the dye since the instructions were all in Spanish, but jumped at the opportunity to have a hostel hair-dye job. I was currently rocking pink, after having dyed my hair many times in the last few months, so was trusted to take charge and mix the dye with water and shampoo in a miscellaneous pot we found in the kitchen, telling Anna it didn’t matter that we didn’t have gloves. I combed through her blonde hair with my fingers, sending dark pink splatters of dye all over the floor and walls of the hostel courtyard and being unable to stop our laughter at the silliness of it all. The men sitting around the table froze and watched in stunned silence, clearly confused at why we’d thought this was a good idea. Our legs and hands and Anna’s scalp covered, stained with dye, I finally gave up and told her to try and wash it out, while I accepted that my fingers would be permanently pink.

Anna was slowing down her travels and staying with a friend in Medellin for a while, so as I decided to get a night bus away from the city that evening, we realised we’d have to say goodbye again. I was panicked at how little time I had left to see Colombia, and how long I’d have to wait before seeing Paul and Lukas back in Europe, so I told Anna that I wasn’t sure if I was ready to go home yet. “So why not stay?” she told me. It was true that I was incredibly broke when it came to funding my trip, having already stayed half a month longer than planned, but I knew there were always options to volunteer and work. “It’s up to you, but if you stay we might be able to meet up again!” And it wasn’t just about being able to see Anna again, it was also about the boys. They were heading up to Nicaragua soon, somewhere I’d already been but had rushed through to get down to Costa Rica, as well as experiencing major physical and mental burnout, so maintained that I wanted to go back. Sensibly speaking, it was a stupid idea. But speaking from within me, it seemed like the next adventure. I decided to sleep on it on the bus.

The next problem was that I didn’t even know what bus I was taking. I would either head to San Gil, the adventure sport capital of Colombia, to do some hiking and paragliding in the mountains, or I’d go straight up north to the Sierra Nevada jungle mountain range, entering warm tropical Caribbean territory again. I was sick of the rain and clouds that covered these cities, and the temperatures that now felt very low to me, but I knew there was more to see in the highlands. As I waved goodbye to the oddball group at the hostel, someone asked where I was headed next. I turned, sighed, and said that I honestly didn’t know. “I could never do that,” he laughed. “Choose a direction minutes before getting on the bus. It takes some balls for sure.” I smiled and agreed, too exhausted to continue the conversation, and flagged down my Uber to the bus terminal. On the way I decided I’d always wanted to experience flying, so my choice became suddenly clear. It would only be a whistle-stop stay in San Gil, but that was where I was heading.

I’d bought some sleeping pills in Medellin, which are amazingly available over the counter pretty much everywhere in Latin America and completely illegal back home, coming in a single strip with no instructions, just vibes. I Googled the name of my pills and the correct dosage to check I wouldn’t die, and then fell happily asleep on the bus all night, waking up to incredible mountain views and a stiff neck. As we started driving through San Gil I gathered my stuff to leave, but the bus kept going and I grew suspicious of being forgotten about. I told the driver my ticket was for this stop, and he started swearing to himself in Spanish and looking through receipts. Expecting him to turn around quickly to drop me off, I sat up front with my belongings, perched and ready. But he kept driving. I panicked and started raising my voice to get his attention, but all I got in response was laughs from the driver and his irritating mate sitting in the front, with both of them repeating “tranquillo!” as if it would make this situation any easier. I was not tranquillo, and this made me even more angry. I demanded to know where we were going, and managed to figure out that he was driving to the next terminal and sending me back on another bus.

Trying to keep calm but unable to stop thoughts of scenarios where I’d have to pay for the next bus, or get stuck in some random town until a bus came, I tried to tell the men that this wasn’t fair, that I shouldn’t pay and that they should’ve just turned around. But I just became even more infuriated at my lack of Spanish to articulate my feelings, so in the end gave up, and sat looking out of the window in defeat as they laughed. Luckily, there was already a bus back to San Gil at the next terminal, a dragging 30 minute drive away, and the driver ran to explain my situation to the new bus driver, chucking my backpack in the luggage storage and smiling apologetically at me. The new driver made me feel calmer, speaking quietly and giving me a curious-looking fruit for my troubles, so I could only accept the setback and take a seat.

I tried to cheer myself up after getting off the bus by stretching my legs and walking the 20 minutes into town instead of getting a taxi, buying a mango for my porridge breakfast on the way. But I couldn’t understand the Colombian Spanish the seller was using, and quickly got stressed again, dampening my mood further. To make matters worse, a storm was on the way, meaning I couldn’t take advantage of the whole afternoon here with a hike. But as I started making my porridge after a long-awaited shower and change of clothes in my new hostel, I realised the underlying cause of my looming bad mood. I couldn’t get Paul’s eyes or smile or curly hair out of my head, and I couldn’t bear the thought of going home without seeing him again.

At the advice of a friendly Dutch girl staying at the hostel, when the rain stopped and the clouds in my head cleared, I jumped on a local bus to explore a small artesanal mountain village, where I milled the craft shops, hiked up to a viewpoint of the mountains and grabbed coffee and a sandwich by myself at an adorable little cafe. I revelled in being completely alone again, in exploring at my own pace and being unsure whether I really would take that flight home. For now, it was time to enjoy the rest of Colombia. But San Gil was much bigger than I’d expected, and with its size brought the same dirty and busy discomforting feeling as the other cities. I felt like retreating to tiny villages like the one I was currently in, in the mountains and wilderness, for the rest of my time here, and getting out of San Gil as soon as I’d had my paragliding adventure.

After a questionably shit ‘pool party’ arranged by some of the hostel guests, including a Swiss French guy who turned DJ for the night, I hit my drunk limit and quit early, determined not to throw up mid-air while paragliding tomorrow. A friendly and lively Irish girl, Nadine, who I’d met at the hostel, suggested that if I didn’t want to stay long, I could join her and a friend taking the night bus to Santa Marta tomorrow night. It would mean only one night in a real bed out of three, and a very long journey to get up north before even reaching my next stop Minca, but I knew I was prepared for it. Not wanting to commit just yet, enjoying my carefree, turn-up-at-the-bus-station kind of lifestyle for the moment, I told her I’d sleep on it, and possibly even mull it over when I was almost 2000 metres in the air tomorrow. She said that sounded fair and bid me goodnight.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that I was late for paragliding in the morning, after idly making my staple mango porridge and leisurely sitting down to eat before being told that the instructor was waiting for me. I would forever and always be on pura vida time from now, it seemed, so I apologised and wolfed down my food. It was only me and a strange Swiss man on the tour that day, so we made painfully awful conversation on the drive up through the mountains to the Chicamocha canyon. He was solo travelling Colombia by motorbike, something I could never attempt for fear of the wrath of Colombian drivers, but it became clear that while the man was apparently unafraid of fatally crashing, he was terrified of heights. After asking me at least five times if I was scared, to which I mildly replied each time that I was more excited than anything, he chuckled to himself and clutched at his sweaty palms, trying to hold down the fear. We stood at the top of a mountain looking down on the vast stretch of landscape before us, just about being able to see the canyon snake through the mountains in a horseshoe loop. It was unbelievably beautiful, and I grinned at the thought of running off into it. The Swiss man shivered next to me.

We were given the option to add some adrenaline to the experience, with loops and G Force tricks while in the air, and I shakily agreed, knowing I would love it but also being conscious of how high up I would be, dropping at ridiculous speeds. I decided I wanted to feel alive and nothing less, so I fist-bumped my tandem professional as I got strapped in, and ran with all my might off the top of the mountain. My feet stopped hitting the ground and suddenly there was no ground, just rolling hills and tiny dots of people and houses. I let go of the paraglide straps and spread my arms wide like a bird, whooping and reaching into the air like I wanted to pocket this feeling forever. Whenever I get asked what superpower I’d have, my answer has always been flying, and now it was real, and before I knew it we were catching a thermal spiral and twirling even higher still.

My tandem told me to hold on tight, and I braced myself, knowing the G Force was coming. My stomach flipped and somersaulted, my eyes watered and I could only let out cries of happiness, with a tiny bit of fear, as we plummeted towards the ground and then shot up again. My heart pounded with adrenaline and I laughed when the trick was over, begging to do another one instantly. That feeling beats merely flying, I thought to myself. That feeling, the energy coursing through your body and making you alarmingly aware of just how alive you are, that is true freedom.

I’d wanted to squeeze in a visit to a waterfall in the afternoon before leaving, but as the clouds rolled in and a storm started brewing on our way back to San Gil, I accepted the fact that it was better to relax and wait for the night bus so that I didn’t almost miss anything else. With paragliding checked off the bucket list, done and dusted, I was also done and dusted with this place, and craved the tropical heat and jungles of the north. I joined Nadine and Evie in their wait for the night bus, all three of us going out for a final meal in San Gil to celebrate, but regretting it instantly when all three of our meals could’ve been compared to actual dog shit. My coffee was literally hot milk with a tiny aftertaste of real coffee, and the slimy vegetables on my plate made me want to vomit. We now wouldn’t eat a proper meal until tomorrow afternoon, so mourned over our gross-tasting dinners and left abruptly.

So far, 90% of local Colombian food I’d tried had been utterly disgusting, save the empanadas, and I’d ended up skimping my own food instead to make it last as many meals as possible. Every food establishment stank of deep fat fryers, everything was covered in oil, and vegetables mostly seemed like a thing of the past. I was glad I was forcing myself to eat as much fruit and veg as I could by buying from local markets and cooking myself, but I slightly missed the cheap and comparably nice street food of Central America. I packed rice cakes, peanut butter and an apple for my bus breakfast, a top-notch dish that only a night bus connoisseur could dream up, and followed the girls into a taxi to the terminal.

We’d split up in Santa Marta, with me heading straight to Minca, the famed gem of a small town hidden in the Sierra Nevadas, while the girls attempted to find the hostel they’d booked in the middle of nowhere. I’d been close to joining them, but my previous experience of middle-of-buttfuck hostels, and the physical and mental pain of getting all my stuff there and back, prevented me. So, save this incredibly long night bus journey, I was flying solo yet again, and buckled in for a numb bum and my rice cake breakfast.

The seemingly simple task of getting from Costa Rica to Bogota, except it just keeps getting worse

I woke up on the morning of my flight out of Costa Rica and to Colombia at half 6 in the morning, not only with the most violent hangover I could possibly imagine, but also with the sinking realisation that something wasn’t right. The two girls staying in the other section of our dorm, Stephanie and Cat, had both come down with some sort of virus, from the dodgy water or mosquitos we didn’t know, and they’d suffered intensely with fever, dehydration and vomiting, much worse than the previous virus outbreak in the hostel a week before. As I felt my forehead burning up and rushed to the loo that morning, I knew two things: first, I was getting my second awful stomach bug in two weeks, and second, I had to try and push through it if I was going to make it to Colombia by nightfall.

To make matters comically worse, Paul had decided to wait until my last night in Puerto Viejo to confess his feelings for me, something even more unexpected than the aggressive dysentery I’d just caught, and we’d had one blissful night together before I ran away yet again. I looked at Paul, who was just waking up and realising that I’d fallen ill, and contemplated the six hours of local bus rides that I’d need to take to get me to San Jose’s airport for my 4pm flight. On one hand, I’d waste a lot of money missing the flight, and besides, my infected wounds and stomach needed a break from the tropical Costa Rican climate. But on the other, something so irrationally strong was pulling at me to stay with Paul, to not let him go, to stay with him and Lukas forever if I could. Was it even possible for me to travel in this state, without instant access to a toilet? In my insane dilemma I did the only thing I could think of, and called my mum.

Instead of calming my nerves, my mother told me she was worried I had contracted sepsis and needed urgent medical attention when I reached Bogota, so I thanked her dryly and hung up the phone. I was alone in this one, no one to tell me what I should do. I could barely move through my pain, could barely think through the intense fever coursing its way through my body. I needed to make a decision, and fast, before my bus left for Limon. I looked at Paul again, his big and curious blue eyes, his messy curly hair and tanned skin, and forcefully shut out the emotions tugging me towards him. In my head, mantras were echoing: I am solo, I do this alone. Keep moving. Come on, Cerys. Be brave. Be strong. Come on. I dragged myself out of bed and told Paul I had to keep going, trying not to cry. He said okay. We looked at each other for a long time, an unspoken back-and-forth of him begging me to stay and my stupid stubbornness at leaving Puerto behind. I didn’t even know exactly why I was leaving, or how on earth I would make it to my flight, given the risk factor involved in taking Costa Rica’s, shit at the best of times, public transport all the way from coast to airport. But I left, turning away from Paul and the hostel deliriously, and started my slow painful trudge to the bus station.

