Oops! I started a travel blog and didn’t post anything for three months!
To those of you who’ve asked me what happened, thanks for sticking with me. Since my last post in July, I explored more of Guatemala, making stops on the typical tourist route that’s affectionately called “The Gringo Trail.” I traveled to the Caribbean, where I visited friends in Turks and Caicos, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. We snorkeled, hiked, ate great food, and I reveled in the luxury of hot showers and familiar company. I met up with my family in Ecuadór, and we spent a week on a Galapagos live-aboard. My parents and I continued on to Perú, where we visited Machu Picchu, spent time in Cuzco and Lima, and ate a lot of delicious food. My mom and I went on to Uruguay, with a trip across the river by ferry to spend a few days in Argentina. Then we flew to Chile for the last bit of her time in South America.
Now I’m solo again, staying in Colombia, which is my 10th country since June. I’m doing my second Workaway, which is a website for work exchange, where people can create profiles as workers, offering their labor in exchange for room and board. Hosts also create profiles, describing what kind of help they need. I did my first one in Puerto Rico in August, and had a great time staying with a local artist. I helped her with the upkeep of her Airbnb properties, painted part of the background for her next mural, and went on some fun adventures with her and her friends.
The place I’m staying in Colombia is a small eco hotel a few hours away from Medellín in the countryside. I’m here with a handful of other foreign volunteers, and we spend our mornings working in the garden, which supplies the hotel restaurant. No cell service, but good wifi. Our afternoons are free, and I’ve been spending time drawing, journaling, catching up with friends, and thinking about what I want to accomplish with the time I have here. After a few months of changing location every week or so, it feels really good to slow down the pace, get grounded in some routines, and escape the hubbub of the major cities.
I think I’ll probably do some writing to fill in the 3-month gap, but I’ve realized that this blog is probably going to be something different from what I originally envisioned. As I was writing about my time in Guatemala, I found myself looking at the blog as an obligation that I just wasn’t feeling drawn to. Doing retrospective research to give accurate information about the places I’d visited, writing in detail about the tourist attractions I visited, the tour companies I used, and how much things cost… Honestly, all the stuff I’ve done lately has been really fun, but as it turns out, for me, writing a travel blog in that style is not. It kind of felt like I had to write a post about every single place I went and thing I did. I felt like I needed to optimize my posts for SEO and scrub all the passive voice from my writing. And because I felt overwhelmed by the amount of work it would take to produce something polished for each place, I just didn’t post anything.
I realize that these ideas of what the blog “should” be were completely in my own head. The twelve people who are actually reading this do not care at all what style of content I produce, aren’t too worried about the passive voice, and don’t need my blog to be their source of information for their own Central and South American travels. There are plenty of other blogs like that, and you probably just want to know what I’m up to. So thanks for being along for the ride, and thanks for all the support! If you’re interested in seeing more of a play-by-play of my travels, I’ll keep posting that kind of thing on my @sachi_so_far Instagram account. I do have a couple of Guatemala posts that I had mostly drafted back in July that I’ll put up in the next few days. But in an effort to be consistent with this, I’m going to shift the focus of the blog a little, and only write posts that don’t feel like work. In this spirit, I was trying to upload more photos to share with you in this post, but apparently my Google Photos hasn’t backed up since August and I’m struggling to upload them from my phone. But perfect is the enemy of good, and I just want to publish this. Hopefully you like the ones I did manage to upload.