Love Story Bronze Winner: My Dutch Explorer
by Catherine Parker
“So you’re bailing on me.”
“Look, I’m sorry Cath. I’m not earning pounds like you are. I just can’t afford it.”
I sighed into the phone, and looked out the window of my tiny flat in London. Rain, rain and more rain. It suited my mood. I had been living in London for eight months and had been madly saving up to be able to travel to South America with Sarah, one of my closest friends. Unfortunately she was back in South Africa, earning a decidedly weaker currency than the British pound. A month before we were due to leave, she’d called me from Cape Town and pulled out of the trip.
Maybe it was the sight of that endless rain out the window, or the thought of all those days I’d spent running from my day job of formatting spreadsheets to my night job of pouring pints of beer for drunk Englishmen. Whatever it was, I decided as I put the phone down to Sarah that I had sacrificed too much to simply abandon my travel plans. I was going on the trip - whether she was coming or not.
Of course, the thought of traveling alone to deepest, darkest South America seemed overwhelming, not to mention the fact that I spoke absolutely no Spanish. With trepidation then, I began looking into organized overland tours. After much research, I finally booked a three month backpacking trip from Ecuador to Brazil with a tour company who promised “independent travel - without the worry”. I had to pay for fifty percent of my tour cost upfront, and keep the rest in cash for “kitty money” on the road, a seemingly small detail that would literally save me later on.
With my trip booked and paid for, I phoned a London travel agent to book my flight into Quito. It turned out that the only reasonably priced flight arrived a week before the tour started. An entire week by myself in Ecuador? Before I allowed myself to think too much more about it, I booked the flight.
Exactly three weeks later, I found myself standing in front of the baggage carousel in Quito airport. Collecting my backpack, I took a deep breath and walked into the arrivals hall. All around me, hordes of people shouted and laughed and reunited with one another. I felt lonely and vulnerable. I knew not a soul, and all I had on me was the address of my hostel (obviously I’d left my guide book on the coffee table of my London flat in my rush to leave). Via some rather frenetic sign language, I managed to communicate to a long suffering airport official that I needed a cab. A driver led me out from the airport taxi desk to the dark lot where his cab was parked. It was nightfall now, and I was in a strange city where it is advised that women shouldn’t travel alone. Climbing into this man’s cab by myself, without a cell phone or any kind of backup, I tried not to think about the possible dangers of what I was doing. Having being brought up in crime-riddled South Africa though, I found this almost impossible to do.
As it turned out, I was dropped off at my destination without incident. Situated in Quito’s New Town, my hostel was called “Centro Del Mundo“, meaning “centre of the earth”, and that is what it became to me for the week I spent there. The hostel building was an old rambling house with a Spanish-style courtyard that had been converted into a lively meeting place for travelers from every country imaginable. I fell in love with the atmosphere the moment I walked inside.
I’d booked a single room, and held my breath as I unlocked and opened the door. It was tiny, dark and musty-smelling and was slightly bigger and more airy than a broom closet. Despite this, I felt a pang of excitement well up inside me. I was finally here. After a long hot shower consisting of one tiny stream of water (in South America you can choose temperature or pressure, but not both), I ventured out into the common lounge area where people sat around eating, chatting and playing board games. It would have been nice to have been with a friend right with me right about now.
But then.
As I looked around the lounge, I caught sight of a tall, tanned stranger sitting by himself at a table near the window. He had elegant limbs and unruly hair that was roughly tied back into a ponytail. As he sat writing in his journal, something about him made me stop and openly stare. He looked at up at me, obviously sensing someone looking at him, and smiled back at me. In that moment, something inside me lurched with excitement. Up until then, I’d fancied myself as quite a worldly 22 year old, someone who didn’t believe in love at first sight. But as I stood in the middle of that room, and my knees went weak and my mouth went dry, I knew that it existed. It felt like we stared at each other for about 10 minutes, though in reality it was probably only for few seconds.
That night, the hostel organized a “rum and coke” evening. Translation: one large silver barrel of rum and coke was set on the lounge table in the hostel along with a tall tower of plastic cups. I walked up to the table and picked up the ladle to pour myself a cup. And then I heard a voice behind me.
“Hi”.
I turned around. It was my tall, ponytailed stranger. My heart was beating so fast that I was sure he could hear it.
“I’m Tjalling,” he said.
“Hi Tjalling,” I managed, my mouth instantly dry again. “I’m Catherine. From South Africa.”
Smooth, Catherine, I thought.
“Hi Catherine of South Africa. You want to sit down?”