Fast forward seven hours and I’d miraculously made it to San Jose, after fainting twice while changing buses in Limon and almost throwing up an embarrassing amount of times, painfully swallowing down and sucking in disgusting body fluids so no one would fine me. The biggest problem now was that I only had an hour to board my plane. And the airport was a 30 minute Uber ride away. I felt simultaneously terrified and disassociated, too exhausted from the stress I’d already endured throughout the day to panic at all, as I wordlessly got into the Uber and prayed that I’d been gifted a lunatic driver. Sadly, said driver didn’t even get to show his potential because standstill traffic awaited us on the highway towards the airport, making it clear that we’d never even make it there in time. I received the inevitable, dreaded call from my airline telling me the gate was closing without me, and a single tear of desperation watered up in my eye before I blinked it away furiously, determined to keep calm and work something out. My Uber driver was more upset about the situation than I was, arguing with the airline woman on the other end of the phone to just wait five more minutes and looking at me with wide eyes. I waved the idea away and hung up the phone, assuring him that I was okay and immediately searching for the cheapest, closest hostel to the airport to crash for the night.

‘Fuck you, San Jose,’ I thought to myself after attempting to digest my first meal of the day, a humble Subway, and throwing it all back up instantaneously. ‘Fuck you for dragging me back here three times when I’m clearly trying to leave.’ San Jose has a funny way of engraining itself into your memory, becoming the beginning and end of all roads, the place you can never escape from. I’d developed a Jane Austen worthy love-hate relationship with it. And apparently I wasn’t alone: in my new last-minute hostel I met a severely annoying Californian man who’d managed to get himself stuck in this god-forsaken city for 18 months straight, doing absolutely nothing in particular aside from escaping California. I asked if he’d visited any other places in Costa Rica, in disbelief that someone can spend so long in a rough capital city without even liking it here, and he said no, looking confused that I’d even suggested leaving.

I had to get out. I’d booked a new flight the next day, for a very decent price considering the tardiness, and was now gearing myself up to take a shower, which involved the pain of standing up without getting explosive diarrhoea, and the pain of having to clean out my fondly-named “pizza leg” infection again, which at this point I’d accepted would never fully heal. It really was a horrible ordeal, taking me at least an hour to wash myself, and at the end I still didn’t feel much better. I could only hope that I would sleep off the worst of my illness tonight, and avoid nightmares of being stuck in San Jose for eternity.

When the flight attendant told me the next morning that I was safely checked in, with no problems at all, a comfortable 90 minutes before my flight, I was convinced I was still dreaming, and turned away from the desk clutching my boarding pass as if it would disappear if I relaxed even the slightest bit. The next thing I knew I was crying in relief. It didn’t even seem like a dramatic reaction given the last 24 hours, because for once, if briefly, the universe had stopped doing me dirty. I was so relieved that I’d actually be making it to Bogota that the excitement didn’t even reach me until we’d touched down and I snapped back into ‘go mode’. In the hour-long queue at customs I realised I really, really needed the toilet again, but was too stubborn to give up my spot, so spent the 60 minutes crouching in agony at my stomach pains and pleading I could hold it in. When I eventually made it to the desk I had everything out ready, turned to all the correct pages so I could rush to the toilet once it was over, but got stumped when the official asked me where I was staying. ‘How can I tell Colombian passport control that I don’t know where I’m staying without getting deported?’ I mused internally.

In truth, I knew where I was staying: with Arin, a friend from uni who was doing a study abroad year in Bogota. I just didn’t know where he lived. And I couldn’t tell the customs man I was staying at ‘Arin’s’; that would definitely get me deported. I wracked my brain for the address Arin had given me and the same address that I’d instantly forgotten without writing down, and managed to recall the name ‘Calle 18’ seemingly out of thin air, a dissolving cloud in my vomit-plagued mind. Confidently and completely unconvincingly, I blurted it out to the customs guy with a shaky smile. The problem with Latin American addresses is that they all either contain the Spanish for ‘street’ followed by a vague string of numbers, or will be something like ‘the green house on the corner’, meaning they could be literally anywhere. And there was definitely a lot of Calle 18’s in Bogota, the capital city of Colombia. He asked me where on Calle 18, predictably, and I was rendered thoroughly stumped once more. With only one hope to get the hell out of here and on the toilet, I reeled off a list of numbers in Spanish and silently prayed.

Clearly it wasn’t enough, because all I received was a dead-eyed stare and single blink from Mr Scary Colombian Customs Man. He set the pen down and I mused that it probably wasn’t a good idea to blatantly lie my way into Colombia, but I didn’t know what else to do. I had no SIM card yet, no Wifi, no way of contacting Arin. Aimlessly, I pointed at the map on my phone and blurted out some seriously incoherent Spanish for a few minutes, batting my eyes as much as I could through the pains that were writhing in my stomach, and thankfully, mercifully, finally, he gave in and stamped my passport.

By the time I got my hands on some Wifi to text Arin and ask him where the hell he lived, I was so exhausted by the day, and the lingering dysentery, that I just knew I needed sleep, and a lot of it. Within 48 hours I’d caught feelings for a German boy, gotten violently ill, attempted to take two flights, only successfully managed one, changed countries, narrowly avoided being sent back, taken a painful amount of buses, and was now sat in the lobby of an apartment block, unable to fully recount how I was still alive, breathing, and here. After telling him the whole story, Arin was pretty shocked too. He introduced me to his friends in the high-rise downtown apartment block, took me out for food, and even showed me the first draught beer I’d seen in months, but that was all my body could muster for the day.

And with all honesty, save the beautiful artisan coffee shop visits by day and hardcore benders at night, sleep was all I did for the next couple of days. Being in a real city with a real friend from home again had the same effect as waking up from a dream that felt real – I was disorientated, deflated, and drained. I really had left Central America behind. Arin made amazing efforts as tour guide, showing me different neighbourhoods in Bogota’s maze, local and fancy coffee syphoning methods, and the historical plaza Bolivar, constantly surprising me with his local-like knowledge of the city, but even despite all of this I couldn’t escape the feeling. The feeling, the miserable fact, that Bogota was dark and rainy and made me even more lethargic, strikingly similar to London. I just couldn’t fall in love with it. After the tropical beaches and pura vida lifestyle in Puerto Viejo, and after over three months of mystical Central American paradises, it was hard to adjust to dirty, busy city life. To wake up to the real world. Where crackheads tried to pull knives on you and a suffocating amount of cars were ready at any minute to flatten you. The weather was bad, the people walked too fast, and the only saving grace was finding a poke restaurant, I decided.

However, my intention of visiting Bogota had been clear from the start: I hadn’t come for good weather, or friendly people or to get a break from being cat-called, I’d come to party. The electrically intense reggaeton and techno parties I’d attended religiously in Guatemala were only distant memories now, and I found myself desperately craving Bad Bunny. I also knew that hanging out with students in Colombia’s capital city was the perfect way to un-bury those memories from their graves. Here, people partied all night and well into daytime, and then slept until it was time to go again, meaning that the lack of flair in Bogota was made up for because the only things you see are the four walls of a nightclub or your own bedroom. I was nowhere near this level of crazy, but I was admittedly excited to dabble in the student lifestyle for a few days. It started with a techno party where I witnessed more drama on one night out than I’d ever seen before. Arin and I joined a massive group of French students who were loud and loved to get with each other, as well as everyone else, so the night became a kiss-count competition and simultaneous argument over kissing the same people. I stood on the outskirts of the action observing, thoroughly confused and drinking water for my poor, recovering stomach, marvelling at how it was possible to so confidently grind on each other in the local ‘perreo’ dancing style.

Culture-shocked and hungover to my core, the next day I heard the best news I’d had in a while, considering the missed flights and dysentery. Anna, my lovely German friend who I’d met months, or what felt like centuries, ago in Mexico, was in Bogota and heading to Medellin next, like me. The last time I’d seen her we were stuck in Chetumal, the Mexican border town with Belize, and we’d eaten weird pizza in a weird restaurant to celebrate neither of our attempts to leave working out. Then we split, Anna heading to Palenque and I to Belize. That had been way back in November, and now, feeling like a truly seasoned traveller four months later, I knew it would be strange to see each other again after so much growth. I’d gone from having a planned itinerary that I was slowly starting to stray off from, to being a hectic, last-minute free spirit who decided on things mere hours before they happened. But Anna, a few years older than me, had always seemed head-strong in a completely spontaneous and chaotic way, and I admired her as much for her bravery now as I did back in Cancun on Day One. In a way, she was a lot of the reason why I’d become the traveller I had.

We were headed to the “biggest club in town” for Friday night, with mine and Anna’s plan being to party and then head straight for a night bus to Medellin at 4am. Instead of putting makeup on, I got ready by scrubbing my cheese-looking infected leg with a bar of soap in the shower and consequently picking out bits of dirt and yellow scabs with a pair of tweezers like I was performing surgery. Arin walked in while I was digging into my leg, phone flashlight in hand, glasses donned and wincing through the pain, and confusedly laughed at me before walking out again. I knew I must appear utterly bizarre in the real world now, after being shocked that he’d gifted me a real bed in his own room, that there was a hot shower, and that I could actually throw toilet paper down the toilet here, after months of getting used to disgusting sanitary bins. I slightly liked it that way, being completely out of touch with how it’s done in ‘normal life’, with my only worry being how I’d adjust when I eventually did end up back at home again. What would life be without squeezing all my belongings into a backpack every couple of nights and being covered in various inexplicable injuries? I wasn’t sure how ready I was for it to end.

Mine and Anna’s reunion was as heartfelt and movie-like as it could’ve been amidst the 2010 and reggaeton hits being blasted from Arin’s speaker at pre-drinks. We sat on the sofa in his friend Teo’s apartment and laughed and tried to catch up as much as we could, but the music and the dancing people and the alcohol quickly took over our attempts. We went on a search for a pair of socks and trainers for Anna, after she showed up wearing staple backpacker sandals and was too embarrassed to wear them in the real world of nightclubs, and upon entering the massive, multi-storied club went straight for a tequila shot to celebrate old times. While Arin and the group of French people methodically made their way around the venue, assessing the best rooms to dance in and socialise, Anna and I ran around like maniacs, trying and failing to convince the outdoor karaoke stage team to let us sing ‘Tequila’. We made friends with locals, got kicked out of a pub room playing slow-dance music, and taught a group of guys how unacceptable it is to refuse something after someone asks “por que no?”, which backfired (or was successful, whichever way you look at it) when they started relentlessly handing us straight whiskey to shot. At some point we realised we were completely drunk after buying barely anything. The night ended in what can only be described as a gay club room, being cheered on by queers and getting way too confident in our dancing abilities.

I woke up at midday and instantly remembered the 4am bus we were meant to get, which had turned into the 6am and then the 9am bus we were meant to get. Anna had disappeared off to her hostel at some point in the night, and, apart from texting me that she was alive, we’d had no contact about how the hell we were making it to Medellin in this state. Jumping out of my still-drunk reverie, I grabbed my phone from the floor and scrolled through my messages to Anna. She was online, so I sent a message demanding that we make the 2pm bus. Anna suggested just staying in Bogota for another day and hopping on a night bus as the more sensible option, but I was adamant that I would not stay in this godforsaken city a minute longer than I had to, so convinced her to come with on a whirlwind, hungover Uber ride to the bus terminal. Like zombies, absolutely starving and having probably never felt worse in our lives, we lugged our two massive backpacks around in search for a bus to Medellin. After finding one in 20 minutes’ time and separating to buy snacks for the journey, I found myself in a Dunkin’ Donuts waiting for my coffee and pastries, blissfully unaware of the clock and clearly still on Costa Rica ‘pura vida’ time, when Anna appeared from the waiting room in a panic, shouting that they were about to leave us behind. I was forced to remember that in the real world, a lot of things actually left on time, and grabbed my food, hurrying off to the bus.

After the initial shock of me almost getting stuck in a bus terminal in Bogota, Anna gave in to my good mood about it all and laughed with me, about my inability to be on time, or apparently care about anything. I realised that this was my first time actually travelling from one place to another with someone else since catching local buses with Lore in Belize, and smiled to myself as we chatted together and settled in for the painful journey ahead. I inhaled some orange juice, my body screaming for vitamins after the night we’d had, and then felt too sick to eat anything else, instead thinking about what awaited us in Medellin. I knew Conal was living there, the lovable northerner I’d worked with in Guatemala, as were Paul and Josh, the Scousers that had joined us in saving Christmas and cooking dinner for over 30 people. I knew it would be a legendary Mr Mullet’s reunion, but I also couldn’t help thinking about Paul and Lukas, who I’d left behind in Costa Rica and had now moved to Panama. I was surprised just how much they occupied my thoughts, at how difficult it was to keep travelling alone without them. But I was determined to keep going, so I plugged in my headphones, sipped my scalding coffee, and watched Colombia crawl by from the bus window.

