Where to Next?

I had make it back to Buenos Aires and kinda settled back into my routine of learning Spanish and hanging out with my school mates and other random people I run into. At this point I’ve officially been in Buenos Aires longer than I’ve spent in any other place while traveling.

A couple days later Joanna came back from her successful trip to the south. The glaciers were spotted she told me, and they’re awesome and I have to go. I knew that was going to be the answer before she got to town. She was leaving for home in a couple days, but was going to finish her trip off in Buenos Aires.

We found time to close down a few more clubs and for her to teach me a couple more moves on the dance floor. After that it was another good-bye to someone cool I met traveling. I’ve gotten awfully good at saying those goodbyes after a bit of practice.

I came here looking to settle down for a little bit. And after a couple of weeks being settled down I was starting to get antsy. My sisters somehow convinced my Dad to buy them tickets to come to Ecuador to come visit me. Well the Ecuador part was my idea. They asked me where they should fly to in a couple of months to meet me. And I looked at a map and came up with Ecuador. I was thinking Peru originally, but then I met this Ecuadorian guy who was really cool and kinda planted the idea in my head.

This gives me about two months to make it from Buenos Aires to Quito, Ecuador. I find myself spending a lot of time analyzing maps and planning out routes. Maybe I’ll head through the northern part of Argentina, through Cordoba and Salta before crossing into Chile and continuing along the coast. Or maybe I’ll just keep heading north and spend some time in Bolivia and Peru before working up into Ecuador. Or maybe I’ll just fly all the way to the Caribbean and work my way down south to Ecuador.

Joanna told me this story when she came back. She said she was sitting in a restaurant or something waiting for a bus, and at that moment it just dawned on her that she was happy. That everything was good in life and she was just content. This seemed like an amazing revelation. And I started trying to think if I’ve ever had a similar experience.

Before I started this trip I kinda knew things weren’t going the way I thought they should. But of course I had no idea what way they were supposed to go. My plan was that I would just hang out and after a couple months while I was laying on the beach in Rio everything would just magically be clear. And many things did come to me while I was lying on the beach in Rio, although none of them were the meaning of life. When I told Joanna about my original plan she just kinda laughed.

Apparently finding happiness isn’t really quite that simple. She said it was about knowing what you want and knowing what you don’t know you want. And I hear those answers can only come from within. You can’t find it searching Google and it’s not in that new razor that they’re selling. Sometimes those clichés take on an entirely new meaning when you can tie a moment and an experience and a point in time to those tired string of words. And sometimes everything really is quite so simple that it can be summed up in a few words.