Candy from Babies

Today I´m going to write about why I haven´t been writing. 

A few months ago I read a book called, "Do Travel Writers go to Hell?" which relates the purportedly true, alcohol- and drug-riddled story of how Lonely Planet´s 2005 Brazil guide got written.  In between the graphic depictions of ecstacy-fueled sex in fishing boats, the book put forward what I think is a pretty true theory nugget about travel.  Traveling (at least as backpackers like the author and I and most of you do it), the author submits, isn´t really about seeing interesting stuff abroad, or meeting people with different cultural backgrounds, or learning about history and geography; those are all secondary purposes.  The real beauty of traveling is that you get cast so far out of our own element that your mind is shocked into a  hyperawareness of the present.  Travel so overloads you with new stimuli that your mind resets.  The cobwebs that routine and familiarity have spun get swept out, and you suddenly find you have the ability to start thinking clearly about all kinds of other aspects of your life.  Being dumped into a foreign land with foreign-looking people speaking foreign-sounding languages, he argues, is one of the only experiences overwhelming enough to give members of our information-overlaoded, sensory-dulled generation that kind of a mental reset. 

I didn´t explain that nearly as well as the author did, but I have to catch a bus in a few minutes so I don´t have time to rethink and rewrite it.  You get the idea though, right?

Anyway, to make a long story short, I haven´t been posting much on the blog because Uruguay has been shockingly easy to travel around.  There have been two little snafus: my bag getting temporarily lost by the airline (but it showed up) and the group I was walking around Montevideo with getting mugged (but nobody got hurt and we didn´t lose anything).  Those incidents aside, traveling around here has been smooth-to-a-fault. See, Uruguay works.  The buses run on time, the electricity doesn´t go out at random intervals, the hotels are affordable and have space, the public parks have free WiFi, the whole country has universal 911.  It isn´t a rich country, but it´s an eminently functional one, and a surprisingly easy one to navigate.  And damn it, after Madagascar that just makes the place kind of mundane.  Within two weeks of getting into Madagascar I´d been almost killed by lightning, sickened by contaminated pork, and chased by feral dogs through the streets of the capital.  Here I am almost two weeks into Uruguay, and the worst I can say is that some scared street kid tried to snatch my friend´s purse. 

This place is just too easy to give me the mental shock that I was hoping for: the thing that makes travel worthwhile for me.  It isn´t just that traveling lets me see new stuff and meet new people and eat new food; it´s that while I´m traveling, and for a brief, wonderful hangover period afterwards, I´m able to gain some perspective on life and make weighty decisions on a clear mind. 

That isn´t happening here.  Add it to the fact that the Uruguayan landscape is flat and agricultural, and the food made up mostly of pasta and beef, and what I basically have on my hands is a vacation in Spanish-speaking Nebraska.  The place just isn´t as quirky as I thought it might be.  Being the tiny, undervisited cousin of the nearby Argentinian and Brazilian giants might, I thought, have given Uruguay a few odd traits.  You know, the kind of thing that little brothers and sisters develop to steal attention away from their older siblings.  But not really.  The place just works.  It´s not rich, it´s not poor.  It´s very middle class, very pragmatic in its layout and civil functions, and very, very navigable. 

So what, exactly, am I to write about?  The cities and monuments I´m seeing?  The food I´m eating?  That stuff´s not interesting to read.  You have to be here to care about that stuff. 

But I´ll come up with something.  Just give me time.

In the mean time, I´ll be mailing off postcards tomorrow.