Tales from an alternate pura vida dimension where leg infections don’t matter and time is an illusion

Pura vida, Costa Rica’s most famous quip, simply means ‘pure life’ in Spanish, but it’s a lot, lot more than that. Pura vida is a lifestyle that lets go of all worry and rejoices in positivity, it’s a friendly greeting, a farewell wave, a shrug if things have gone bad and a cheer if they’ve gone well. Pura vida changes the whole dynamic of the country, the whole dynamic of anyone who happens to visit, it lifts up your heart and leaves you inexplicably peaceful and happy. Pura vida goes hand in hand with the slow and relaxed Caribbean way of life, and suddenly nothing matters because everyone is in complete harmony together. Pura vida tells us to let go, to accept things as they are, to say fuck it, to be kind, to love deeply, to smile a lot, to embrace adventure, to be brave, because after all, pura vida. It’s an explanation for everything, the answer to all questions you could possibly ask, it’s the meaning of life and the most spiritual thing in existence, while also being the most simple. Pure life. Real, raw, pure life. Beautiful life. Simply, pura vida.

I wasn’t feeling very pura vida sitting at the volunteer base in Rio Hondo watching my leg get slowly more and more infected with each day that passed, but I suppose that’s also the beauty of pura vida. Fuck, this is bad. That kind of pura vida. Fuck fuck fuck, I thought to myself repeatedly, gingerly touching my cheek where the burn graze had become a huge, swollen blister that was oozing liquid constantly. After getting too tequila-drunk and falling off my bike on our weekend trip to Puerto Viejo, I was now reaping the rough consequences of my stupid decision, and trying and failing to keep my wounds clean. We’d returned to Abby and Marie hungover, vomiting and with me limping over the train tracks, shells of the humans we once were. But the show must go on, so lessons resumed for the volunteers that weren’t at flight risk of rushing to the toilet every few hours. I’d got the back end of the bug everyone had caught too, so as well as trying to look after my leg and face, I spent a lot of time on the loo and didn’t eat a thing. We all slept a lot and cried sometimes and got ridiculously homesick in the next few days, feeling melancholic in a way you only feel thousands of kilometres from home, ill and injured. Sorry for myself was a big understatement.

We were also unfortunately in the worst place possible for my wounds to heal without getting infected, thanks to the sheer amount of humidity in the inland Caribbean. I fought the overwhelming sadness with forced shows of laughter at how ridiculous my situation was, merrily singing along to Frank Ocean in the shower while I took a bar of antibacterial soap and scrubbed my dirty knee, ignoring the pain. A few days later and it still looked no better, with my toe and foot being yellow and un-healing as well. I sat on the bench swing and stared out from the wrap-around veranda at the beautiful tropical oasis around us, frustrated at how I still felt so unbelievably shit and cursing myself for letting go of all reason as soon as alcohol entered my system. I’d been sending Paul light-hearted updates with photos of my gross wounds and of volunteers vomiting every so often, and I’d called my parents to explain the situation, but it wasn’t enough to keep being positive. Suddenly the facade came falling down, and I let myself cry. In that moment I was so unbelievably sorry for myself that the combination of food poisoning, infected wounds, and being alone in a foreign country was too much to handle. I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do this.

I wanted to book the next flight back to England and forget about Colombia, forget about staying any longer than I absolutely had to. I snapped at Rebecka who adorably came to ask if I was alright, angry that people had seen me cry and angry at myself for being weak. I was so used to being strong, in saying that I could do anything; this setback really blew my confidence. Tearily, I asked Abby if we could go to the emergency room because I was starting to get very worried about my knee, and she let me drop the lesson I was meant to teach to find a doctor to check it out. Healthcare is free in Costa Rica, and incredibly efficient, so within two hours I was in and out of Siquirres’ A&E room holding onto bright green antibiotics and even brighter pink painkillers. I would still have to clean the wound myself, since they hadn’t even been concerned with getting the dirt out of it, but I convinced myself that it would have a much better chance of healing now, and that I wasn’t going to die. Back at the base I donned my glasses, which I only used in emergency situations such as this so I wouldn’t lose them somewhere in Central America, disinfected my mini pair of scissors and got to work on my knee, determined to get the dirt out. Tugging out an alarmingly big pebble from the gunk, I stared in mild shock at the debris that had collected in my leg, and laughed at how indifferent I was to this now compared to a few months ago. At least I was braver.

With my knee pebble-less, what awaited me was a painfully slow routine of scrubbing out infected pus from all my wounds, and waiting for them to scab over and eventually heal. I started teaching classes again, trying to ignore the huge graze marks on my face that had hardened into patches of painful, dark scabs, and slowly I started to feel better. The volunteers all recovered from our traumatic weekend, both physically and mentally, and we started eating together again, socialising more and playing card games in the evenings. My home-sickness dissipated seemingly into thin air as the group’s positivity returned, and with it, my excitement for more adventure. The drunk bike accident became just another silly story, one that I had got past and could move on from. My head was now a mix of teaching women’s English classes, learning poker, and waiting for Friday, the day that marked my freedom. My backpacker life, ready and waiting for me. And no, there was no way I was going home. I’d begun to enjoy life on the train tracks again; rejoicing at our shitty shower which managed to turn lukewarm, giggling with Jemima about boys until we fell asleep, marvelling at the sofas which had been put in our previously furniture-less new house, cleaning my teeth in smelly sinks and noticing cockroaches climbing out of them. Little things that made material comforts at home the last things I wanted.

We went on walks around the pineapple plantations and rivers of our temporary home, Jan and I made friends with the man in the pulperia, I got addicted to the peanut butter that served as one of the only snacks available in the house, we learned a card game called Secret Hitler which resulted in everyone yelling about someone else being a fascist. In the evenings Rebecka would make popcorn and Georgie would put the kettle on, and then we’d eat snacks, drink tea, listen to music and play cards. In the days, when we weren’t lesson-prepping, we were sunbathing or doing laundry or going on walks or reading while watching tropical rain. Things became peaceful, rhythmic, like the calm after our Puerto Viejo storm, and for a few days, that’s exactly what I needed. Right now, the blissful home-like sanctuary of Rio Hondo and my lovely volunteer friends put my heart at rest and made me smile endlessly. At least, that was until I entered the backpacking storm again, searching for more stupid tales and crazy adventures.

My last night at the project was also Rebecka and Thea’s, and the mood on base was a sad and reflective one. The air was quiet, the wind still and the stars sparkling timidly as we ate our last dinner together as a group of 10 and talked about our favourite moments, as well as the most questionable ones. The volunteers had a ritual of writing each other small notes and collecting them for each person who left, meaning that on your very last day you’d get to see a whole little book of notes from the people you’d volunteered with. After dinner I joined Jan and Georgie on the stone garden table on the grass and we set out writing each person a note for when they left, while the rest of the group filtered away into different spots to write theirs. We got talking about bravery and solo travelling, and Georgie asked me, like so many other women had in the last few months, how I could go on such a mammoth adventure alone and not be scared. “Oh no, I’m always scared,” I told her. “But that’s vital. Feeling fear is inevitable if you want to grow as a person, because it’s only when you’re truly out of your comfort zone and in the scary unknown that you can change.”

Georgie was a very smart girl; I knew from the second I met her that she thought deeply and cared for knowledge, cared for truth and for justice and for good. I could almost see her powerful brain working through those bright, pale eyes, and sometimes I felt like she could see right through to my soul too. She was almost intimidatingly smart, because the way she articulated her feelings and formulated arguments and stood up for what she believed in was beautiful. And now, just as she had taught me how to speak up a bit louder about things that matter, I was teaching her how to be a woman, alone, and brave. I always told the girls at the project, who were all so incredible for coming to Costa Rica and living in a completely foreign environment and working hard to help others, that I utterly admired them and hoped that they would all go on at least one solo trip one day. They would ask why, and I would say that travelling is undoubtedly invaluable, but only going solo can show you that it is you, alone, that can get yourself through the hardest and scariest of situations, and that once you go through them, because you have to, you can do anything.

Georgie listened to me tell her about the miserable person I was half a year ago, having lost my sense of self, my freedom, the dreams I’d always had and the life I truly wanted, and she couldn’t believe that I could’ve ever been in that place, compared to the strength of the person I was now. In that time I’d done so many things, seen so many places, overcome so many challenges, all alone. But just as valuable were the friends I’d made along the way, the people I’d met and learned from and been inspired by. It is by knowing these people and yet going on my own individual journey that I had managed to grow so distinctly in the space of three months. The two weeks I spent at Rio Hondo had given me unexpected friends who’d turned into massive impacts in my life, each one teaching me something new about myself. I told Georgie that in return, if I could teach her anything, it was to be brave. And then I turned to Jan, who’d brought out his Costa Rican flag that he got all his new friends to sign, and grabbed a pen.

“The world belongs to the brave – Cerys.”

The next morning, after saying my final goodbye to the volunteers, being dropped off in Siquirres and catching my first public bus in weeks, I pulled out the little book that Marie had made from all the notes they’d written me. I’m a very emotional person and I feel incredibly deeply, but I wasn’t prepared to feel this overwhelmed as I sat on the bus with tears in my eyes and a smile on my face. I read the gorgeous things my friends had said about me over and over again, remembering each of them and mentally giving them all my love. When I was done reading the notebook 15 times I turned my music up loud and looked out of the window, now thinking about my freedom, the next path, how electric it felt to be on the road again, how alive I was at being alone. I was ready to leave Rio Hondo and get back to backpacking, but I couldn’t imagine what my journey would have looked like without it. I silently thanked the universe for teaching me the importance of friendship and reflection and even the occasional rule, and asked if next time I could just be a bit more careful on bikes, as I trundled south to Puerto Viejo once more. On the move again.

Two buses and a whole lot of emotion later, I hopped off in front of my new hostel, a 10 minute walk away from the main town and off the side of a main road. Jan was already waiting for me; he’d decided to come back to Puerto on his weekend off rather than stick with the other volunteers in their mini-trip to San Jose, having previously got on amazingly well with Paul and Lukas, two fellow Germans. We were now staying with them in a lowkey, family-run collection of little cabinas called Hostal Cecilia, where the boys had already made friends with the owners and guests. I’d texted Paul a few times to no reply, and since Jan and I didn’t have a reservation anywhere, just a promise that we could stay with them, my Catholic companion’s panic started rising. I couldn’t explain how I instinctively knew, but an affirming sense told me everything was going to work out, so I tried to explain it to Jan while we walked up to the hostel entrance. And there, two seconds after we arrived, Paul and Lukas appeared to wash their surfboards and hair in the outdoor shower after coming back from a session, noticed us, and ran to greet us, in disbelief at this perfect timing.

Something was different this time; I didn’t just see Paul and Lukas as a couple of German guys I’d met a couple of times and enjoyed hanging out with, but was overcome with a joy I rarely felt when I saw their faces again. I’d first met them on Day Numero Uno of their travels, and compared to the pale, lost-looking faces I’d known in San Jose, these confident, purely happy smiles, tanned bodies and salt-washed curls were a world away. It felt like I was coming back to people I’d known for years, the familiarity of their laughs and greetings made me feel safe and comfortable, and as they helped us bring our bags inside and showed us the dorm the four of us would be sharing together, it was like settling into a new life. A pura vida. The owner, Cecilia, gave us massive bowls of the stew she’d made as welcome gift, her son and manager William showed us around the hostel, and the handyman, a hilarious guy named Tito, fixed Lukas’ skateboard and snuck some drinks and joints with us while getting through his odd jobs. Life became so easy, flowing without trying, and I smiled while letting the hours pass in complete bliss.

Hostal Cecilia also owned a cabina across the road towards the beach, surrounded by a small stretch of jungle, where four Floridian guys who Paul and Lukas had befriended were staying. We spent the evening getting high and cramming ourselves into the hammocks on their teeny tiny porch, chatting an unbelievable amount of shit and laughing a lot. I whipped out my yellow nail polish, which I conveniently carried around with me everywhere for no other reason than occasionally getting drunk and letting other people paint my nails awfully, and it wasn’t long before Jan, Lukas, Paul, Alex, Frankie, Matt, Nick and I had formulated the ‘Yellow Pinky Club’, a very exclusive affair of beautifully executed yellow nails.

The next morning was clearly going to be a slow one, but from the moment I woke up, it was the best morning of my life, and yet I didn’t really know why. We were all purely happy without rhyme or reason, just delighted at existing in that very moment. Paul and I made mounds of food with the ingredients already in the fridge, porridge with mango and toast and a bizarre scrambled egg spaghetti dish with lettuce, and we filled up four Costa Rica flag mugs with the strong black coffee the hostel provided for our group of four amigos. We shared our food with Stephanie and Cat, the two girls also sharing our cabina in the adjacent room to ours, and washed up all together, laughing endlessly and soaking in the warm morning sun. All I knew that it was a good, good morning to be alive, and although it took forever to get anything done, none of it mattered even the slightest bit. Slowly and happily, we got dressed and started walking out of town up to the jungle, talking about life and love and travelling and happiness as we went. Paul stopped me abruptly as the word “hate” left my mouth while I was explaining something, and told me that we don’t say that anymore. “Why?” I asked, and he replied: “It’s bad karma. Besides, it’s such a negative emotion, and why would you want to feel so strongly negative about so many things?” I was taken aback at the amount of wisdom stored in this 20 year old’s body, and silently swore to myself that I would stop saying “hate” from now on.

