Ah, the keyboard, my old friend.
I’ve been experimenting with making videos. I suppose they are van-life videos, but mostly they are the chronicling of a life on the move. Whether in a van, a shop, a friend's apartment… they are always on the go. Some of you may have seen a video or two, and I appreciate that immensely. They have been fun to make. Something new and different to set my mind to. But the reality is… words seem to fail me at the point that I put sound to them. But writing… the written word rarely fails me.
Except when it does.
But what can you do?
Well, dear friends, after a woefully long break… Welcome back to Maia’s Misadventures!
Blog addition…
Cause I suppose the Vlog is now called the same thing.
Ha. Branding, am I right?
I’m so excited to be back here with you.
I’m so excited to be heading back out on an adventure.
You may be wondering if that’s a valid thing to say, given I live in a van and never seem to be in one place for too long, but the reality is, the van is my nest. My ability to breathe easy. My home. And though it’s tiny, it makes me feel safe. It is a known, in a largely unknown world. Something solid in the liquid flow of life, and I love that. But returning consistently to something known, doesn’t necessarily lend to a sense of adventure.
I’m ready to be in a new bed every night.
To be surrounded by foreign landscapes.
To communicate with body language and gestures because I don’t speak the language.
To not know what the day will hold.
To open myself to the possibilities once more and fling myself into the world.
That is one thing I love and miss about travel.
You have to trust.
You have to surrender.
Two things I’m not good at.
Two things which thrill me.
Five days til departure.
Let’s go.
There is a sense of wonder missing. Typically when I wake on travel mornings it’s excitement and joy I feel, from the moment my eyes pop open, but this morning took some dragging. Perhaps it’s because I don’t feel I completed everything I meant to the day before departure. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t get nearly enough sleep last night and my coffee this morning was gross. I suppose the reasoning doesn’t matter. Up at 4:30am, called an Uber by 5:10 (after nearly losing my mind when the Lyft app didn’t work), to the airport by 5:29am, and all the way through security by 5:37am…boarding at 7:15. But wait, actually, my flight has been delayed. Boarding by 7:45…so much time to kill.
I wander through the airport searching for breakfast, desperate to avoid the 30 person Starbucks line or the $20 omelet from Second St Bar… bagel and coffee acquired, I head to the infinity gate, recently installed in the Austin Airport by my good friend, Audrey, and the company she works for, Blue Genie Art Bazaar. A fantastic gate which will print you a ticket to hundreds of fantastical destinations and make announcements about visiting them safely. Infinity is apparently the number next to 14, so if you find yourself in the Austin Airport with time to kill, I suggest heading to gate 14!
With 2 hours to kill, and coffee in hand, I sit down to upload my latest YouTube video and work on my blog, but my computer has other ideas and won’t connect to the wifi. This is going swell so far.
I’m sure, however, that once I’m truly underway, I’ll find the excitement once more.
Sayulita, Mexico…where I’m heading now, as I realize I’ve not said so yet. But let’s rewind.
Back in April I left Colorado for a few weeks and took my van over to San Diego. I had no plan, no reason to go there, but I knew I wanted to. I fell in immediately with a whole host of van lifers. We partied and slept on the beach, and I wanted to stay forever.
Two of us headed to a roller skate meetup on the boardwalk one day. There was a kind lady with a cool haircut whose young kid (five or six years old, I think) fell in love with us. We raced the kid on our skates and played games with her. Her mom got our info when we parted ways. A week later she messaged me. “Have you ever been to Sayulita, Mexico? I could see you making your forever home there.” And I had not! I had not even heard of Sayulita, Mexico.
So to the internet I went.
And now, to Sayulita I go.
Because that’s my favorite way to travel. Open to the winds, the possibilities, the suggestions of near strangers.
Those are the best.
I realize on my second flight, after startling myself awake with a sudden twitch, that I don’t hate the masks on the plane. Not completely. At least with a mask no one can see my mouth drooping open during the inevitable unconsciousness which over takes me. Born of being up since 4am, getting few hours of sleep, and being on my 7th hour of travel for the day.
The flight attendant comes by two seconds after I startle myself. I request a coke, hoping the sugar and caffeine will work it’s magic, and watch them pour the man across the aisle a glass of tequila.
And I mean, a whole glass.
“Disculpe. Cuantos por el tequila?”
“It’s free,” she chuckles at me, and pours me a double.
Oh boy, welcome to Mexico.
In the center of Sayulita, a friend awaits my arrival. Josh. We met on Tonsai Beach in Thailand when I was 19, where we climbed, drank, and I played my first horrible game of pool. Then in Austin, Texas, when I was 22, where we sat beneath the Congress bridge and watched the bats emerge. Now in Sayulita, Mexico at 27, where we’ll…well that remains to be seen, but I’m sure it will be fantastic. This is the ideal friend, if you ask me. An adventurer, a traveler. Someone you don’t see for years, but fall right back into camaraderie with when the opportunity arises. Someone to whom you can say, “hey, I’m going to Mexico, you coming?” And there they are.
