“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
Hi there, all-time and regular weekenders!
I'd like to tell a story about something of my childhood that marked me for life. It's an experience that I remember fondly and that shaped my way of looking at places and understand things that work and do not. For the tittle, you must've guessed, I'm talking about traveling.
Let me rain of my parade and tell you there are no photos of that. Not any I took for that matter.
I didn't have the chance to go abroad until I was an adult in age. Before that, my parents could afford taking my brother and I into family vacations around the country. It was great! You don't always get along with your relatives, but traveling is a interesting way to learn more about life. For starters, you get to know how you hometown might be too small for growing. Going around Venezuela makes you understand a big picture and sad truth, centralism is the bane of this country. If it ain't happening in the capital, good luck trying to do something elsewhere.
Beisdes that, we have almost of kings of ecosystems inside our frontiers. So, as a 15-year-old person, I had always set my feet on snow, desert, jungle, savannah, beach, island, inside the sea, and else.
So, as some of my classmates talked about their trips to Miami, I mentioned my third trip to Merida and getting on the longest cable car in the entire world. It was really fun. That until I got sick. It happened in each of those three trips. I think it's called altitude sickness. I call it being awfully pale. But that's something I wouldn't have learned of I hadn't gone to Merida all those times.
Once, we even got to travel with out grandparents. It was even better. With them, we usually had this vacation trips to Margarita's Island. And if you're not Venezuelan, let me tell you this is the version of whatever you have in your country related to going somewhere for a shopping spree. For my, it meant loading on bunch of candy. A lot of them weren't usually seen on the mainland shops. One time we even bought a bucket of Nutkao, which something similar to Nutella. We shared it among the grandchildren. Just image what do kinds do with a bucket of 20 gallons worth of the thing.
For my part, I did drink a lot of coffee sweetened with it.
However, one for the most important things I remember whatching was progress. While other States and cities had new things each time we went by, my hometown was always the same dull big town by the sounding sea. Like there was some sort of curse on it since it was the first city built by the Spanish on the American mainland.
There are still some people who get pissed when I say this city doesn't move forward. I guess they either think backwards or haven't travelled enough.
I don't think there's a single better way to learn about your own country than going around and visiting all the places that have some historical value in it. There's plenty of those in Venezuela. And there are also some really cool building that represent state of the art designs and techniques. We have a lot more of those nowadays, but some of the oldest ones are still there for us to visit.
And what better thing for someone who loves to eat than finding new amazing things to eat along the road. One of my favorite trips in regards to food has been to Maracaibo. And let me tell you, the food there is on another level. There's lots of fried goodies. And also, you come along with different preparations of things you already know. For example, I didn't know back then that it is a custom of the Venezuela easy to make beans sweet. The rest of the country makes them savory. That's really weird since some beans have a very annoying earthy flavour that overpowers everything else and it onlys gets worse with salt. Also, in the Andes arepas are made with wheat flour instead of the usual corn flour.
A lot of our memories were captured in disposable cameras. Do you remember those? I still have one inside it's envelope. It must be more than 10 years old, but it's a memento of times when you didn't know of you had screw a photo up until it was time reveal it. That made the whole deal of photography a lot more interesting and gave you an added challenge of deciding what to keep in paper and what should be kept in your mind.
Speaking of which, let me show you one of you haven't seen it in while:
Swipe to see the photos
Some of these trips were more comfortable than others. I still remember when we had to walk for more than a mile under the scorching sun of La Gran Sábana because the road was blocked by a protest; or the time I was carried to the hospital because of altitude sickness and I felt like I was dying. But also the good times are there, the more than one hundred flavors of ice cream at Heladería Coromoto in Mérida, going to the dunes in Coro, my first time at Mochima Bay. On those travels, the worst part was usually coming back home.
What can I say, traveling changes you. And that's for better or worse. What you make of it depends on your mindset. But I can tell for sure that the best memories of my childhood come from being around the country. I feel lucky of having such good times to remember.
Thanks a lot for reading me!
Photos 📷: taken by me (Redmi Note 8)
Thumbnail 🖼️: by me, created with Canva.
Editing 🎬: by me, made with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
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