We walked up into the jungle using trails that seemed like they only existed on my trails app, which I already knew not to be the most reliable source to use. We ended up clambering through branches and vines, dodging massive ant highways everywhere that belonged to the angry, red, biting kind, getting spooked by a mysterious man hacking through the trees with a machete who appeared on our path, and laughing through it all. Through the intense heat and sweat and bugs everything seemed mystical, surreal even, and incredibly trippy for Jan and Lukas, both high as kites. Paul was dedicated to going barefoot everywhere, as was I now that I was fully embracing the pura vida lifestyle, but not enough to copy him this time, and I was quietly very thankful to myself for it. While he nimbly hopped around the treacherous obstacles on the ground I admired the nature surrounding us, my adventurous happy companions, the ease with which we got lost on the trails and then found our way back to the roads of Puerto Viejo. A bouncy excitable dog followed us and then decided to latch on to Jan’s heels, yapping and jumping up at him in a confused frenzy. Still stoned out of his mind, Jan made some lazy movements to move it away and hurriedly starting running around to lose it, making the rest of us double over in wheezing laughter.

Deciding not to worry about what we’d eat tonight until the universe compelled us to, we walked instead to the beach to watch a dramatic cloudy sunset, all huddled on a wet log and united in body and soul. Through the clouds, golden beams of light shone in the shape of a cross, and I looked over at Jan smiling, already anticipating the look of mesmerisation on his face. He had tears in his eyes and I knew in that moment, even though I wasn’t remotely religious myself, that it was what he needed to see, the exact image that would make him feel at peace. So yeah, he wasn’t exactly the best devout Catholic I’d ever met, so what. By pushing past his confusion and guilt, going on this journey, he was learning to have a relationship with God that also lined up with his true identity, and I was so excited to see the person he would grow into with more time on the road. And as we returned to the hostel in the dark and realised how hungry we all were, in a perfect coincidence, we were greeted by Cat and Stephanie, who’d made a huge communal pasta dish for dinner for us all to eat together. This harmonic life we led here, not worrying about money, living collectively, respecting each other and cooking for each other and loving each other, made my heart feel like it would burst, like this was what my whole life was meant to be.

Back on the beer and Cacique, which we’d started pairing with orange and carrot juice for an elite beverage, we got the Yellow Pinky Club together for a reggae party that was being held at a local hostel, the perfect genre for our Puerto vida. I brought back my German alter ego with a vengeance, and Paul and I managed to convince not only Alex, one of the Floridians who – fair play to him – had no idea whether there was a bizarrely named German region whose people could speak English fluently in a undoubtedly British accent, but an English girl called Rae who literally had the same accent as me and yet got completely fooled. We kept it up for hours, and later, at a street party where locals sold beers out of the boots of their cars and played music on standalone speakers, I broke the news to Rae that obviously I knew where Stratford upon Avon was and that I, too, was painfully English, and she had to sit down to process the news.

The next morning we woke up late, collectively decided to have a ‘no phones, no plans, just vibes’ day, and deliriously laughed our way to Bread and Chocolate, the single best breakfast cafe I have ever had the pleasure of attending. Jan smoked the rest of his weed before having to return to the volunteer base and sat at the table resembling a vegetable, swaying slightly and smiling wildly at his breakfast sandwich, while the rest of us couldn’t help but feel second-hand-stoned just by watching him. We knew that not having our phones wouldn’t be a problem; it was a small town and whenever you wanted to bump into someone, the universe would somehow make it happen. We didn’t have any of the American guys’ numbers, no way to contact all the local and backpacker friends we’d made, and everything felt a lot more organic that way. Instead, we walked around Puerto Viejo like locals, hugging people we knew, receiving small gifts and giving them in turn, fruit, weed and shells all being traded like money. All too quickly Jan had to leave, and I knew I wouldn’t be seeing him any time soon. While Paul and Lukas climbed into a tuk-tuk we’d called to take us to a waterfall, I hugged Jan for as long as I could, told him I was proud of him, and made him promise to keep in touch as he went through his transformative solo adventure. He looked at me and I looked at him, once again silently sharing the same emotions and excitement in our smiles, and then we were gone, whizzing away in the tuk-tuk.

The group’s mood at the Bri Bri waterfall was like a balloon deflated over time; we were relaxed, tired, quiet, and very aware that we were missing someone who felt like he was meant to be there. It was a mellow and relaxing change of scenery to be out of town, basking in the sun, swimming in the waterfall pool and listening to the soft call of animals all around, but we all felt collectively ‘down’ without really knowing why. So we talked, Paul, Lukas and I – talked about our families and our beliefs and our lives until now, about what we were most passionate about and why we didn’t hate anything and why we loved our hippie Puerto Viejo lives. I was left speechless at how insanely amazing these boys were, and as we ventured around a corner, jumping between rocks over the stream and sitting to face the sun, I looked at Paul meditating, at Lukas quietly staring into the water, and wondered how on earth I had been given the honour in knowing them, in being best friends with them. Slowly, as we’d gotten closer and shared more with each other, I’d realised that by just being around them I became a better person, I stopped eating meat and smiled at strangers and gave without any expectation of receiving, I went out of my way to pick up trash and stopped using my phone and found my spirituality. I was vulnerable with them and told them about the sadness that had brought me away from London and to Central America, about the freedom and joy I felt in their presence, and in return they told me they felt the same. I wanted their energy and smiles and love to stay with me forever, but I knew that it wasn’t long before I was catching a flight to Colombia, and then I’d have to leave behind their beautiful souls and keep growing, moving.

But our time wasn’t over yet, and our final celebration for Lukas’ 30th birthday was still to be had, so we left the waterfall and started discussing the beach party we were planning for it the next day. We decided to hitch-hike back to town, one of my favourite travel activities for meeting new interesting people and the boys’ first experience of it. We were picked up by a man in a truck, with six kids in the backseat and heaps of platanos in the pick-up, where we made ourselves at home and whooped as wind whipped our hair and we sped down the jungle highway. When he dropped us off at a junction he gave us a platano bunch for free and got all the kids to wave us off, and five minutes later a hippie Spanish couple picked us up and played us their favourite music as we cruised into Puerto Viejo. Just as expected, the one time we needed to rush back to Hostal Cecilia to make dinner and for Lukas to go to the toilet, we bumped into absolutely everyone we knew, and had to tell Alex the 411 as we shuffled past him, feeling bad at how happy he’d looked to see us and laughing together at Lukas clenching as he ran.

I woke up the next day with the sudden overwhelming realisation that I was less than 48 hours away from taking a flight to a completely new country, and I had planned absolutely dot-diddly-squat on how to successfully do it. In the pura vida ease of life here I had gotten completely caught up and settled, and now had to run around in a slightly maddened state, stressing about immigration forms and bus tickets and where my passport happened to be hiding. Paul joined me on my errand run to the bus station and supermarket for Lukas’ surprise vegan birthday cake ingredients, and I vented to him about how bizarre it felt to be leaving tomorrow. In return, seeing as though we’d decided to hang out together the whole day and keep the cake a secret from our friend, he told me more about himself and his life, and once again I felt a painful twang of having to leave this beautiful person behind. He told me about his ice hockey career at a young age, about the anxiety it had given him in his teen years that prevented him from even leaving the house, about finding surfing and skating and rebuilding his confidence, about how free he was now. We snuck into the hostel and started making our questionable cake batter using no recipes or thoughts, just vibes, and as I jotted down some musings in my journal, I looked up at Paul putting the cake in the oven and it struck me that I loved him. I wasn’t sure in which way, I just knew I did. And that was okay.

Typical, that I would finally find someone I truly loved, and two beautiful friendships worth keeping, right before leaving the country and entering a new continent. I was closer than I’d been the whole trip to cancelling the flight, forgetting about my dreams of solo exploring Colombia, and for once settling somewhere. These boys were too special. But it was too late now; I comforted myself with thoughts of visiting them in Germany in the summer, before we reunited with Lukas and joined the Floridian gang in a game of football at a nearby local field. I swiftly tapped out as the game began due to my worryingly pus-filled knee, instead perching on Paul’s skateboard and attempting to cover my leg from the flies and mosquitos with Lukas’ sweaty tank top. Paul soon joined me, after being so desperate to play that he’d used a piece of plastic wrapping and the string from my face-mask to create a makeshift plaster for the gash on the bottom of his toe. Each time his contraption fell off he returned to me with a new master plan involving more every-day trash objects, grinning at the lunacy of his determination and enjoying himself playing Doctor Paul. I grinned back, looking up from my journal to watch him return to the game and finding myself unable to take my eyes off him. Even through the dense humidity of the day, the dripping sweat and the incessant bugs, he looked beautiful, and watching him in motion was like watching art. Every action, every movement seemed so effortless, like Paul was made for this world, or like this world was made for him. He fit so perfectly into the chaos, dirty and bruised and happy, finally giving up and limping towards me as the last plaster invention fell off his toe.

The boys and I all cycled to the beach afterwards, making a mad dash for the sea to cool off. I hadn’t played football with them, and I knew for a fact that the last thing my knee needed was to be wet yet again, but I couldn’t resist the freedom of the ocean so followed behind them, laughing. After revealing our weird vegan chocolate cake to Lukas and singing happy birthday to him with the American guys back at the hostel, we returned to the beach armed with a bottle of Cacique, orange and carrot juice to wash it down, and the least damp firewood we could find. Alex and Paul ran around crazily sourcing more fuel for a bonfire while Lukas and I giggled at nothing, ecstatic in the dark night and singing along to music.

To be here, on a beach in Costa Rica, celebrating Lukas’ 30^th birthday and staring at the lopsided moon (“Look guys!” I called to everyone, “If you turn your head sideways it’s like being in Europe!”), seemed both utterly bizarre and incredible. Rae and her friends soon joined us for our impromptu beach bonfire party, and we danced with Paul and Lukas to Madness, excitedly pointing at the luminous sky of stars and iridescent glowing waves in the distance. It was beyond a perfect night, and I regrettably and eventually tore myself away from the fun when I realised I was way too drunk, and needed to get at least some sleep before my big day of travelling tomorrow. Groundhog day was upon me, the day I had to snap out of the ‘pura vida’ mindset, leave Costa Rica and rejoin the real world – or at least, that was the plan. Nothing ever really goes to plan though, I should’ve remembered.

The acquired taste of refried bean paste, and its un-relatedness to collective food poisoning

The first few days of real work in Rio Hondo reminded me that I actually don’t like working with kids, and yet that was exactly what I’d signed up to do. After shadowing a ‘summer camp’ English learning and games session with the local children and other new volunteers, where I awkwardly sat amongst the kids and tried to make myself invisible, I sheepishly asked Abby and Marie if I could instead switch my focus to women’s empowerment in the future. They clearly sensed the desperation in my plea and gave me the opportunity to join Abby, Bry and Megan, a down-to-earth English graphic designer turned NGO volunteer with an incredible no-bullshit attitude, in their trip to Tsiobata, an indigenous village further into the mountains. Our base was collaborating with Mar a Mar, a non-profit that created a walking trail through Costa Rica from the Caribbean to the Pacific side for the purpose of experiencing rural life, by giving women in Tsiobata English lessons so they could sell their goods to hikers passing through. The village is only accessible by walking for an hour and a half up into the mountains from the nearest road, including wading stomach-deep in a river and warding off angry jungle ants, and people in the community live up to an hour away from the centre, in hidden corners of the rainforest.

Listening to Abby explain the project and what it would entail, a three-day trip giving two three-hour English workshops for the local women in indigenous Costa Rica, I jumped at the chance, and knew I’d finally found my calling. We set off on the hike, successfully getting across the river, adding a layer of sweat onto our water-soaked clothes, and stepping in a massive swarm of biting red ants if you’re me, because I clearly don’t learn from past mistakes. Flapping the angry insects from their trails up and down my legs, hopping away in pain, I carried on up into the jungle hillsides with the sweat seeping out of my pores in the unbearable humidity. Abby guided us up front, armed with a heavy backpack holding all our food and supplies but acting like she was on a lovely gently stroll, intimidating me even further. We reached the centre of the community dripping wet and starving, and clambered through a locked gate – which everyone apparently just squeezed through instead of ever unlocking it – to the empty school grounds where we’d be camping.