In this case, the timing worked out perfect, as Josh has been in Mexico for weeks already, climbing, and happened to be a $50 round trip ticket away from my destination. Why not take a little climbing break in a cute beach town with an old friend?
Although I love traveling alone, and was fully prepared to have a month to myself, I’m happy to be arriving to a familiar face, especially for the first couple days. A friend, while I get my sea legs back under me. It has, after all, been three and a half years since I’ve left the country. A shocking number, for myself, but I’m here to set that straight.
The pilot announces the beginning of our descent, and I lean my head against the round window to get an idea of what I’m heading into. The moment my eyes begin to devour the landscape below me, all apprehension from the morning lifts and I feel the excitement I was waiting for. Mountains and jungle and rivers spread beneath me in every direction as we approach Puerto Vallarta, and I’m grinning. Maybe it’s the tequila. Maybe it’s the fire that’s been smoldering, waiting for me to head to new lands once more, finally grabbing it’s chance to ignite fully.
Whatever it is… I’m here for it.
Five minutes off the plane and the misadventures have already begun. The frantic energy I have always loved about traveling, but that can take a minute to settle back into, once out of practice.As soon as I’m off the airplane I receive a text from Josh letting me know he’s having a hard time figuring out which airbnb is ours. While trying to work out solutions with him, I head to the ATM to withdraw pesos.
“Cannot complete transaction.”
Weird.
Next ATM.
“Cannot complete transaction.”
Oh, shit.
Try my other card.
But it’s a credit card and I don’t know the pin for the ATM.
Shit.
Okay, so I definitely forgot to put a travel notice on my cards. And now I’m here, in the Puerto Vallarta airport, ready to board a bus, my final leg of the journey to Sayulita, and realizing I have no pesos and no way to do so.
I drop my bag where I stand and kneel on the dirty airport floor - chauffeurs and taxi drivers everywhere holding signs, passengers shuffling around me in a daze - and try to figure out how to contact my bank without being able to call them.
After a few minutes I’m able to find a contact email and shoot them off a message. Now to focus on the task at hand… getting to my airbnb an hour away with no physical money.
After a long day of travel, and, as I’ve mentioned already now multiple times… very little sleep… I take the easy route, bite the bullet, and order an Uber on the airport wifi, even though it’s 10x more expensive then the public bus I planned to take. I reason that it’s my first day, and the first few days are always my most expensive while I figure the ins and outs.
Having settled on my decision, I order the Uber and walk outside to find the car. The wifi promptly disconnects. I can’t find the spot where the Ubers are supposed to pick up passengers. I ask a kid in an Aeropuerto vest, and we speak a mixture of broken English and broken Spanish to each other, sending me in generally the right direction, but still feeling completely lost. I rush in the direction he points, checking my frozen Uber screen and knowing the timer must have hit zero already. I remember, unfortunately, from previous trips, that when you lose connection and the driver can’t find you, you still get charged, for at least some of the ride.
I see a man standing in a bright orange vest that may or may not work at the airport.
Fuck it, gotta ask someone.
“Disculpe. Hablas ingles?”
“Un poco.”
I ask him and he informs me that the Ubers come to where we’re standing.
OR
They go to a spot across the highway.
And with no signal, there’s no telling which my driver chose.
I glance at the license plates near us, thank him, and bound up the ramp and across the pedestrian bridge to the other side of the highway.
I can feel eyes on me and hear chuckles as I tear around other tourists with suitcases, searching for the license plate that matches my frozen screen.
Finally, I see it!
I manage to get to the car and yank the back door open, just as the car starts to pull away from the curb, obviously giving up on me.
“Hola!” I shout, tossing my bag in the backseat.
“Maia?” The driver exclaims, clearly surprised.
The drive from Puerto Vallarta is beautiful. The jungle sprawls in every direction with it’s lush greenery. It’s an hour drive, and my driver and I exhaust our limited language abilities pretty quickly, each trying to speak the others language, so I spend some of it writing, and most of it staring out of the window in a dreamy haze. The green highway sign for Sayulita comes into view. “Pueblo Magico” it says beneath the town name.
“Pueblo Magico?” I ask, smiling. “It’s a magic town?”
“Oh yes,” Ramon replies. “Very magic.”
We weave through cobblestone streets, too narrow for two cars to pass each other, packed with people, cars, dogs, dread locked hippies on quads, mopeds, and golf carts. Past cute shops, colorful murals, and tables in the streets outside restaurants.
Pueblo Magico.
Perfect.
