I'm inspired to do some real traveling again! Posted on September 3, 2009

Reading my friend Barbara’s account of her recent trip to South Africa has inspired me to think about doing some real traveling again.

My friend Barbara Roth, a dedicated, award winning teacher, who has just retired from an exhausting job in the Philadelphia public school system:

Mmy first trip abroad 35+ years ago, the contents of my backpack weighed only 15 pounds and I didn’t even pack an aspirin tablet. Now, newly retired and on a recent trip to South Africa, I took 2 suitcases half of which were filled with precautionary pharmaceuticals and enough fiber to float the Titanic. How times have changed!

I too have shared Karen’s feelings about long distance travel - the plane hassles only continue to get more random and crazier (like landing in Dakar at 2 am & having to sit in your seat with all your overhead baggage on your lap while “they” conduct a USA required search of overhead bins & seats). This all gets harder to deal with as we age along with the jet lag which now requires “daze” to recover from.

, I’ve always thought the pluses of travel outweigh the inevitable trials. Travel makes me feel energized which is even more important in “the next stage”. Prior to a trip, I have something to look forward to and plan for and afterwards new memories for my old age.

I went to Europe in ’71, it was with a copy of Frommers’ “Europe on Five Dollars a Day” and a splurge was a gelato. So, another benefit of elder travel is being able to sit down in a real restaurant with actual tablecloths and good wine and not have to worry that I can’t afford to get home.

Travel also broadens my world. During apartheid in South Africa, I was simply living my life, only marginally aware of Mandela and boycotts. I had read “Kaffir Boy”, seen “Master Harold and the Boys” and watched the nightly news but it was not until I was there that I had a better sense of how devastating and all pervasive the policy was.

was also amazing to observe on a tourist level a country trying to heal itself and the incongruity of my TV images of Soweto then and how it is today. In Capetown we had a ‘coloured’ or mixed race cabdriver relating horror stories of the day to day reality of apartheid. The only problem was that he kept taking both hands off the steering wheel to emphasize his points! Travel places a human face on my world.

one of the best things travel does for me is that it puts me in the now in ‘yogaspeak’. When I’m away, I don’t make lists, think about the weeds growing or worry about the future and things I can’t control. I also realize that the best part of my trip is coming home and appreciating all the little pieces of my everyday life even the weeds.

My recent journey was also different from my first foreign adventure on another level. On my initial trip, I went with a girlfriend from college and on this, I traveled with my 30 year old daughter who shares my passion for travel, an experience I wouldn’t trade for my youth.

Be careful what places you revisit; sometimes it’s best to keep the memories intact. Posted on August 10, 2009

I’ve been making up my list of must reads and weighing the merits of rereading old favorites vs. reading new books. In a similar vein, my husband and I have been making lists of places we want to revisit and places we have never been to. When you’re in your 60’s, there are no longer limitless expanses of time; choices have to be made. Will some of the old favorite vacation spots disappoint just as some of those once beloved books fell short?

I can’t imagine ever saying to myself, “I don’t know what I ever saw in Paris or Rome, or Provence or Tuscany. There are places I’ve got to go back to and am sure won’t disappoint. (Affording them is another matter.)

I have had a travel experience similar to my disappointment with books I fell in love with when young. Several years ago, my husband and I went to Argentina and Santiago de Chile. I fell in love with Chile (or rather with the sense of social possibility I found there) when I spent about 5 weeks there in 1972. I spent a lot of time with young activists who supported the Allende government. We spent our evenings going to coffee houses to hear La Cancion Nueva—a hauntingly beautiful hybrid of Spanish and Andean folk music. When the Allende government was overturned in a brutal coup on September 11, 1973, I was stunned. Everyone I met was pro-Allende. How could this have happened? Some of the idealistic young people I met probably wound up tortured and killed by Pinochet.

Off and on over the years, I listened to the music (the Parra family, Victor Jara, Inti-Illimani) and was thrilled when Michelle Bachelet (who was one of Pinochet’s victims) was elected president.I went back in search of the remnants of that culture. The coffee houses were gone (and despite the election of Michelle Bachelet) there seemed to be no trace of the once vibrant Chilean left. I thought I must be looking in all the wrong places, but a sociology professor I met in Buenos Aires confirmed that that there was in fact not much left. “The repression was total,” as he put it.

One of my guide books mentioned “a human rights legacy tour.” It was a very expensive tour and I thought it might be too left wing for my husband, but he was willing, so we signed up despite the steep price.We were the only people on the tour and when the guide,a woman in her late 20’s picked us up, she apologized profusely that the Pinochet Center was not open that day. I was confused—the Pinochet Center??? But this is a human rights tour! Her reply: “We want to make sure this is a balanced tour and we present both sides.”

