DemocraSay

In response to ESSAY: A Travel Tale.

I love to travel. I simply love it. I have a traveling soul. Whatever the experience, good or bad, if it connects me to the place somehow, it still moves my soul and I still love it.

In 2005, my sister, my daughter (then 9 years old) and I went…on a whim…to the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela. It was to be a low budget trip and we were scheduled to be there for 8 days and got there with nowhere to sleep. I whipped out my Lonely Planet on Venezuela and started looking for hotels. By the time we found a place that had space and was nearby, it was late and dark and we were all tired. We discovered once the sun came up, much to our delight, that we were on the coast of a small town and not yet in Caracas (which had no beaches). So we immediately hit the beach, but it was not, at all, what we expected. Beaches in New York were cleaner than this. Dirty diapers, bottle fragments, cigarette butts and all kinds of other trash littered the beach and the water. Dismayed, but not put off by the filth, my sister and my daughter decided they were going in the water immediately! I, on the other hand, abstained. After about ten minutes of frolicking in the water, they came rushing out of the water grumbling with horrified looks on their face. They say in a broken sort of unison, “You’ll never guess what we saw floating in the water right next to us.”

Well, it was human feces.

Our exit couldn’t have been faster if wild bulls were chasing us.

Our next move was to a hotel in the heart of Caracas, which was again, found in the book. We dropped our bags there and went exploring. By the time we got back to our room, it was after 11pm and we were exhausted and ready to relax.

That was not to be.

It started with us turning out the lights and my sister having to go to the bathroom. There was a small shriek and some scuffling and then all the lights came on. On my sister’s face, again, was the look of horror. For a moment she was speechless, then she said, “Roaches. Lots of roaches.” I went to take a look for myself, because I knew she was a bit squeamish about that sort of thing to discover that there were, in fact, lots and lots of roaches. And they were everywhere. My sister and I stayed up all night with the lights on killing roaches and talking while my daughter slept. I watched my daughter carefully, afraid something was going to crawl in or on her. When it was light enough to safely roam the unfamiliar streets of Caracas, we found a different, cleaner hotel.

Then my daughter got dengue fever.

But that’s another story for another time.

I sure did connect to that place…