He drops me at the end of a dirt road the car will clearly not make it up, gives me a business card to call him for a ride back, and drives away.
Here we go!
I find the building of my airbnb relatively easy, and am grateful Josh already figured out we’re on the second floor, not the first like I thought, so the clothes hanging downstairs don’t throw me off.
I climb a level and enter our cute outdoor kitchen and patio area through a small gate. Josh is spread out on a couch, the fan above him on full blast.
“Hello!” I exclaim, dropping my bags, and we embrace.
Just like that, we’re chatting and catching up, and deciding where we want to eat. With some people it’s easy. With some people it doesn’t matter that it’s been 5 years. It could have been yesterday. Let’s go get dinner.
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| In front of the airbnb |
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| Outdoor kitchen in bnb |
We head towards the town center, down twisting stone stairways cut into the hills, between colorful houses, past packs of street dogs, and laughing kids. We’re about to turn the corner onto the main avenue and Josh stops suddenly.
“I don’t think I’m gonna make it. I’m gonna have to go back.”
“Wait, what?”
“I think I’m gonna need to throw up. The sandwich I had while waiting for you, it’s not sitting right. I’ll go throw up, text me where you end up eating, maybe I can come meet you after.”
“My phones on 5%. I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”
I feel terrible for him. He’s only supposed to be in Sayulita for three nights, and on his first, he’s been taken out. But there’s not much I can do to help, and having someone cramped in a room with you while you’re ill, isn’t always the best.
We part ways at a pharmacy, him back to the room, me off to dinner.
“I’m really sorry,” he says as we part. “I know it’s lame to have to be by yourself. But you were gonna come to Mexico alone, so…”
“No worries. I was gonna come alone.”
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| One of two staircases to get home |
I head down the street feeling slightly bummed. After such a long travel day, and such little sleep, a decently large part of me wants to go back to the room with him. Rinse off and pass out. But my stomach is growling, I don’t want to crowd him, and I know I won’t sleep well hungry, so I push on into town, passing shops offering pasta and pizza, searching for something at least slightly more authentic for my first night in Mexico.
I pick a restaurant based largely on the friendly nature of the waiter who shows me the menu, and take an empty table on the street next to 3 middle aged men. They immediately pull me into their conversation, and next thing I know, I’ve been drinking spicy margaritas and talking to them for 3 hours. One of them proposes to me, one offers me a management position for a bar he’s buying in Mexico, and one picks up my bill (which I allow only after his friend explains how much he’s worth, and that my dinner is pennies to him). As we sit, we rope in more and more people. A German kid walking by, minding his own business on his way to work on his masters thesis, gets sucked into our conversation and sits. A couple at the table on the other side of me joins our rowdy crew, as well. Random passersby stop to exchange stories and grins with us. At one point, I notice a girl a few tables over giggling as she observes us. I try to engage and pull her in. She exchanges a few jokes with me, and then the waiter informs me she’s the restaurant manager and I can’t help laughing at the ridiculous scene. We are an infectious blob of laughter, drawing others in.
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| My "bowl buddy" my little sister gave me to take pictures with (haha!). Name TBD |
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| Couple new friends from my first night |
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| Another new friend |
“Okay, Maia, I ask everyone this. How did you hear about Sayulita? How did you end up here?”
“Well…” I chuckle to myself. “I was living in Colorado and I decided I needed a little beach and sunshine. I headed over to San Diego for a few days. I met a woman there who said I should come here. She said she could foresee it becoming my ‘forever jungle home’. So here I am.”
“Wow, so you just came! And how many years ago was that?”
“That was in April.”
“Oh wow. So you’re here a few days?”
“A month, I think. We’ll see how it goes.”
The three men’s mouths pop open in comical gestures.
“So…in April, a stranger told you you might like a place in Mexico, and you up and came for a month? You have a remote job?”
“I don’t actually.”
“You don’t work??”
“No, no, I work. I just don’t work while I travel. I work a lot, I save my money. I go travel…spend it all. Go home and restart the process. It’s been working for me for years!”
I smile at their expressions and sip my margarita.
“Well, Maia… you must be doing something right. To be half our age and able to travel so long."
I'd like to think I am... living to my own rules, at the very least.
One of the men orders a new bottle of wine and Alejandro, the waiter, automatically brings me a glass. I hesitate before accepting, but only on the terms that he can tell me where to buy bananas at this time in the evening. He laughs and tells me what to look for. I finish the glass of wine, thank all my new friends, and head off in search of bananas for Josh. I think three hours is enough alone time in the room. Hopefully.
