In the past two days I have traveled from the salty dry deserts of Uyuni to the more populated Oruru, via a creaking bouncing Night Train which, due to one of the frequent power outages in Uyuni, is without heat or light. I have taken a crammed bust to the wild and dizzying mountain scapes, people jumping on and off while the bus is moving and every so often someone getting on to address the bus on some topic such as the health benefits of quinoa. I have been given the keys to the basic flat which will be our home in Cochabamba, Bolivia and unpacked bits and pieces into it. I have been to the market to buy supplies including washing powder, milk sold in a bag, and an unknown green vegetable (which later turned out to 'Kaywa' or 'Achojacha'). Some of these activities were thrilling, others dull and pedestrian. But they are probably not in the categories you think.
The fact is, over the last couple of weeks, (with the exception of the days in which we were crossing the salt flats, which were like a whole other world) I have actually been experiencing what I believe is commonly known as 'homesickness'.
It does involve a fair amount of looking forward to seeing particular people and particularly exciting activities, like adopting a cat, or finding a rental flat. But really for me the word 'homesickness' doesn't quite express it. I am not so much sick from missing home. I have only a few months before I will be there after all and the wonders of the Internet has allowed for much in the way of contact with people back in the UK. Instead I am just a little tiny bit sick of traveling.
Well at least I assume I am. I assume it while I try to sleep on the train, or to refrain from being sick on the bus. I assume it when my rucksack make the transition somehow from being a symbol of freedom to, well, just a really heavy rucksack.
Until I walk through the door of a very basic flat and I think I am in heaven.
I can put my shampoo in the bathroom and leave it there! It doesn't have to be packaged up again into my lunch bag after each ablution! I can leave my towel there without later discovering it being worn on somebody else's head before disappearing together! There is a kitchen! It has very little in the way of pans, but it is ours! We can sit at a little table to eat! The bustle of external Cochabamba has that muted, homely quality that places take on in the evening. I can make a cup of tea in the kitchen in my underwear without causing offence! (Please refrain from the obvious joke here).
Then we go to the markets of Cochabamba. And everywhere, everything is a market. There is no need for a supermarket, (though we do, rather pointlessly, visit one), because you can buy anything you want on a street market. You name it, someone has a little store on the street selling it. We walk through bustling, chatting streets, assailed with colour, oranges piled up high, cats slinking among bloody meat markets, huge rounds of fresh cheese piled up, butter and milk in buckets of ice, packets and bottles of detergents and cosmetics piled precariously on top of one another, no two bottles seemingly the same. Cars beep, children giggle, people shout, birds call. We conduct out transactions entirely in chatty, curious Spanish, with chatty, curious Cochabambinos (that is their official name - isn't it lovely?) and I feel that brief, vertiginous sense of overstimulation that is so familiar from what remainsy favourite continent, South East Asia.
It doesn't feel like travelling. It feels like coming home.
And perhaps, I reflect, curled on the sofa at the end of our days, drinking glasses of £2 Bolivian wine and listening yo the, already cozy, Cochabamba clamour outside, this is why we haven't felt homesick before.
"Don't worry," said a good friend before we left, "if you find yourself feeling really homesick. It's normal. And if you need to come home earlier than 11 months, don't beat yourself up over it."
But really, the last few weeks, and a little in Bali, are the only times I have really felt it, and never to the extent she was describing. M is the same. Do we just not like our home? No. Absolutely not. We love it, and personally I anticipate our return with the same excitement I anticipate, and anticipated, this trip.
It is more that the way we have conducted this journey, 'settling' for a month into each new place, and making like natives, means we manage, usually, to create a sense of belonging. A sense of roots, making us feel less like ghostly onlookers, just passing through.
And it is the places we have called home, spaces designed to be lived in, rather than stayed in, the local markets, the sane faces we ask for bunches of fresh herbs, the same hands each week, measuring out our chilli paste, our beans or our rice. The deepening flicker, on both sides, of recognition.
The times we have felt less comfortable in country or city are countable on two fingers (Bali and San Pedro), and have in common a sense that we could not, for differing reasons, feel as though we truly 'lived' there. Bali, because of the traffic and the resultant lack if access to the locality, and San Pedro because the hostal was very much a hostal. We made friends but we watched them passing through. In the end we were a ghostly presence too, despite our relatively long term stay.
The last, however, is mitigated by at leas two sets if people who we made proper contact with, and this is rather underlined on our second evening in Cochabamba, when we manage to meet up with one couple from San Pedro, who happen to be in Cochabamba that night.
We walk to meet them through streets and sounds already familiar. (Though I have yet to shake off an annoying, and I suspect rather overblown, sense of danger lurking around every corner, at least on paper. In reality each time we go into town I am a little more struck by how safe I feel. Precautions like not taking valuables out with us, and avoiding darker, lonelier streets late at night are sensible and, frankly, apply just as much to London. But it is not true that every Bolivian is hoping to rob you. We probably experienced more of that, though in more subtle ways, in our first few days in Cambodia.)
We chat with our friends, with the ease of those who have already made the friendship and have only to sit back and enjoy it.
Then we go back to our flat (OUR FLAT!) where I have begun, already, to pride myself on making ever more inventive Bolivian inspired breakfasts and M, to counter these efforts with ever more delicious dinners.
I don't think we ever had a 'traveling itch'.
We have a 'settling itch'.
We just want to settle in lots of places, and just a little more frequently than the expression, 'to settle' might normally imply.
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