All posts filed under: roam

Bogotá Part II: Making Friends while Traveling

Published by nathalie alyon

I arrived in the Anandamayi Hostel in La Candelaria, the historical district of Bogotá and where most of the main sites are located, dragging my suitcase and neurotic self. And yes, I am travelling with a bag with wheels as I have intention of permanently bending my spine. It does go on one’s back if one choses to put it on one’s back but I haven’t had any reason to do so as it rolls on practically every surface just fine. The hostel is like an ashram in the middle of the city with its garden courtyard adorned with hammocks and blue-green painted décor. They even play the kind of music you’d hear at a spa in Thailand. Yet considering the internal frenzy I was in having finally stepped out into the solo travel episode of my journey, no amount of Zen was going to calm me down. I left the hostel and ventured into the Botero museum. After about 15 minutes of walking around trying to figure out where to purchase an audio guide, …

Bogotá Part I: Passover, Semana Santa, and Celebrating My Arrival in Colombia

Published by nathalie alyon

Having lived away from my “home” country and family for most of my life, I never developed a soft spot for holidays. We don’t have family traditions cultivated over years and years of celebrating Passover or Rosh HaShana. I remember celebrating one Passover in San Diego with our Muslim neighborhood tailor and Christian friend. Another I celebrated in Boston with a childhood friend of my father, who had become religious since my dad last saw him over 20 years ago. That was my longest Seder, as the Hagadah was read in Turkish, English, and Ladino! In Israel, my sister and I always receive multiple invitations from distant relatives and friends. Last Rosh Hashana, I was in Ko Lanta, Thailand and celebrated entering the Jewish New Year splurging at the Pimalai Restaurant with an Israeli-Dutch couple we had met that day. No matter where I am on holidays, alone I am not but most likely not with my family either. Even with my missed-flight episode, I was to do the Passover Seder with a Bogotan Jewish …

Me, my hair, and my bag are off to Colombia!

Published by nathalie alyon

It was an arduous journey filled with tortuous deliberations. For the last few months, I traveled the entire world, twice or three times over. In my head, that is. As I continued to tie up lose ends of my sedentary life, finalizing the end of my 5-year job and making sure my mailbox at home wouldn’t explode in my absence, I also had to decide where I was actually going. South America was the first destination I decided upon. I could be learning Tango in Buenos Aires, or loosing sense of time in Parachi, Brazil, which looks like my kind of paradise according to google images. But I could also go hiking in Nepal or feel strange among a hippies in Goa. Meanwhile the weather was getting colder in Patagonia and the ski season nearing its end in the Northern Hemisphere. I seemed to have the open-buffet syndrome: standing before me was all the tastes of the world and I seemed to have only one small plate and a flimsy plastic fork. Which one would I …

Traveling Alone in Distant Lands. Afraid?

Published by nathalie alyon

I can think up many a reasons for packing up my apartment and traveling to the other side of the world by myself. I want to learn new languages, understand other nations, see the rainforest, and climb strange mountains… But the real motivation for leaving home is to learn one thing: to be alone. I’ve always had this romantic notion that to be a true artist—whatever that truly means—one must have a personality that thrives on solitude. I imagine a painter locked up in a basement for days, weeks, months, working on her masterpiece. Or picture Virginia Wolf shooing away servers in her country retreat in Sussex, in self-imposed imprisonment, to think, to write, to be alone. After John Steinbeck finished college he was broke and needed to find a way to support himself that afforded him the time to write. The 24-year old aspiring writer accepted a job at a large estate in Lake Tahoe as its sole caretaker. “It required that I be snowed in for eight months every year. My nearest neighbor was four …

Thinking on the Winding Road To Pai

Published by nathalie alyon

The winding road that leads from Chaing Mai to Pai, a hippiesque town in northern Thailand, has 762 curves. Travelers are duly warned about the nausea and discomfort they will inevitably experience on the way up to this magical town as Thai drivers are concerned with neither “safety first” nor “keep your breakfast in.” The locals are not shy about profiting on tourists’ weak tummies either—the mid-way toilet stop is a small restaurant in the middle of nowhere, selling various remedies for motion sickness. Fortunately my belly was tough enough to stomach the curves, but the constant sliding from left to right with each turn thwarted any attempts at catching much needed sleep, leaving me with no option but to stay put and think. I forget to think sometimes. Instead I worry, mostly about insignificant decisions. Day-to-day life takes over and I realize that all of my thinking for weeks on end have focused on mundane tasks like paying this bill or editing that paper, and needless deliberations such as what to eat for dinner (i.e., …

Pictures, Memories, and Lots of Fish: Diving in Koh Tao

Published by nathalie alyon

Last October I completed a diving course with ScubaShack in Koh Tao, Thailand. The four-day course which was offered for a bargain price of 8,500 Baht certified me as a PADI licensed Open Water Diver and equipped me with a lovely little booklet in which to record the colorful fish I shall get to see in my future dives. The last day of the course was of course the highlight: two 18-meter dives in Chumphon Pinnacle and Hin Pee Wee. In anticipation of our first dive that morning, my friends Levent and Seda, and our instructor Claus boarded the dive boat at the unbearable hour of 05:45 am, thinking: “Why this Thai torture? Aren’t we on vacation?” ScubaShack is one of the earliest risers among tens of diving schools on the island famous for licensing the highest number of new divers. They torment their students with a 05:00 am wake-up call so that they may relish the wondrous magic of underwater Koh Tao, undisturbed by the hundreds of other divers who arrive at the very late hour …

How I Quit My Job to Travel and Write

Published by nathalie alyon

I am about to embark on a cliché. Two days ago I handed in my resignation to the manager of the research institute where I have been working for almost five years in order to leave my settled life for that of a nomad. With no plane ticket purchased, nor a clear idea of where my round-the-world trip will commence, I declared that I am leaving, flying away to travel the world and write. “What can I do to change your mind?” my manager asked. My decision seemed impulsive to those around me and it was, considering that I woke up two days ago with not much more than the intention of eating breakfast and driving to work. Yet this has been something I have been fantasizing for many years: to leave my comfort zone in Tel Aviv where I have a home, friends, a job and journey into to the world alone. But all of that doesn’t matter. Each word that is written in this first blog entry is a testimony to the ordinary within …