It’s April 2015 already. My perception of time has shifted back into avalanche-mode, far from the painful slow-rolling seconds that made last year seem so long. The distance between now and a year ago for me seems far more than the span of days. In a way, thankfully, I feel like I have shed that version of myself.

The beginning of 2014 blurred with the end of 2013, I was on a leave of absence from work and I living a pretty robotic existence. Thankfully I crashed at a friend’s house and her and my brother took care of me and prodded me to do things like get coffee or go hiking or take a short roadtrip, stuff I normally enjoyed doing but seemed monumentally difficult at that time. Actually my memory of that time is mercifully poor and I had to look at my photos to remember what I did. Eventually I quit my job at the university due to the negative work environment and also the somewhat isolated nature of my position. This was a good decision.

I started working for coffee shop again and then Andrew and I decided Lima sounded like a cool city so we did some research before I told my boss I was going to be gone indefinitely and we bought tickets to Peru. Turns out Lima isn’t anywhere near a place I want to stay so we traveled south to Cusco and spent some time in the mountains. I promptly vomited from elevation sickness, something I’d previously doubted the existence of. Eventually we moved north to some crazy cloud city called Ayabaca which was respite from what was beginning to seem like a series of failures (learning experiences) by slight miscalculations. Next we hit the coast and crawled up into Ecuador, heading to supposed awesome place, Cuenca. I was quickly losing patience and it was clear that Andrew and I wanted to do different things, the tension becoming obvious.

We had a quick visit to another badass mountain town called Gualaceo and then headed to the coast to see if Ecuador’s beach towns could be even uglier than Peru’s. No definitive answer but I will admit that I have no interest in ever returning to any of them. Common themes between them were excessive litter, run-down towns hosting them, no attractive girls and being devoid of any man-made place with a nice atmosphere to hang out in. It doesn’t matter. We cut east toward Santo Domingo, and quickly decided to stay the night there and take another bus ride to Quito in the morning.

Eventually the multiple days of eight-plus hour bus rides took a toll on me–when we arrived at our destination in Colombia I threw up multiple times at the bus stop while we were waiting for a friend to pick us up. From this point on the trip was essentially over for me. I was vomiting and having stomach issues for over a week. We went to a hospital and they gave me some medicine that tasted like candy and some kind of Colombian Gatorade. It didn’t really work. Despite being in a very idyllic location on up on a mountain finca outside of Cali, I was 100% physically miserable and about 80% emotionally miserable.

I finally got so upset that I put all my shit in my backpack and left without saying bye. I asked some people at the of the hill if the bus went to the city and they said yes so I got on. As we got into the city I got off near an area that didn’t look sketchy as fuck and bought some peanut M&Ms. The guy at the convenience store was from New York so we talked for a while and he recommended a hostel. It was sold out so I got in a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the Sheraton downtown so I could go out in mildly stylish flames. I walked around downtown for a while and tried to get kidnapped but continued to be so unlucky, therefore I booked a ticket back to Dallas for the following day. Trip ended a bit poorly but I learned a lot and would make the same decisions again.

Obviously this entry is getting too long so we’re going to have to split it into a two-parter. Part two coming soon.