This was originally published on my old blog BackpackBook (Livro de Mochila), a project that blended literature and travel, sometimes just traveling in my lucid dreams. It ran as âViagem experiĂŞncia rumo ao desconhecido?â on September 18, 2007.
I’d been following a few conversations, some real and some online, set off by Ricardo Freire, mostly around whether too much information can ruin a trip. It gave me some alternative ideas for making a trip different and a bit more thrilling, because for those of us who aren’t the extreme sports type, things do get monotonous.
Out of everything that came up we managed to “put into practice” the one trip that is entirely us. No planning, no money, no idea. In more advertising terms you could call it an Experience Trip, or freely translated, a Non sense experience travel. What it really was is the trip whose single requirement was “let’s go”, even if we had to climb over our own corpses to do it.
We were impatient. The trips this year have been good but rare. We packed the backpacks for up to 3 days somewhere cold or hot, near or far, expensive or cheap, and other antonyms of the same family. Which is to say we had no right destination, and no wrong one either.
Apart from some remarks about our sanity, a lot of people wished us a good trip.
I tried to draw the whole experience as a comic strip, but it’s hard to fit a fiasco of this size into a few panels.
Conclusion
The idea is a very good one and it genuinely makes a trip exciting, occasionally close to stressful. For that reason it’s best attempted outside of long holiday weekends, and preferably without accepting destinations you already know, your home town least of all.
Other discoveries:
- This is Brazil, and a lot of people buy things at the last minute,
- Unlike airports, bus tickets bought at the last minute come with no discount,
- Using positive thinking so the universe conspires in your favour produces universal chaos once everybody is doing it,
- Bus station staff are under no obligation to know every town in Brazil, and asking too much makes you look like a man on the run,
- Some people, our fellow passengers, book two seats side by side and cancel one at the last minute to improve their odds of travelling alone, and they had not counted on our alternative plans,
- Telling one single relative you’re on your way, even at the last minute, is exactly the same as telling the whole town.
Jokes aside, we did find out some interesting things. Your home town can turn interesting when you look at it with a tourist’s eyes, and it’s curious to notice ordinary people and unusual places that went straight past you at other times. We look for the different far from home, and moving city changes our perception and our behaviour, when we could change without running quite so far, using the culture and the people who are already close, running experiments in the next neighbourhood over, trips around the block, changes in ourselves.
We haven’t given up. One day we’ll do a trip like this properly. Has anybody done something similar?