June, 2023

I distinctly remember its disappearance from my life.  I was walking down Strawberry Street in Richmond, Virginia. I had just finished having a cheeseburger at the iconic Strawberry Street Café when I noticed it was gone.

Wet leaves still matted the streets and the dogwoods were just beginning to bud, no longer winter and not yet spring. Out of nowhere, as I walked down the street toward home, I suddenly became conscious that I had lost an interest in travel.

I was horrified. I’d always considered myself an adventurer. I had backpacked through Europe as a student. I’d never said no to a trip. When I hinted to friends my concern about this change, their reaction was what you’d expect if I had said I’d never taken a taxi.

To cover how self-conscious I felt about the lack of enthusiasm, I pepper them with questions about their trips, about what they saw and how they chose the destination or what they ate, a part of me hoping these recounts would fire up my desire and relieve that bit of panic I felt about its absence.

My grandmother used to watch television travel shows. Years later she became convinced she had actually been there. Like in the movie Total Recall (the 1990 version with Arnold Schwarzenegger), she remembered in vivid detail places all the places she'd never been. Even as a teenager I thought that ability was very cool, a way of traveling without all that packing, spending, waiting and sweating.

Where I live in Mexico, I know of many guided tours and paid experiences that I have never experienced. I only eat in restaurants when I invite my Mexican friends out. I groan at the prospect of an airport.

I have, however, in my one little island of Mexican existence, spent several hours discussing the transformative quality of loss with a Mexican stranger in her language.

I have had numerous hilarious “Is-it-Mexico-or-is-it-just-Juan (Alejandro, Jesus, or Ricardo)?” debates with my expat girlfriends under the palapas as part of our ongoing exploration of cultural influences versus individual personality, and which is which. (We still don’t know)

I’ve haggled with Mazatlán cab drivers in the middle of the night until we both broke down laughing. I've surveyed the ocean not just night after night, but month after month.  I’ve studied it in every mood and every quality of light, including pitch black nights when only the starry points of light of fishing boats gave any comfort in the inky void. I’ve studied it in hurricane force winds which felt like an equal privilege.

After a summer of daily quiet rides across a little inlet to get to my gym, I began to pilot the small ferry boat for its pilot, Felipe, listening to the lone sound of fish breaching the water in the darkness along the inlet of the Marina of El Cid. This experience came along only after months of waiting every night at the dock upon returning from the gym. He would spy me across the inlet, and within minutes I’d see the little boat moving assuringly to my rescue. Finally, he just let me drive.

I have spent evenings cooking quiet dinners with close Mexican friends, learning how to make a tortilla or devein a chile, laughing over both the mundane and surreal. These are the kind of things you do when you've established a relationship, not skipped through a fleeting two-week affair anchored by a hotel suite.

Scuba diving years ago in the Florida Keys, I remember my PADI instructor telling the students not to swim too hard when far below the surface. He told us that if you breathe normally and sit quietly, beautiful fish will get used to you being there and they will swim much closer to you. If you are swimming hard, they will dash away.

When I travel through a place, rather than live in it for an extended period of time, that's how it feels - that the place’s intimacy is beyond my grasp, like a person I felt a deep connection to but at whom I only had the time to smile.

Whenever I think that I might be feel that mobilizing rush, that restlessness to travel to places that I won't ever call home, that urge to roam slips through my fingers like water.

Related links: 

Videos of what tropical storms are like in Mexico.

"How I chose Mexico...." -  Ventanas Mexico

Next up:  

Before you leave for Mexico, try your Spanish out at some practice MeetUps

About the author:

Kerry Baker is a partner with Ventanas Mexico, which provides resources for those considering part or full-time life in Mexico. She has written three books.

"If Only I Had a Place," a guide for the aspiring expat seeking to live large in Mexico. Most recently, she released, “The Mexico Solutions: Saving your money, sanity, and quality of life through part-time life in Mexico, and The Lazy Expat: Healthy Recipes That Translate in Mexico” a cookbook for travelers, snowbirds and expats trying to maintain a healthy diet in a foreign culture.