I wake before the sun. The roosters crowing since 3am have been joined by a symphony of dogs performing a call and response with each other. We’ve slept the entire night with our doors, windows, and curtains wide open, so the cool night air I am engulfed in as I wrap myself in a blanket and stand on the porch, facing the coming sun, is the same air that chilled my skin all night. It feels right, to sleep with the doors open. To be exposed. To feel and hear the jungle in the room. I stay on the porch in my blanket until the sun has arrived, and then head back in.
Josh is still ill. He rises and dresses shortly after me, determined to join me for breakfast, but he just can’t swing it. It’s only been 12 hours since he’s poisoned himself. He needs rest.
I venture into the cool, quiet town. So different from the rambunctious streets of the night prior. Too early for anyone, yet. Even the wild dogs sleeping in the streets can’t be bothered to peek at me as I pass, despite their 6am howls. I like it like this. I walk slowly, taking lots of pictures, dishing out and receiving kind smiles and greetings from the few people up. All locals, it seems.
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| Top of the hill/staircase leading to town |
I see the world differently when I travel. I perceive with more senses. I notice more. Landmarks. Behaviors. I am more curious. I feel sharper. I find myself unconsciously translating what I’m seeing into the right words to share the experience here, in writing. Or if not scripting paragraphs in my head, attempting to translate my thoughts into the broken Spanish that’s gotten me by, thus far.
At home, I have forgotten how to perceive in this way.
Not forgotten.
I have simply lost the desire to do so.
It feels good to be awakening these senses once more. The curiosity. The sharpness.
A boy with a saxophone and a full voice sets himself in front of the bar where I’m writing. He smiles at me. He sings Summertime while I sip my coffee and prepare for the good day ahead.
I truck back up the multiple steep stairways to the airbnb, the dark having long since settled over the town. I hear steps ahead of me, and glance up to the shadowed figure of Josh coming down the stairs.
“Hey! You’re up! Where ya going?”
“It’s time,” he replies. “I need to be fed.”
“Lemme drop my bag, I’ll join you for dinner.”
We take it easy and slow. Avoiding food likely to upset his stomach again. We walk down to the water, in search of a beach bar, and find it surprisingly quiet. The windows of the houses lit up on the hillside above the ocean sparkling in the distance.
We find a bar with a DJ. No one is dancing, but the music is good, so we order drinks that taste nothing like they should, and sit on white cushions in the candlelight.
On day three Josh’s eyes pop open in the morning. “Oh my god, I feel normal,” he exclaims in excitement.
“Yay!!”
We rise and pack for an actual day, deciding to venture on a hike I found online, which is meant to lead to a less populated beach. The “hike” turns out to be pretty short, less than a mile, which makes me chuckle to myself as there were multiple comments about it on AllTrails suggesting you don’t undertake it on your own. "Guides highly encouraged." For a 20 minute walk? I think we got this.
It is beautiful though, weaving at times through the jungle and at others along a narrow path above the ocean. Something easy, but rewarding.
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| Finally alive and well! |
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| Views along our trek |
After dinner we wander towards the sound of a live band blasting American covers. Truly a top 20 “my best life” type of set list. Something spotify might make you for your great American road trip. Nevertheless, it’s fun. Like the 10 bros behind us, I can’t help bouncing and singing along to the accented singer.
“You’re gonna have fun here,” Josh says, laughing at me being ridiculous.
“What?” I shout over the music.
“Maia, alone, in Sayulita. You’re gonna have a blast.”
I’m sure he’s right.
I’m gonna have a blast.
And so the 3rd morning has arrived. We pack our bags and straighten the airbnb. Lock the doors, leave the keys. Head to breakfast.
I really liked the room, and wonder briefly as we head down the hill if I’ll return here on my own eventually. It’s possible. I could see myself living there for a time. The open air kitchen. The balcony, perfect for writing. The job offer from my first night at dinner, as brief as it was, has my head spinning with the potential of moving to Mexico. But best not get ahead of myself. One day at a time.
We pay the bill. Josh’s taxi arrives.
“I wonder where I’ll see you next,” he says.
"Somewhere in the states. We have a pattern to keep."
We embrace, and just like that, I’m on my own in Mexico.
But I’m not really, am I?
Never, really.
I lug my pack over to my new hostel, enter the gate and come face to face with the German boy from my first night in town. The rowdy dinner that started me off right.
I drop my bag at the front desk, sit down to write, and am immediately invited out to breakfast by three more people sitting near me.
I thank them and decline. A fourth person sits down as they leave, and compliments my pants, striking up a conversation.
Some of my original motivation for coming to Mexico for a month was the desire to finish my poetry collection and work on the book I’ve been sitting on for years.
That’s seemingly like an incredibly silly and naive desire now that I’m here.
Will I actually get any writing done here?
Who knows!
Will I be lonely in Mexico?
Definitely not.
Sea legs strengthened once more.
Let’s do it.
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| Excited to have a drone to play with on this trip |
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