Let’s stop thinking and just go

This is the first post about travelling to South America. Before starting to write about some beautiful places or experiences, it’s worth talking about how the decision-making happened. Besides the very common “Oh, I’m so jealous! I wish I could do this too!” remark from friends, there were some good questions people asked when we shared the news.

1. Why do it now? What about money?

Like most important decisions, this one didn’t happen in a day. Subconsciously, both of us knew for a while (a couple of years or so) that we want to experience more of this world than the sneak peeks we could manage with our jobs. There were really few fundamental questions a) Are we secure enough about our careers to take a break? b) Does the timing work for both of us? c) Can we afford a trip like this (It’s always possible to travel without spending extravagant amount of money! More of this in future posts)? d) How badly do we want to travel? Actually, just thinking more about the last one helped us answer the other questions too!

2. Why South America?

We thought of places we want to travel to and not surprisingly, it was a very long list :) An important filter was that the region should be a backpacking hub of sorts. That will ensure that there is reasonable infra to travel on budget. South America made sense for 2 more reasons a) It is almost united by one language (Spanish) and we wanted to learn a local language to a certain extent for genuine cultural experience b) It’s a very unexplored and mysterious world for us (relative to something like Western Europe)

3. Why volunteer to teach English? Also, why not just volunteer in India?

Volunteering is a good way to help others (I’m going to avoid the word “impact” on purpose). English teaching is one of the most meaningful things we could do here without knowing Spanish. Besides, we decided that we don’t want to be just tourists (or even “backpackers”) for the entire trip. Although you get to see less places by engaging in a job like this, it is a great way to connect to the community. You get a local identity and local people find it more natural to interact with you than a regular tourist. So, the plan ended up as teaching for first few months (living in one city) and then being more nomadic after that.

Also, it’s not just the volunteering part which brought us here. There’s a much more diverse experience you get when you live outside your comfort zone and hence we didn’t want to just volunteer in India.

4. What will you do when you come back?

We don’t know for sure. First, we don’t know what our priorities will be after travelling for a long time. We may realize there are other things which interest us more. Or, our priorities may not change at all and that’s perfectly fine. Second, the point of this trip is to not worry about the future which we all obsessively do in our daily lives. It’s about living life one small step at a time, not optimizing for a 5-year or 10-year plan.

After applying for this program and convincing our families that we’ve not gone crazy, we started this journey.