If our living conditions in Rio Hondo were rustic, this was verging on uninhabitable. A concrete floor under a concrete shelter was our bed for the night, which we were sharing with massive jungle spiders, something I only realised after pitching my tent on the very, very hard ground and noticing one sitting in a huge web a metre above it. Megan, who’d made the trip to Tsiobata before and knew it well, assured me that the spiders looked scary but actually didn’t like humans at all, preferring to stay unmoved for weeks on end. I waved timidly at the eight-legged unmoving monster as if trying to make friends and stripped off my soaking wet boots and socks, lying them out in the burning sun to dry. After investigating the basic classrooms we’d be teaching in, one of which being a rotting wooden construction on the other side of the field that was straight out of a haunted house movie, the next step was showering, so I prayed to the heavens for running water and walked round the side of the concrete school building to the toilet, a surprisingly nice facility which even had loo roll, and shower cubicle, a not so nice facility. It wasn’t so much the tap for a showerhead that concerned me, given I’d used many before, but the fact that it pathetically dripped freezing water, had a grimy, virus-inducing floor covered in bugs, and didn’t have a door.

Despite all its numerous flaws and questionable living conditions, I decided I liked it here. We had the basics: a shower, a toilet, a place to sleep, and a kitchen, and I was in the most remote place I’d ever been having the experience of a lifetime. What an adventure! We happily tucked into our meal of tortilla chips, refried bean paste and apples, after sourcing the least mouldy plastic plates in the kitchen and breaking the tap, having to go round the back of the building to fit the two precarious pipes back into each other – something we’d get very used to – and looked around at the school. The field on the other side of the fences was home to some friendly cows, one of which was young and small enough to squeeze through the gate we’d entered in. He was a pale milky colour and had a very distinct curly orange tuft on the top of his head, earning him the fond nickname ‘Carrot Top’, and watched us eating curiously as he explored the field. It was indeed a bizarre place, with little metal huts placed around for school use and a random toilet seat out in the open among the grass.

After lunch, Meg, Bry and I decided to explore a bit more of the village, and took to the muddy footpaths up a hill to the community centre that explained the history and traditions of indigenous locals. Tsiobata is part of the indigenous region Nairi Awari, whose native language is Cabecar, and whose people live mainly in the Barbilla national park. The people of Tsiobata come together for rituals and gatherings according to their tribe’s traditions, but live completely spread out in the mountains. As we came out of the hut and looked around us at the hills, I started noticing little houses dotted around for miles, almost camouflaged among the trees, and thought about the small, discreet paths that must run over every inch of the mountains, trodden on for centuries by people who see it as home, not as wilderness. They walk the way we’d come to reach the nearest town, where some of the children go to high school and where they can buy food and clothes, but apart from that, they don’t enter the built world. It was hard to comprehend, but completely amazed me. After our small walking tour of the main part of the village, I split from the other girls and walked high up on a hill to see more of the jungle, a stunning landscape that has been nourished by the locals, and in return nourishes them.

A small group of women from the community walked to our workshop that evening, of various ages and English ability. Spanish was the tribe’s second language after Cabecar, which some couldn’t even understand much of, and English was their third, so communicating was a bit of a feat. But each of the women was incredibly enthusiastic to learn, asking us to extend the session to two hours and then to three, and they were all so lovely to us under the guarded shyness they showed when we first arrived. Some brought their kids and their dogs, who one of us usually distracted while the other two taught up front, and others brought their handmade goods which they sold to passing hikers. I bought a necklace from Fishna, a giggly young mother who struggled a lot with English but had a clear personality despite the language barrier, and swore to myself not to lose it like I had with most of my souvenirs. On the second day of teaching we created a small English test for the women to take, and beamed with pride as distinct improvements became visible, even if they were small and even if the English was basic. It meant a lot that we were helping, and that they were so eager to learn. We recorded a list of vocab words translated from Spanish to English on the ancient tape recorder we were provided, trying to hide our laughs at the painfully slow process, and started planning phonetic-driven teaching methods for future lessons.

It struck me with a twang that I wouldn’t be teaching those future lessons, because the Tsiobata trip was fortnightly and I would only be volunteering for another week more. While the rest of the volunteers were staying for periods between one month and six, I would whizz off almost as fast as I’d come. This was mainly due to money limitations, but a small part of me still wished to stay longer and see more progress in these lovely women; I felt like a bit of a faker, like the careless backpacker who stopped in to say hi, feel good about herself for volunteering, and then disappear off again in two weeks. But I shook the feelings away, assuring myself that even though I couldn’t be present for any more Tsiobata trips, I could definitely help the other volunteers in improving them, and decided to spend my time at the project working on resources for future lessons. Two nights passed quickly, and before we knew it we were eating our last meal of tortilla chips, refried bean paste and apples, followed by a luxurious peanut butter dessert, quietly thinking about the last couple of days. We’d had a lot of laughs, made good friends with Carrot Top, and managed to avoid dysentery by carefully putting chlorine in all the water we drank, spending hours examining bottles to see whether it was the worth the risk to drink them.

Then it was time to pack away the tents, kiss goodbye to our concrete slab bed and our terrifying spider neighbours, take our final dripping water open-doored shower, and put on the same stinky shoes and socks that hadn’t properly dried yet. I’d been wearing the same clothes, hadn’t seen my reflection in days, and had absolutely no phone signal, and somehow liked it that way, so only half-smiled at the thought of going back to normal life as we started the hike back. We’d devoured all the chocolate and sweets we’d brought with us save a packet of shitty Costa Rican gummy bears, and guzzled them up at intervals on the walk for short, sweet bursts of energy. After crossing the gushing river, deeper and stronger than the last time, we stopped to empty the water out of our boots and finish the sweets, and I looked behind me at the beautiful highlands we were leaving, in disbelief that these few days even happened. I couldn’t believe my life, couldn’t believe that people would pass up on an opportunity like this because of spiders or dodgy showers or refried bean paste – it’s an acquired taste, and to me, after three months of trying, it tasted like shit. I missed Tsiobata already, I missed the women and their crazy dogs and kids, I even missed the group of hikers who’d passed through and started taking pictures of our modest campsite like we were the main attraction.

Back in Rio Hondo, the rest of my week was a waiting game for our whole-team weekend trip to Puerto Viejo, the surf town where my German friends Paul and Lukas from San Jose were staying. As sad as I was to leave Tsiobata, the prospect of socialising with backpackers and going to the beach thrilled me, until we were introduced to another painful set of rules for the mini-trip. To avoid catching Covid we had to travel with a private shuttle and stay in private accommodation, resulting in spending a lot more money than I was intending to, and threatening to dampen the fun. Suddenly I wasn’t regretting only spending two weeks, and already longed for the freedom of catching a public bus and staying in a mixed dorm again. But I stayed quiet and accepted the situation, eagerly jumping in the shuttle on Friday morning and then visibly deflating when a heavy rainstorm started lashing the windows all the way to Puerto Viejo.

The rain cleared and we spent a blissful afternoon on the beach, escaping our Airbnb’s toilet which had immediately broken and stunk out the whole place, before finally being able to drink more than the allowed four beers at the volunteer base. It was wild. We ate tacos, Jemima flashed the bartender for free shots, and before we knew it we landed in a hostel techno party watching fire shows and looking after Jan, who whitied and violently threw up twice behind a tree. The next day, hungover and ready to do it all again, we rented pushbikes to explore the main town and Punta Uva, a nearby beach with a natural rock arch jutting out from a foresty headland. Riding a bike felt completely freeing, not quite as exhilarating as the speed of the mopeds I’d rented before but incredibly suited to Puerto Viejo’s ‘Go Slow’ road signs, and as I peddled I felt myself settling into the Caribbean rhythm. The area was stunning, with lush green palm trees on all sides and the lapping sounds of the waves not far away. Surfers cycled to the beach, cars played reggae music, and everybody smiled at our ten-person train on their way past. I didn’t know what it was about Puerto Viejo, but I was completely in love with it. Everything was so relaxed, calm, happy, beautiful – it was like being on another planet, where no one had a single worry in the world.

On the headland leading to the rock arch, while the others quickly turned back to the safety of the bikes, I restlessly started walking further instead, eager to see what was down the paths and explore a bit more, and Jan followed. I sensed his desire to venture just a bit further from his eyes, slightly wild and mischievous, and we quickly stepped down to a flat rock viewpoint that looked over the beach and then the vast stretch of Caribbean ocean, smiling at our discovery. Jan would go backpacking the way I’d come straight after he finished volunteering, and despite our massive, massive differences, we came to bond over our shared love for brave exploring. He looked up to me a lot, as a practical travel guide but also a seemingly fearless example of the kind of person he wanted to be when he started solo travelling too. I walked to the edge of the rock and peered at the beautiful sunset looking back at us, before turning around and meeting eyes with Jan, our smiles growing larger at this very small but very amazing adventure. The air around us had changed, going from nice group beach holiday vibes, to the freedom that only standing on the edge of the sea at sunset can bring, and I knew by looking at Jan that I’d just given him his first little taster at how purely free he could be too.

It was karaoke night at Tasty Waves, a local hostel, bar and restaurant close to our Airbnb, and Paul, Lukas, Fabia and Cam were all there, so I excitedly introduced the volunteers to my backpacker friends who I’d met in various Central American locations as we celebrated Fabia’s birthday. After a few drinks for courage we started signing up for karaoke, with James, Jemima, Meg, Georgie and I performing our stereotypical ‘Brits Abroad’ number, Mr Brightside, and Jan coming out with a beautiful rendition of Frank Sinatra that no one expected. I vowed to have a $1 tequila shots night, honouring the times spent in Guatemala solely drinking straight tequila due to its cheapness and lack of calories – a genius plot, really – and refused to acknowledge how badly it could go, until the next morning when I woke up at 5am to a splitting headache and blood all over my bed.

Confused and still very drunk, I stumbled to the bathroom, desperate for the toilet, but found it locked, with the sounds of two people retching inside. Deciding not to look too much into it, I walked out to the garden and squatted in the grass, unconcerned that I was in plain view and that Jemima had run out from our room to throw up in the garden next to me. When I woke again a few hours later the situation was still as bizarre, but this time slightly clearer as the alcohol in my liver started wearing off. Thea and Rebecka were white as sheets and cradling their heads on the porch table, taking it in turns to throw up onto the grass a few metres away, and the toilet was permanently occupied by Meg who couldn’t seem to stop shitting. I began to ask what was happening, and Georgie, the other British gap year volunteer in our midst, explained that there must have been something in the water at Tasty Waves or in the Airbnb because everyone seemed to have violent food poisoning. Then she asked what the hell happened to me, and I realised that I still hadn’t looked into my bleeding situation. My face was throbbing and swollen and my knee and foot had clumps of dried blood from dirty gashes. And then I remembered.

Paul had got in on my tequila frenzy the night before, scribbling ‘PURA VIDA’, Costa Rica’s famous saying, on both of our phone cases, and we’d decided to find an afterparty in the centre of town with Lukas, their friend Penelope, Jan, Fabia and Cam. Having drunk way too much to operate a bike, I had the amazing idea of riding one anyway, with Paul jumping on the back. Whizzing through the night air we laughed and screeched together as I wobbled onto Puerto Viejo’s main street, feeling completely alive and very drunk. The road changed from smooth pavement to rocky stones, which Paul noticed before jumping off from the back, landing perfectly, but I didn’t. I tried to look behind me to see where he’d gone, lost my balance, and ended up falling flat on my face in the middle of the road, unaware at first that I was bleeding but realising very quickly as Paul ran up to check my face and leg. We stumbled into a bar to ask if they had a first aid kit, only to receive the most Costa Rican response ever that obviously they didn’t because health and safety didn’t exist here, so I asked for a shot instead and giggled drunkenly as we rushed instead to the bathroom. I lay on the floor with my leg outstretched trying to wash off the dirt from my knee and foot, and then looked in the mirror at the mess that was my face. I had a deep cut above my lip and grazes that had burnt the skin on my cheek and chin, overall looking like I’d been violently attacked.

I wasn’t feeling the pain yet, so after our measly attempt at cleaning me up, observed by some very confused female bargoers who were trying to get into the bathroom to find a boy cleaning up a bloody leg, we found the others at the beach and continued drinking. No one seemed to question why I wasn’t just going home instead of carrying on the party with a beaten up face and bleeding knee, so it seemed sensible enough to me. Feeling sand in my toe’s open wound, I furrowed my brow and looked down in the darkness at a loose piece of skin that was flapping slightly in the wind. Too drunk to really know what was going on, I shrugged and pulled it clean off, removing a few skin layers from my toe, and took a swig of beer. Finally, a dull ache started pulsing through my face and I took it as my sign to go to bed. I said farewell to Fabia and Cam, knowing I wouldn’t see them before the end of our trips and apologising for being in the worst state possible to say goodbye, and promised Paul and Lukas that I’d return next weekend after finishing volunteering, hopefully without falling off any bikes next time. Upon getting back to the Airbnb, where people were starting to fall asleep, I loudly announced my presence and showed off my battle wounds, with everyone completely unsurprised that I’d managed to get injured after stupidly riding a bike blind-drunk.

