Surprise & Difference

One of the major reasons that everybody should travel is to understand and learn difference, to overcome ethnocentricity and hatred one needs to leave behind what is familiar sometimes to see and understand something new.

Without these understandings that people, cultures and countries are different we may ultimately close down and become forces of hatred and disinterest in the lives of others and care so much about what we understand that we refuse to understand something new.

David DeAngelo, dating-coach guru, sais in one of his programs that every person should travel at least twice a year. It is one of his 77 Laws of Success. Travelling allows you to see new perspectives, and will even make you more secure about yourself and even new surroundings.

David DeAngelo's Website

Always put yourself in new environments and situations that you have not experienced, it is the only thing that will let you grow as a person, socially and individually.

Surprises.

I've travelled, more or less, Central America for four and a half months before I came to Mexico. Central America is ridden with extreme contrasts, poverty, gangs, violence, beauty, nature, volcanoes, jungles, plains, highlands, lowlands, beaches. Sticking out above it all is the seeming lack of organised infrastructure (at least counting for El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala) and large gaps between the rich and the poor. This also counts for southern mexico, especially Chiapas, which together with the mentioned Central American countries make up the political region of so-called "Mesoamerica". Mesoamerica is a beautiful region, which I love a lot, maybe except for the food, it is one of the places on Earth I feel most at home.

My surprise was when I left southern mexico and arrived in central Mexico. In the big cities here, like Xalapa, Veracruz or Guadalajara, Jalisco, things appear almost European. Poverty not as apparent, development gotten much farther, and you can actually walk around with cameras and so on without feeling immediate fear of being assaulted. The all imposing presence of policemen with shotguns or automatic weapons are not present here, as they are in the south, and I generally feel more like I am in Europe than I feel I am in Latin America.

It is a welcome surprise, after four and a half months without warm showers, only chicken buses and bad roads to come to a place that has all of these apparent luxuries. You learn to accept it all, but you also learn to appreciate the small things that make life and society feel more organised, even though both inorganized and well-organized places have their own charm.

It's going to be very good to come back home next week, I have a lot of stories, a lot of things to do, and I feel I am very different from the person who left norway five months ago, and I am sure others will notice that change in me as well.

All the best to all the travellers I've met, to all the people's houses I stayed in, all the people I shared dorms with, to those I spent four nights with in the jungle and watched sunsets from the tops of pyramids, to those I learned to dive with and to those I shared buses with, I am very thankful for all that I have learned from all the people I met on my travels, and I remember everyone of you, and I hope I carry some of the best from all of you with me, and that I have given you something new to bring with you.

I am the spark, the little stone rolling down the hill, the echo in the snowy mountains, the falling drop of water.

Peace&Success
Kristoffer