Despite this inauspicious beginning, the tour turned out to be worth it because of the driver. He was obviously a well-educated man who spoke several languages and knew a great deal about history and the arts. We guessed that he had probably been an academic—-a man of the left who lost his job in the aftermath of the coup. Those Allende supporters lucky enough to escape with their lives usually lost their jobs.

Part of the tour involved a trip to the cemetery to see Allende’s huge, impressive tomb. I asked our driver about Violeta Parra whose music had so much influence on La Cancion Nueva. To my amazement, he said, “She was a friend of mine and I can take you to her grave." The cemetery was enormous and finding an individual tomb was quite a feat. It was a relatively modest tomb and there were some flowers indicating that she was remembered. He told us the tragic story of her death. Violeta fell in love with a much younger man who left her for a younger woman. She committed suicide. I was familiar with her story but did not know what happened to the man who abandoned her. According to our driver, he married the young woman and they had several children, a very happy marriage, and both were still alive and well. That was not exactly what I wanted to hear.

I asked our driver if folksinger Victor Jara, who had been brutally murdered by the Pinochet government, was buried in the cemetery. He said I can take you to his grave. We went to a much poorer part of the cemetery and there was just a little box with Victor Jara’s ashes and no sign that he was remembered. (I later learned that at least the justice system remembered him; one of the men involved in his murder was recently captured.)Now what were the chances of our signing sign up for tour with a driver who could take us to Violeta Parra’s and Victor Jara’s grave sites???

One more amazing coincidence occurred. We signed up for an overpriced wine tour. A meal at a tourist trap restaurant was included in the price. As we settled down to a not very good meal, a man in his mid to late 60’s walked in with his guitar. He had a long gray ponytail, shabby clothes and looked like a down on his luck 60’s hippie. But then he started to sing “Rin del Angelito ” one of Violeta Parra’s most famous songs. His voice was powerful, expressive—probably the best version of that song I’ve ever heard. (Hear Violetta sing it at http://www.violetaparra.scd.cl/images/Tema10.wav

After all my failed searches for remnants of the Chilean left, I finally stumbled on it in this unlikely venue. I wanted to ask him to sing more Violeta Parra songs, but decided against it. It was clear he was there to earn spare change from tourists and singing more of Violeta’s mournful songs would probably not help him. (One of her most famous songs “Gracias a la Vida, popularized by Joan Baez can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW3IgDs-NnA

Despite the election of Michelle Bachelet, the Chile I remembered was dead. Santiago was filled with ugly high rise apartment buildings, but the ring of shanty towns surrounding the city was still there--although the poverty did not seem quite as horrendous as I remembered it. There probably has been some trickle down.

Anyway, the trip to Santiago was much more of a disappointment than my rereads of Russian classics. The moral (if any): of the story: Be careful what places you revisit; sometimes it’s best to keep the memories intact

My changing taste in vacations, Posted July 29, 2009

My husband and I were serious travelers at one point. During the 80’s and 90’s we took 2 international trips per year--once over the holiday break or during our spring break and then again over the summer. The dollar was strong then and we could do this out of income--two community college teachers’ salaries.

I remember giving my sister a hard time about her Jersey shore rentals: “For the kind of money you’re spending on these shore houses, you could be going to Europe!”

I became kind of self-righteous about not letting terrorist attacks stop me. We traveled to southern Spain during the holiday break after September 11 when just about everyone we knew cancelled travel plans.

When the dollar tanked, we stopped going to Europe and used the opportunity to head south—Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile. I fell in love with Mexico, the people, the colors, the food.

This summer (and last summer) we rented a house on Block Island. My husband and I had the same reaction: isn’t it nice not to have to deal with airports? The list goes on and on: getting there hours before an international flight and then dealing with the inevitable flight delays, the 7 hour flight turning into a 14 hour ordeal; the endless security lines; the lost luggage; the ever-shrinking seats and disappearing amenities. You have to really want to go somewhere to put up with all this!

Our last trip outside of the continental U.S. was to Puerto Rico—chosen in part because it was a 4 hour non-stop flight from Philly. Our last major international trip was Argentina and Chile in August 2006. We loved Buenos Aires but the return trip was the flight from hell. We departed the day of the aborted liquid gel terrorist attack. On top of the flight delays and pervasive fear, there was total chaos at Miami airport. We couldn’t find any airport personnel who spoke English. The Spanish speaking tourists were all getting their questions answered but we Anglophones were out of luck. (I do speak some Spanish, but not when I am exhausted, anxious and surrounded by all that confusion.) I turned into an ugly American and snapped; “What country are we in?” My husband responded: “Cuba.”

I am sure we will deal with international airports again. There’s a world out there and we want to see more of it, but taking a break from airports is really nice. And a week in Block Island with my husband and some good friends is now my idea of a great vacation!