And then food poisoning struck at 5am, leaving seven out of our group of ten crippled with vomiting and diarrhoea and adding to the immense hangovers we were all feeling. It wasn’t a great morning for everyone, and to make matters worse we had to get back to Rio Hondo as soon as possible, where Abby and Marie were expecting ten fresh faces ready for teaching this week, not seven vomiting volunteers and someone who looked like a domestic violence victim. And thus ensued the funniest, most chaotically horrible shuttle ride of my life: The flight risks sat closest to the minivan doors, and on regular intervals we’d have to call the driver to stop while someone got out to throw up. For two hours. James, Georgie and I sat squished together in the backseat hiding our laughter as Jan hobbled out of the van, the next victim, and retched into the bushes next to the road. I tried to hold my knee so as not to get blood on the seats, wondering how on earth I’d actually get the dirt out and prevent infection, and how on earth they’d let me teach classes with a battered face, and in the end let out my laugh at how wrong it had all gone in the last 12 hours.

Broken dorm doors, rural backyard speakeasies, and 10 points for each cockroach squashed with a flip-flop

I walked up to the reception of my new hostel in San Jose, different to the one before because this place’s reviews were bad and mentioned loud music, which was how I knew it was the place to be for a party after my trek. The staff members were automatically rude, as expected, and left me to find the dorm on my own, so when I arrived, exhausted after four days of hiking mountains and the long journey back, I could only smile fondly at the door that was off its hinges, completely broken, with no attempts being made to fix it. Ah, hostel life. It was good to be back.

Of course, this was the only appropriate way for me to re-enter the constant chaos of being a backpacker, so I instantly accepted the situation and chose a bed. When we’d reached our guide Dennis’ house at the bottom of the Chirripo national park earlier that day, Armin had told me that there was enough hot water for me to take a shower, which not only made me want to cry with gratitude but also left me feeling incredibly self-conscious of how much I stank after the hike. After that, and keeping his promise of driving me back to San Jose on his way home, Armin and I set off like father and daughter once again, only to get a flat tyre on the drive back. We were both desperate to get back to our lives, his being at home and cosy with his wife and mine being in a cheap dorm with strangers I could party with, so in silence, we sat and waited for the tyre to be changed at a llanta stop, one of Costa Rica’s incredibly efficient 24 hour garages, eating Snickers bars.

It was a lot later than expected when we finally reached San Jose and located my hostel, but there was still a lot of people around and I was suddenly all the more grateful for the shower I’d taken before re-joining the real world. I could’ve called it a night and gone straight to sleep, given my exhaustion from the last few days, but funnily enough the broken dorm door made me think otherwise, that maybe it was a really weird sign – or a good omen or something – that it was time to meet some new people. As if on cue, a German girl walked into the room and started digging through her stuff, making polite introductions and conversation with me. Her name was Ida and she was going out with a few friends she’d made in the hostel and previously at her hostel volunteer job in Jaco, and so without thinking about it, I skipped the idea of food and asked if I could join. She was taken aback considering I’d just told her about the painful four day hike I’d endured and returned from 20 minutes beforehand, but said yes, of course, and that they were leaving very soon. I didn’t need telling twice and threw on some nice clothes before following her downstairs.

Ida introduced me David, an Austrian guy turning 24 at midnight who she’d met in Jaco, and then to Paul and Lukas, two German boys travelling together who’d just arrived in Costa Rica at the very beginning of their trip. It was an all-German speaking group aside me, I realised too late as they whisked me out of the hostel and onto San Jose’s unruly streets. We found a popular student area and, upon the group’s demand, started searching for decent German beer, which I was completely indifferent to but nevertheless campaigned for the general consumption of alcohol, not fussy about what it was. After hanging out with so many English people until now on my trip, it was actually refreshing to be around this German group, and I was blessed with very funny ones. I was even slightly grateful for the times I didn’t have to speak or listen in to their heated German conversations, and instead patiently smiled to myself, glass of wine in hand, admiring civilisation as a whole and the lack of shooting pains going through my legs. It was good to be back in San Jose, however dodgy and medium-ugly the city was. It was alive with the sounds of young people partying on a Friday night, and we followed their tracks eagerly, making introductions and small talk on the way.

Paul and Lukas were heading straight to Puerto Viejo the next day, a small Caribbean surf town in the south of the country which was conveniently close to where I was volunteering, and they wanted to surf and skate to their hearts’ desire, having brought both boards with them. David was preparing to enter Nicaragua the same way I’d just come, joining a volcano boarding and hiking company for six weeks as a volunteer to have some incredible adventures. Ida was returning to Jaco after her weekend off and then seeing where the wind took her; maybe Puerto, maybe even Panama. Maybe South America after that. I loved her carelessness, her freedom, and was excited for my own when I reached the end of my volunteering and had zero plans for anything further. I decided that this group of people was the best I could’ve stumbled upon in that shitty chaotic hostel with broken doors and chlamydia-inducing swimming pools, and together we attempted, and failed, at getting into one of San Jose’s popular clubs. After getting turned away for no particular reason, we instead located a pulperia to grab some beers and return to the hostel, when Lukas and I froze at the counter upon noticing some suspicious, unpackaged cookies sitting on a pretty display plate. “What’s in the cookies?” Lukas asked, and the girl behind the till started listing off flour, butter, vanilla, hashish, sugar, counting off the ingredients with her fingers. Lukas and I exchanged a look of delight and he replied, “I’ll take two big ones,” before we skipped out of the shop and showed our companions the treasure we’d just found.

In the hash-hazed hours that followed, Paul and Lukas taught me how to say the name of an obscure northern German town and how to convince people that it was where I was from, and I managed to fool pretty much everyone we met on the streets and in the hostel that I was just as German as the rest of my group. I nodded along and reacted to their conversations without understanding a single word, embodying my new alter ego to my very core. It gets boring introducing yourself the same way every time you meet new people when travelling, especially after the three months I’d been going for, so learning a bizarre tongue twister from the western region of Germany was exactly what I needed to freshen up my personality. We ate leftover mango curry, then watermelon, then junk food snacks from the pulperia, our munchies still unsatisfied and our feast an inexplicable jumble of interesting foods. David whitied from the cookies, Ida went to bed, and suddenly Paul, Lukas and I were the last ones standing, laughing at absolutely nothing at 2am sitting on sunbeds next to the pool. I barely even knew them, let alone knowing them while we weren’t high, but I had a good feeling about going to visit the boys in Puerto on my weekends off and after my volunteering.

This was my first time going back to the Caribbean side of Central America since Belize, and to say I was buzzed is an understatement. Obviously I missed the culture and the warm waters and the pristine beaches, but mostly I missed the reggaeton music that reigned supreme in the Caribbean. I hadn’t had a proper party, save Sunday Funday in San Juan, since my Guatemala days, and I craved party reggaeton like it was the elixir of life; no longer a guilty pleasure but an absolute necessity in my eyes. Every shitty Sean Paul and Bad Bunny song was a beautiful reminder of the wild parties gone by that I wanted more of, and the further east I headed, the more popular reggaeton became. My only dilemma? I wouldn’t be able to party in the slightest while doing my volunteering: A two-week stint at a global charity base in a rural Costa Rican village, teaching English to local and indigenous women and children. It would be an amazingly rewarding break from my backpacking lifestyle, but nevertheless I found it hard to let go of the nonchalant freedom that had defined my life for the last few months. Here, there would be rules, there would be expectations and seriousness and work, whereas where I’d come from there was just laughter and mistakes and alcohol.

After the hilarious couple of days spent fucking around in San Jose with my new German backpacker friends, I finally took a glance at the bombsite that was my rucksack, which had never been as unpacked and messy as it was now. David, the last remaining amigo in our group, walked into the dorm and laughed in shock at the bundles of clothes that stretched to every corner of the room in my attempt to re-pack, and I said farewell from my sitting position on the floor in the middle of the chaos, knowing that he would be waking up at 5am to get to Leon by the end of the day. Then it was my turn to leave, get an Uber to the other side of the city at 8am, and sit in a hotel that was far too posh to be hosting the likes of me, only to be joined by the people I would be volunteering with for the next two weeks. After a blissful 48 hours of backpacking, I was back to a very foreign environment with very interesting people once more. I sat at the table where we had our introduction meeting and mildly observed the others around me; young, middle-class, “gap yah” students who were mostly all from the UK stared back at me with the innocence that I definitely would’ve had in their position, had I not spent the last three months solo travelling down from Mexico.

The global company we were working for obviously attracted this type of crowd, which was completely unsurprising to me given that I was the definition of ‘that crowd’ when I’d found the volunteer programme way back in September last year. What did I even expect? The only problem was that I was now a very different person to the one who signed up for this volunteer scheme, and now I was sitting in front of pale, western, PPE enthusiasts who didn’t share an ounce of similarity to me. As we sat on the shuttle to our volunteer base and I eventually decided to tune out from the others’ heated debates about Cold War politicians, by shoving my headphones way too far into my ears and turning the volume up to full, I silently prayed to the Lord to give me the strength I needed to survive these two weeks, and texted my mum to tell her about this hilarious turn of events.

James and Jemima were both 18 year old British private school alumni who were on a gap year before starting uni, where they’d decided to study something intellectual and cool like history or politics. They were joined by Jan, a 20 year old German boy taking a year out from uni to decide if he really wanted to dedicate his life and career to being a lawyer, who had already spent time in an English boarding school and was very strictly Catholic, but just so happened to also be gay. Given this, he was also better at the English language than I was and gave off the exact same vibes as James’ interesting Eton career and Jemima’s Catholic all girls’ school horror stories, and as a trio I found them absolutely terrifying at the get-go. The only other new volunteer was Bry, a 29 year old Californian working in HR, who was very sweet but painfully Californian, and I can’t seem to describe her any other way. Harmless but very tempting to throttle on occasion, Bry managed to remind me why Americans are almost always the most annoying people in the world, for the smallest and silliest of reasons. All together, with a gay Catholic who thought it was a sin to be gay, an Eton alumni, a dark academia private school girl who’d lived in Sweden to channel Marianne from Normal People, and an unbearably Californian Californian, I looked around me on the shuttle at the gaggle of bizarre people I’d be living and working with for two weeks, and internally gulped at the thought.

What I didn’t know yet was that I would come to know these people very well and adore their company, as is natural when you meet people who all have the desire to help others and explore the world. The one thing they all had in common was their deep and irrevocable kindness, and with this kindness they had come to Costa Rica with the same purpose, with the same curiosity about themselves and with the same malleability to learn, to grow, to become more at one with this world. They all wanted to help rural communities learn English and become empowered, they all wanted to live a different life, if only for a while, and they all wanted to see what more this world has to offer. Above all, I admire when people take the leap out of everything they’ve ever known in order to understand others, in order to become a soul of the universe rather than a mindless body to consumerism and capitalism as is so easy in the western world. With time, these people became my confidantes, my trusted friends, my inspirations.

With time, I’d come to greatly appreciate James’ ever joyful smile, positivity and sweet jokes that lit up any room he was in, Jemima’s grounded-ness and wild stories about Scandinavian men, Bry’s bravery at leaving home properly for the first time, Jan’s strange yet sweet musings when we sat drinking together, in the process of figuring out his place in life and what that meant for him. But right now, I felt like an observer to some of the oddest people I’d ever met, looking in on their lives like a foreign body entering a daunting new venture. We pulled up to Rio Hondo, the rural Caribbean village we’d be living and working in, and immediately starting adjusting to life in the Tropics, and all the cockroaches, swarms of bugs, poisonous animals, dripping tap-like cold water showers, and incredibly cheap, squeaky bunk beds in teeny tiny rooms that came with it. Thankfully, these things weren’t at all new to me, but it was clearly a big culture shock to the others, who initially struggled to come to terms with the basic living conditions we’d be dealing with.

Bry, Jemima and I were moved into the project’s new house, a more modern cement house on the main road of the village which was completely infested with ants and cockroaches even after its fumigation, and didn’t have a single household item inside, aside from beds. After waking up, spending as little time as possible in the bizarre fake-walled toilet that could be heard from all rooms in the house and had cracks in the walls to peek into, and walking in circles around the empty, dirty living room to try and mentally fill it with furniture, we spent all our waking hours in the other project base by the train tracks. Rio Hondo, situated next to a river and being completely divided by train tracks that were used sporadically on weekdays, was the most rural place I’d seen so far, apart from its connection with Siquirres, a big local town to catch buses from and go to the supermarket. Walking into the main house, an adorable wooden construction raised on stilts and painted green and white, reminding me of a Tarzan-like tropical shack that was placed right next to the local river, it felt like the centre of the village, just as the train tracks were. Its hanging chimes, chipped wooden shutters and large veranda exuded peacefulness, and I smiled upon seeing it for the first time, knowing that it was a perfect place to live, if only for two weeks.

