The Inca have a trail. The Maya have a trail. Heck, doesn’t silk have its own road? Well, here are a few stories about the trail I have followed through life: the Gringa Perdida Trail. I wish I had thought years ago to share it in this way.
You see, I’ve been traveling and having wild adventures, mostly with my family, for as long as I can remember. In fact, I recently learned a new term for myself: a third-culture kid (Ok, so at least I was one while I was still a kid). Wikipedia even has a page about it! Basically, it’s when a child grows up in one or more cultures other than the one they are born into and that their parents are from. The amalgamation of the family culture and the culture outside the front door becomes a third, unique culture within that child. It’s not that I like to ascribe labels to myself or anyone else, for that matter, but sometimes it’s a comfort to see something defined that we can point to and identify with. In any case, how did I become this TCK? My mother was born in Argentina and moved to New England at a young age. My father lived in Nigeria and Ghana while during his childhood until he, too, moved to New England. They met on Virginia Beach when my Dad was training for the UDT (which would later evolve into the US Navy Seals) and my Mom would walk the same beaches with her two dachshunds. The rest is history.
Well, no, the rest is more like my two older brothers, my older sister, me, a younger sister and a younger brother. Aah, the love! Most of us were born in different places and grew up throughout different phases and countries in my family’s history. I was born on Cape Cod, Massachusetts where my family used to summer when I was little. It has been pointed out to me that only New Englanders have the audacity to use “summer” as a verb. Love it! I spent most of my younger years growing up in the small coastal city of La Ceiba, Honduras. It was a wild time sharing a house with so many siblings on top of as many as six dogs, a donkey, a capuchin monkey, an otter, ducks, ferrets, sloths, a kinkajou (yeah, look him up- very cute), rabbits, chickens, agoutis (not quite as cute, but quick as Flash Gordon), koatimundis, three parrots, but… no cats! I have wonderful memories of them all, like going up to the Cangrejal River on Saturdays with the otter so she could swim around and fish; or watching my mother sit out in the yard in a rocking chair until the monkey, Memin, came down out of the trees to curl up in her lap so she could go through his hair; or when the parrots (Gallo, Gringa and Gandhi) would cry out “night night, night night” with a rich Spanish accent telling the world, but mainly Silvia, our cook, that they were ready to go into their cages for the evening. There are so many stories I could tell about all of them!
When I was about twelve, we packed up and moved to a much tamer and more cosmopolitan life in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. It took a while to adjust, but by high school I was ready to embrace this lively city with all its dancing, singing and endless night-life. I’m sure by now my father wished he could drag us all (particularly his adolescent daughters) back out into the bush somewhere! Instead, we shifted the “summering” to a lower latitude: the Utila Cays off the northern coast of Honduras. No televisions, no telephones, no endless night-life, but plenty of snorkeling and dozing in hammocks.
It was not until I moved up to Virginia for college that I realized my life had been at all out of the ordinary. By then, my parents and two younger siblings had moved to Salta, Argentina. For a couple of my summer breaks I took the seemingly interminable flight down to this lovely, colonial-style city to once again head out on the trail with my family for some pretty wild rides. There was the unforgettable trip up into the foothills of the Andes when we all munched on bitter coca leaves to avoid altitude sickness, and our car got stuck in the snow drifts. There was the 12 hour road trip (which could have been done in less than 10 had my father lowered himself to ask for directions) down to see my mother’s family on the ranch outside of Rio Cuarto. And there were the various, slightly more sophisticated trips into the many wine-making areas of the country- beautiful, stark landscapes like Mendoza and Cafayate.
By my junior year, I had such a strong case of “the travel bug” that I found it suffocating to stay in one place too long. So, I packed up for a semester abroad in Adelaide, Australia. I spent six months roaming around mostly the southeastern portion of this fabulous continent, meeting wonderful people from all over Europe, Canada, and of course the charismatic and friendly Aussies themselves. I brought back loads of photos, a jar of dirt for my grandmother who had always dreamed of going to the Land of Oz (did I just get busted by customs?), and a newfound respect for the financial and physical stamina of backpackers.
When I returned for the holidays, I was welcomed to my parents’ new home in Belize, Central America. I spent a summer interning there and living with my father just outside the citrus groves, west of the coastal town of Dangriga. That summer, my father got me into the wonderful, albeit expensive, habit of exploring someplace new every weekend. In this way we came to know much of the country, from the Mennonite communities up north near the Mexican border to the Mayan temples near the Guatemalan border to the west, to Francis Ford Coppola’s retreat deep in the pine forest interior of the country, all the way out to the island of San Pedro and the longest reef in the Western Hemisphere.
When at last I graduated from college, I moved up to the Cape for several years. Although the traveling slowed down, I still managed to get some trips in down to Argentina, Honduras and Guatemala. By then my father was in Guanacaste, Costa Rica and I was lucky enough to tag along with him once as he drove from Managua, Nicaragua, through the old capital city of Granada and across the border to Liberia, Costa Rica where we enjoyed some of the nearby beaches and tropical rainforests.
In 2009 I moved to northeast Texas and experienced some of the greatest culture shock of my life. I have enjoyed exploring and getting to know this part of the United States, with its dry, open, landscapes and lush, talkative people. By far the traveling highlight of the last few years, though, was my recent trip with my older sister to visit my father in Mozambique in southern Africa. It was this sojourn that finally prompted me to put this site together and begin sharing the stories of my journeys on the Gringa Perdida Trail.
I tell this cliff-note version of my story to give some idea of the forces, countries and cultures that have shaped me throughout my life. Obviously, it’s not the full script. In each place I have been fortunate to meet and be accompanied by fantastic, interesting, eccentric characters. My hope is that, going forward, I can pay homage to some of these people as well as these places as I revisit them or take them with me, as a part of me, when I explore new corners of our world.
I should say, too, that in many ways I do not have the character of an adventurous world traveler. An excessively picky eater since birth, I still don’t eat any seafood; I am not a big fan of bugs and have always had an inexplicable phobia of them crawling into my ears; I’m asthmatic; I get motion sickness when I’m snorkeling, not to mention when I’m in a moving vehicle (I wish I were joking); and, worst of all, I’m chicken! Yet I travel. I deal with the food, the bugs and the smoky air. This seems to be part of what makes seeing my travels through my eyes so humorous to the rest of my family which is so much tougher and more rugged than I. I hope that anyone reading along will also enjoy it and perhaps be inspired to venture out. If I can, anyone can!
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