Every time we hop-scotched the tracks on our way to the main house, we pinched ourselves at the incredible novelty of our rural, Caribbean Costa Rican lifestyle, before spotting the green and white veranda through lush palm trees and exotic bright flowers that grew all around us. The land around it had access to the river and also to a lagoon that housed some local crocodiles and reptiles, completely covered in jungle plants and animals. The sounds of the Caribbean were deafeningly beautiful, constant reminders of the wild species that lived all around, and heard from everywhere in the trees above us. In a clearing stood the house, with an outdoor shaded area below the main structure serving as a laundry room and meeting place for the volunteers and staff, and stairs leading upstairs to the polished, timber kitchen and living space, filled with comfy cushions, books, teaching materials and bug spray. It was the most homely place I’ve ever seen, the easiest space to relax into while rocking on the veranda’s bench swing or reclining deckchair in the immense tropical humidity. The rest of the volunteers lived in small dorms adjacent to the living spaces, and spent all day warding off bats, frogs and mosquitos away from their rooms, while we killed time squashing cockroaches with our flip-flops and spotting ant nests back in the town.

The base was run by Abby and Marie, two passionate NGO workers from the US and Chile who’d spent years living in offbeat rural environments to volunteer for good causes and embed themselves in local culture around the world. Although neither of them were particularly old or experienced, they both carried a superior air of intimidation, probably due to the fact that were so inspiring to me as a wannabe forever-traveller who wanted to help others, and as much as I wanted to trap them into hours of storytelling about the places they’d lived in, I kept a respectful distance so they wouldn’t think I was insane. Soon after we were introduced to them, we were introduced to ‘The Rules’, a long and painfully extensive list of all the things I wasn’t allowed to do anymore after my freeing backpacker lifestyle, which left me feeling like I was 15 at school again. No drinking on weekdays, a maximum of four drinks in a night on weekends, no external socialising for fear of Covid, no walking alone past 5pm, mandatory uniform when working on company projects, no key for us to get into our own house without a member of staff, masks on in all indoor enclosed spaces, and on, and on, and on. I took a deep breath upon hearing The Rules and tried to convince myself that living with them for two weeks wasn’t the end of the world, and it would be easy to abide by – and if it wasn’t, at least it would be over soon.

Since it was a weekend when we arrived, and therefore unofficially legal drinking territory, the new recruits and I went to the local pulperia off the train track, a house with a big black gate where you asked for what you wanted and a mysterious man would reappear from a mysterious back-store of goods and hand it over to you through a grate. We bought some local liquor, Cacique, after being laughed at for asking if he had rum – apparently it was offensive in rural Costa Rica to assume you could drink anything other than Cacique – and paired it with Coke back at base for a big night of drinking which ended with everyone being in bed by 9pm. Clearly, this wouldn’t be the wild reggaeton party town that I so desperately craved. But in the morning we met the other volunteers who’d been out for the weekend; five girls from the UK, Denmark, Sweden and Portugal, and my prospects of socialising began to slowly increase.

It was the all-important election day in Costa Rica that Sunday, so we knew the country’s bars and clubs would be going wild until the early hours. For us, in rural Rio Hondo, Abby and Marie told us that it meant a village ‘bar’, which was in fact an illegal speakeasy in someone’s garage, converted into a music-playing, beer-stocked watering hole full of poker tables and local Creole regulars that opened every Sunday. Not quite believing what I was hearing about a secret speakeasy in the middle of Caribbean Costa Rica, hidden away in a garage somewhere, I followed the others on their quest to find it with intense curiosity and literal shock. After dodging the angry guard dog who was alarmingly close to attacking us, our group of white western volunteers walked in on a local hotspot, full of gamblers, people dancing and singing, and speaking to each other in dialects I’d never heard. We stuck out like a sore thumb that had separated from the rest of the hand, and we knew it. But the locals were kind, and we quietly observed the scene around us while drinking local beer and debating Jan’s contradictory Catholic beliefs with his own homosexual, free-spirit nature, not fully taking in the surreal unfurling of events all around. I could’ve laughed at the strangeness of it all, but somehow knew that it would be an invaluable memory very soon, and smiled to myself at this bizarre little life I was leading.

‘How hard can it be climbing Costa Rica’s tallest mountain?’ – an altitude sickness sufferer

I raised my water bottle to the sky as if toasting the universe, or whatever crazy thoughts I’d had that spurred me to cross the distance from Ometepe Island to the capital of Costa Rica in a single day, before swallowing an iron supplement and washing it down. All I could do this morning was hope for the best, that I’d make it to the other end of the road without collapsing from exhaustion or getting stuck in some random Costa Rican town at nightfall. This was going to be a long day, and to make matters more interesting, I’d be travelling solely by local transport. I checked out of my hostel bright and early, quickly walked down to catch the first ferry of the day, and silently bid farewell to Ometepe as I watched the twin volcanoes slip further and further away. But this time round, something changed in me. My usual panic in the rush of moving turned to quiet confidence, my questionable-at-best Spanish became proficient, my former vulnerability was replaced with a refusal to get scammed. I knew where to find the cheap colectivos from the ferry station to Rivas, I laughed away the lying hagglers who would tell tourists that the cheap buses had stopped running when I got to the chicken bus station, I effortlessly made my way to the Penas Blancas border.

It was a long wait to get into Costa Rica, but from the minute I reached their immigration desk everything changed. The zero-English, seemingly chaotic lawlessness of Nicaragua dissipated, and was replaced with a tourist-centred order that reminded me oddly of America. I was shocked to find out that the officials could speak English, and very good English at that. Despite the ease with which I could then cross the border, I wasn’t sure I liked it this way. There weren’t any chicken buses in Costa Rica, which I was surprised at after half an hour searching for a familiar, crazy, loud station filled with vamped-up school buses, so instead I approached the dawdling drivers of massive double decker coaches that were parked on the Costa Rica side. I asked if anyone could take me to San Jose for $10 and was picked up by one of the companies like a sad little abandoned puppy on the side of the road, with the drivers taking pity on me and throwing my backpack into the luggage compartment. It was a long journey ahead, about seven hours of driving, but the coach was kitted out with air-con, TV screens and even a toilet on board, all of which felt unnatural to me after three months without such luxuries.

We rolled into San Jose in the dark, and it dawned on me that I hadn’t stayed in a big city since right at the beginning in Cancun. I asked a bus station security guard if the walk to my hostel was logistically possible with my big bag and in a big, potentially dangerous city, only receiving a “si” in response. I took this to mean that it could be 10 minutes or it could be 40, but either way it was possible, so I thanked him and set off on my undetermined journey. I made it fairly easily and ended up talking to the friendly group of people sleeping in my dorm, one of whom was Canadian and clearly thought he was a master traveller. He described directions to the nearest tienda so I could grab some snacks as a dinner substitute, but gasped in audible shock when I got up to go. “No, you can’t go by yourself in the dark. Wait until tomorrow,” he demanded. I suppressed a smirk and told him I’d actually walked here, and I think I’ll be okay, before leaving the hostel.

My favourite person out of the random collection of transitting travellers in San Jose was a young, blonde German boy who laughed a lot and had an innocence in his eyes, like a fresh new recruit. The city itself wasn’t really of backpacking interest, so the main reason to end up here was flying in to Costa Rica, flying out, or using it as a halfway point between destinations thanks to the country’s shitty public transport system. But as such, San Jose was an unsuspecting melting pot of travellers, from all different places and heading in all different directions, which there was something very exciting about. And that’s why I enjoyed meeting the German boy so much: He was 18, had just left home for the first time, and was on his way to a Pacific beach town to start a soon-to-be legendary solo trip. I could see his energy in the way he moved, in the intent way he listened to me talk about the last three months of my trip. He followed me round like a pet and sat with me on the hostel’s sofas for hours while I recounted the stupidest moments I’d lived through so far, and as he left to catch his bus to Jaco, I realised I didn’t even know his name. I decided to let him go without ever knowing because it seemed right, and somehow got the feeling that in a few years he’d be an absolute veteran backpacker.

I’d grow to know San Jose very well in the next few months, but I didn’t know that right now as I woke up early for an admin day before heading out on the mountain hike the next morning. I wandered around the city’s streets, looked up at its massive buildings and spent far too long in its supermarkets gazing longingly at the amounts of choice they presented. All different kinds of cheese, a nuts machine, real chocolate, even a sushi stand. I felt myself getting emotional just looking at all the food I hadn’t had access to for months. It was strangely like being back in the western world, and after being warned by everyone that San Jose was a shithole, I was pleasantly surprised – yes, it was no Antigua or Leon, but it wasn’t on Managua or Cancun’s level either. The most annoying thing about San Jose was that, no matter how hard or far I searched, I could not find a single blister plaster. My hiking boots were too big for me and I knew it, but I’d already run out of my blister plaster stash and risked a whole new cluster on each ankle during my mountain hike. I had to settle for some shitty waterproof ones in the end, completely baffled at this city’s abundance in everything western except the humble blister plaster.

The reason for this bizarre Americanisation compared to the rest of Central America was unclear to me, but somehow Costa Rica has become extortionately expensive even compared to the US, much more touristy than its neighbouring counterparts, and home to a lot more gringos than I’d previously seen. While Nicaragua is seen as rough and dangerous, Costa Rica is an increasingly popular tourist destination, despite being in some places just as dangerous, if not more, than Nicaragua. Poverty and disease is just as rife in Costa Rica as other countries too, which seemingly makes the gap between local wages and the crazy expense of food and material goods even harsher on its citizens. Its politicians are just as corrupt, its colonisation just as apparent in the clashing western and Latin American influences around the country. But many westerners had decided to make their home here, and whether this was the reason for Costa Rica’s social progression or not, good change has been happening. There is no army, only well-trained police forces, and free healthcare for all.

I returned to my hostel with arms full of supplies for the four-day hike ahead of me, and was shown to the private room I’d booked – my second ever private room in three months. I stared at the double bed and bedside table in wonder, like it was a five-star hotel room, and instantly got emotional at the fact that I had a bedside lamp. Gleefully I dumped all of my belongings on the floor in a chaotic mess, spreading out as much as I could just to revel in not having to live out of my backpack for fear of annoying other dorm-mates. I then spent the whole night in isolation, not socialising with a single soul and enjoying the peace and quiet in my beautiful and clean private room, getting into bed nice and early and sleeping deeply all the way through till morning. I didn’t even have to use earplugs. It was amazing. I’d booked a private room for exactly this reason, and because I knew I’d need the sleep before the three sleepless nights I was about to get in the mountains. In the morning I was picked up by my guide, a friendly, strange and funny man named Armin from Austria, who lived in Costa Rica with his wife and had travelled the whole world hiking up mountains, and we began the drive to the Chirripo national park entrance.

It was an odd road-trip to say the least, and very quickly clear that we were both insanely awkward people when it came to making conversation. Armin had had the most interesting life and yet would say the bare minimum about his experiences, which I could only ask so many questions about before it trickled into silence once more. It felt like we were a father and daughter duo pulled up at a service station and quietly eating plates of gallo pinto together for lunch, and I smirked at the weird turn my trip had taken. We pulled up at the national park entrance and began the long, confusing process of preparing for the hike, signing forms, pre-ordering meals, packing up small parcels of clean clothes for porters to carry up to the mountain lodges, deciding what food and equipment to take. I realised how under-prepared I was despite my best efforts in San Jose, and how cold I would be on the mountains without a proper jacket or any layers. I had to borrow everything from Armin, even an old backpack because neither of mine were the right size. I was the only backpacker in the group and therefore the only one carrying all her belongings in one bag around with her, which I had to leave in one of the trucks after separating out everything I’d need for the hike from the rest of my possessions. I felt completely homeless, and I suppose compared to these other people I was.

I don’t know who I’d expected to be joined by when I booked the trip, months in advance, but I knew it was out of the usual price range and short notice of backpackers. What I didn’t expect, though, was a Costa Rican mother and her two daughters, all of whom didn’t like speaking English and all of whom had the worst resting bitch faces I’d ever seen. They looked miserable, all the time. Even on the top of mountains. I didn’t understand them in the slightest. The only other person on the tour was Danielle, a 50-something year old Canadian woman who’d visited Costa Rica five times and was a commercial pilot at home. She had a daughter a few years older than me living in Vancouver, and I’m not sure whether it was real or I was imagining it, thanks to being away from home for three months, but Danielle’s presence instantly felt soothing to me, like the mother figure I’d been craving in my anxiety before the hike. She was kind and spoke with a mellow tone to her voice, exuding patience and calmness even if things went wrong. Clearly I wouldn’t make any new backpacker besties on this trip, but at least I had one person to talk to.

We woke the next morning at 3.30am to officially start the hike, bodies racked with cold, adrenaline and nervousness. In the darkness I cleaned my teeth, tied my hiking boots and clipped my backpack shut, going through the motions with trembling, clammy hands and silently saying goodbye to the last running sink I’d see for a while. It’s hard to prepare yourself for a hike on this scale, hard to get your brain to comprehend what’s about to happen with this much anticipation and excitement coursing through you. It was a feeling I always got before a big hike, and it didn’t leave me until way after sunrise, as we slowly plodded up to the tropical mountain forests and reality hit. This was it, this was the way up. No turning back now.

My muscles seemed to accept that their only job now was the keep me moving forward, and I settled into a rhythm of climbing uphill, as if I hiked thousands of metres in elevation on an ordinary day. I was surprised at how easy I found this shift, considering I’d been feeling severely anaemic and teenage-like recently, needing endless amounts of food and sleep to survive. Mentally, I tuned out from the relentless climb by letting the smells and sounds of nature ground me in a connected calm, while starting to reflect on basically my entire life up until this point. You get a lot of time to think on mountains, a lot of time alone with your own conscious.

I thought about my coastal path at home, which I used to trail run and wanted to hike the entirety of at some point when I returned. I thought about the Pacific Crest Trail, the mammoth North American route that Cheryl Strayed hiked solo, and how it was a dream of mine to one day complete this too. I thought about the books I’d read, and the books I wanted to write about the travels I would undoubtedly have in the future. I even thought about my former life in London, about the friends and responsibilities I’d left behind, about my ex who I knew I would never go back to, who I wished the best for. Then I thought about why this was, that I could never go back to that life: The reason was that I’d had such a deep, profound change in myself that it was a life that no longer looked like what I wanted at all. I thought about my idealism, about my growing spirituality that I was learning from other amazing people I’d met on my journey along the way. I thought about Lake Atitlan and the indescribable energy drawing me back to it even to this day, up this mountain, over a thousand kilometres away. I thought about Conal, if I’d ever see him again, if we’d end up in Colombia together like we laughed about when I said goodbye. I thought about whether I should try and make it to Colombia, whether I should cancel my flight home in a few weeks and push on, whether I was strong enough to do so after the weakness I’d been feeling in recent weeks. My thoughts would always circle back to the mountain though, at the end of these trains of thought: The mountain was everything, its power over me was overwhelming, right here and now it was the only thing that mattered. The mountain signified so many things in my life, the good, the hard, and the magical, and it felt so perfect that I was here, right now, reflecting on this pivotal moment in my travels.

By the time we arrived at base camp, a basic wooden shack 3500 metres above sea level named ‘Los Indios’, I felt so overloaded with thoughts and emotions from the long day hiking that I dived straight in my bag for the notebook and pen I’d brought with me. At this altitude and with the sun setting it turned freezing cold very quickly, and after ten minutes’ writing my hands started getting numb, unable to feel the pen between my fingers, so I retreated to my bag for more layers. The others in our group left the camp to walk around and warm up their muscles from the cold, but I was in the depths of my thoughts now, and couldn’t be pulled away from the notebook. So, alone, with the porters, our other guide Dennis, and the sole other couple hiking this route cooking in the makeshift kitchen, I stared out at the clouds, peaks and occasional pine tree dotted along the skyline in this thin air. The ‘window’ was just a cut-out in the wood, leaving no protection from the elements, and the ‘rooms’ were two square floor spaces separated by a wooden wall, again with no hope for insulation against the biting cold. It was going to be a rough night, as we’d been warned by Armin and Dennis, so before we settled in I wanted to make use of my hands writing before potentially getting frost bite.

It was a rough night indeed. We had no tents, no beds, and an outdoor toilet with only a blue plastic sheet shielding us from the rest of the mountain. Danielle and I did not have our own sleeping bags or roll mats, so we were given some mouldy sponge cut-outs and the thinnest, oldest sleeping bags I’d ever seen, left to pray for the best and layer up overnight. I donned every single layer I had; hats, hoods, jumpers, two pairs of gloves, three pairs of socks, all the pairs of trousers and shirts I could find. My feet were still completely unfeeling and I began to worry, to which Danielle told me I could have her self-heating feet pads because I probably needed them more than her. I thanked her profusely and savoured the small mercy of feeling warmth come back to my toes again. Tonight brought a whole new definition to The Coldest I’ve Ever Been. Previously, it was up Volcan Acatenango in Guatemala, but this was definitely worse, with only flimsy and rotting wooden walls to protect us from the wind and cold outside.

The ordeal of almost freezing to death inside that tiny sleeping bag ended only for another, arguably much worse ordeal to begin: Summitting two mountains in a single day, and walking for 14 hours. We rose at 2.30am shivering and barely able to even move our hands enough to brush our teeth, rushing to pack up our things and get walking to shake the biting cold away. Breakfast was cooked and got cold within minutes of each other, and I gulped down my cup of instant coffee as fast as I could so it wouldn’t end up lukewarm like my scrambled eggs. My body was confused at this strange rhythm of waking up and eating before the sun even rose, but we all knew that we’d need every ounce of energy we could gather today, so unanimously forced breakfast down and set off out of the camp. As soon as we began the gradual incline up to the first summit, Cerro Uran, something felt wrong in my body. In the darkness, frowning at my waves of nausea and trying to stay conscious, it suddenly hit me what was wrong: I was altitude sick, just as I had been on Acatenango but had tried to ignore, and this time it was undeniable what was happening. But I was stuck 3600 metres in the air, and would have to survive the whole hike now that I was here.

I wanted to cry with frustration, as well as the overwhelming desire to throw up. But nothing would come, so I gratefully accepted an anti-nausea pill from one of the Costa Rican women and pushed on to the summit. I knew I was more than capable of making this summit push, but the altitude sickness was holding me back so much that it was barely even possible. I adopted a slow and rhythmic zombie plod as I climbed the mountain, focusing only on slowing my heart rate down and regulating it enough to trick my body into moving forward instead of passing out. I started disassociating while staring down at the ground, the darkness luring me into a state of confusion where nothing at all seemed real. My body was on auto-pilot, my legs were ploughing forward slowly and heavily, like they were lead poles rather than limbs, and everything was numb with cold and nausea. The only things capable of going through my head were affirmations, and I repeated them to myself like my life depended on it: Keep moving, keep going, just a bit longer, push yourself, come on.

As we scrambled up the rocks that jutted out at all angles and were our only route up to the summit, the sun began to rise, and I started to get the tiny feeling that this was possible, that I really could do it, that daylight could give me the energy I needed to make it all the way. We stopped at our vantage point above an entire national park of mountain peaks to marvel at the landscape before us, and at both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts that lay on the horizon either side, to the west and to the east, glowing in the pink and orange sunrise light. The only other people on this trail were a couple who we’d been tailing since the beginning, and as they made it to the top we all cheered together, the only sounds for miles and miles on this empty path in the middle of the mountains. And then it was our turn to reach the summit, and we did, and among the smiles and cheers I could almost trick myself into thinking my job was done. But it wasn’t, so I finally tucked into the vanilla panquecito I’d been saving up until now for a burst of energy, and signed the trail register with my favourite phrase: ‘The world belongs to the brave’. It felt like a dream that I’d actually been able to write that down in a real trail register, that I’d been able to reach the top of this Costa Rican mountain. I couldn’t fully believe it was real.

The altitude sickness that hit me like a tonne of bricks as soon as we started moving again was a helpful reminder that it was, in fact, real, and that there was a lot more pain to go through before it was over. The air was unbearably thin, so the only thing I could really do was resume my zombie-plod state as I accepted that this would be a consistent problem the whole day. We’d be spending 12 hours at this altitude ridge walking until we reached the next peak, Cerro Chirripo, which was even higher, so I buckled in for a rough ride. Each uphill made me feel like a 70 year old smoker whose lungs had significantly shrunk, and each downhill made my heart rate dangerously fast, on the brink of panic attack, if I increased speed at all. In between maintaining the same slow rhythm to cope with these changes, I passed the time talking to Danielle and gazing around at the sheer height we were at, the sheer views we were witnessing. In a strange way this ridge walking reminded me of the Purbeck ridges I hiked at home, and with a twang in my chest I suddenly longed to be walking those familiar ridges, at safer altitudes, with my mum here with me rather than Danielle. She was a lovely substitute, but it was not the same.

At midday we began the summit push of Chirripo, Costa Rica’s tallest mountain. Alongside my altitude sickness, I now also had to deal with severe leg pain from two days’ incline and a major lack of sleep, collectively making the ordeal seem to go on forever. But through the pain, my heart rate through the roof and my chest strap almost giving me a panic attack, I realised that even though it felt like forever, I was capable of it, that I was doing this every single second I thought I couldn’t. In fact, I could do anything. Armin reached the summit before me and grabbed my hand to pull me up the ledge separating me with victory, and once I’d made it, I looked around me with tears welling up in my eyes. Our group beamed at each other and whooped in joy, fist pumping the air and gazing around at the beautiful country below us. The tears kept coming and suddenly I was crying, looking around me in relief and above all, an overwhelming happiness. Maybe it’s common to cry when you reach the top of mountains, I don’t know – this feeling was the very same as when we reached the top of Acatenango, and all I knew was that it made life worth living. Everything suddenly falls into place at the top of mountains, at the tallest point you can reach, at the top of the world.

I wrote in the trail register that I felt alive on this stupid hill, which is a fond pet name I give tall things that I’m climbing when it’s hard and I feel like giving up. “This stupid hill,” I mutter under my breath like it will propel me to the top, and then I reach the top and laugh about the silly mound I’ve become at one with. From the top of Chirripo it was a three hour walk back down to base camp, a much nicer organised establishment where we were promised warm food, big blankets, and parcels we’d sent up for ourselves with clean clothes. The real challenge came here, after two summits and a whole day of walking, where I had to mentally force myself through the blisters gathering on my feet and will myself onwards to the end goal. The old backpack I’d borrowed from Armin was giving me horrendous back pain, and I was so tired that it took all the strength I had to keep going. I was desperate to peel off the disgusting under layers I’d been wearing for two sweaty days straight, and even more desperate to yank the too-big boots away from my feet. Up at the front of the group Armin and Danielle happily chatted the time away, talking about what more there was to see in Costa Rica for Danielle’s sixth trip next year, but I purposely hung back behind them, also safely ahead of the mother-daughter trio, to have some time alone. I was uninterrupted with my thoughts, which again took me to dreams of more adventures. This was where I realised that I was almost ready, but not quite, to come home – first, I still needed some sleepless nights at 3800 metres, not showering for four days, a body covered in aches and pains, and the party I knew was waiting for me when I returned to San Jose.

Our next base camp was a place of luxury compared to the last, the Buckingham Palace of mountain lodges. They had endless hot chocolate, all meals and snacks included, warm blankets, and real beds to sleep on. I’d even sent myself some dry, clean clothes with the porters, which I received on arrival like a Christmas present. Obviously there was still no hot water anywhere to be found though, so I decided to skip having a cold shower and instead collapsed straight into my bunk bed and slept, followed swiftly by Danielle and Armin on the beds below me. We barely woke up in time for dinner, which we sleepily devoured before immediately going back to bed and sleeping all the way through until our early start the next morning. I didn’t even have the words or thoughts to express how grateful I was for proper rest; my body felt broken like never before and right now, this comfortable bed was the only thing making it better. That was until our 5am breakfast in the freezing cold, where I not only longed for my blanket again but formed a sneaky suspicion that I could keep going for much longer than this, maybe if the altitude wasn’t so high. I enjoyed pushing my body to its limits, and every time I thought I wouldn’t physically be able to go any further, it was always possible. This off-the-grid, gruelling yet incredibly rewarding lifestyle didn’t seem so bad going forward.

Danielle and I set off on the long descent from the mountain ahead of the others, looking and listening out for wildlife as we entered the cloud forests once again. We talked about our lives at home, our families, but also about the adventures we’d already been on. However cool she was, an absolute machine for completing this whole hike without issues thanks to her Canadian roots, it drove me mad how she could keep returning to the same areas of Costa Rica and seeing the same things. It’s nice to feel that you know a place like this, but I wanted to see everything, discover new places and experience whole other worlds all within this one planet. Despite Danielle’s drive and bravery, despite her ability to solo travel and hike without fear, she was still playing it safe, and that’s where our similarities ended. I craved the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable, she was happy in this spot in this country forever. It made me long for the company of mum, who I knew was exactly the same as me on this regard.

Somewhere along this four day journey in the mountains, I’d made one important decision: I was going to Colombia, and would finish my journey there. When, I wasn’t sure, and for how long I had no idea, but all I knew was that I would not be catching my pre-booked flight in two weeks’ time. The idea of going further buzzed around inside me like an ignited flame sparking at the seams, the excitement and adrenaline coursing through me as I realised I’d made the right decision to not go home. As we finally reached the bottom of the trail I cheered with joy and almost kissed the rough tarmac that had replaced dirt and stones below our feet, flinging my boots off my feet to reveal the carnage inside my socks. They were battered, bruised and blistered, deathly pale from having no sun exposure this whole time and in complete stark contrast with my wrists and hands, which had been violently burned after I’d forgotten to cover them like I had the rest of my body. But I was alive, and I’d made it down, and I managed to get enough signal to message my loved ones, so I was happy. Somehow I felt like a better person now than I had been when I started walking, and I knew that going forward life wouldn’t be quite the same.