I sat down next to him. Right from that first conversation, it felt like I had known Tjalling my whole life. He was Dutch, and he was hitchhiking alone from the South to the North Pole. He had crewed on a boat a year earlier in Antarctica, had been dropped off at the southern most tip of Chile, and was now working his way up the Americas using hitchhiking as his only mode of transport.
As he talked with his gentle, lyrical voice in a thick Dutch accent, I fell for him thoroughly and completely. And as we shared our first kiss in a bar down the road that night, I decided I didn’t want to leave his side. And I didn’t, for the rest of the evening, or for the rest of that week. For those few days, we were inseparable, exploring Quito together in a haze of loved up cotton wool. We saw natural springs, and mountains, and the local markets. Tjalling taught me my first few words of Spanish, and how to eat fried platanos with tomato sauce. I all but forgot my initial fear at being in a strange country by myself - the reason I had booked myself on a tour in the first place.
Even so, Saturday morning dawned when I was due to meet my tour group and depart for Banos, a spa town on the edge of the Amazon forest. Tjalling and I both felt depressed. All I wanted to do was stay with him, and he wanted me to stay too. His offer was tempting. Come with me, he’d said. Travel with me for three weeks around Ecuador before I get a boat up to Panama and make my way north.
Ultimately though, I couldn’t bring myself to leave a tour that I’d booked and paid for. Besides, what would I do after those three weeks? And so we said a tearful goodbye to each other as I joined my 23 tour mates on our overland bus parked outside the hotel. It sounds crazy that we were tearful, but that’s how profoundly we had fallen in love with each other - after only six days. I got on the bus and waved goodbye to my Dutch Explorer, watching him out the back window as the bus drove away.
I turned my attention to my tour group and tried to stay positive about the adventures I had in store. Our trip was scheduled to go through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, winding up finally in Rio de Janeiro for the Carnaval three months later. Two hours later, we arrived at Banos, a lush jungle town set on the hillside of the Tungurahua volcano. But by my second night there, I was already having doubts. In contrast to my week back at the Centro Del Mundo, I was now surrounded by bratty tourists who were irritated that no one spoke English, or that they couldn’t find Italian food, or that they couldn’t get their morning Starbucks. After two days with them, I was climbing the walls. I found an Internet café, and there in my inbox was an email from the lovely Tjalling.
“I miss you,” it said. “Come back.”
It was all I needed to hear.
After a sleepless night, I woke up early the next morning and nervously approached my tour leader Nikki, a sensible and no-nonsense New Zealander. When I told her I was quitting the tour, she nodded slowly, but the expression on her face told me she clearly thought I was out of my mind. My tour members felt the same way. They tried to talk me out of it, reminding me of all the money I’d lose and how dangerous it was for me to travel around by myself on this vast, underdeveloped continent. But I had 50% of the tour money in cash, and being South African, had my sixth sense danger radar already tuned. Besides, I had already phoned Tjalling and told him I was coming back. I couldn’t let him down, could I?
Four hours later, my tour group waved me off from the local Banos bus stop. I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face as I traveled back to Quito with a woman sitting next to me, the head of her dead chicken resting in my lap.
Back in Quito, Tjalling was waiting for me. I ran full speed into his arms. “My crazy South African girl,” he laughed.
We walked to a hotel, where he’d booked us in for that night. If Tjalling was going to make his North Pole goal on time and under budget, we had to get going from Quito as soon as possible. And so early the next morning, we walked to the highway near our hotel and Tjalling stuck his thumb out to wait for a lift. We didn’t have to wait long before being picked up by a long distance truck driver en route to his home town on the north-east coast of Ecuador. Tjalling sat in the front of the truck with Enrique, the driver, and made conversation, as I sat in the seat behind them and gripped the seat while watching him drive. In Ecuador, as with most South American countries, people drive on the other side of the road when turning a sharp corner, and then hoot to warn oncoming cars. I was convinced we were not going to make this journey alive. Against all road safety odds though, we did.
Meeting Enrique was my first of many experiences of unbelievable generosity while on that trip. When we got to his town, he insisted that we stay the night at his house before we set off on our own. He lived with his wife and two small sons on the outskirts of the town, in a two-roomed house made of cement walls and a corrugated iron roof. Like many of his neighbours, Enrique was too poor to afford any windows or doors, and the floor inside was plain cement. Yet despite this, we were treated us like kings. His wife cooked us dinner, the South American staple of arros et pollo (rice and chicken) along with an interesting looking chicken soup complete with a hardboiled duck egg floating in the middle. After dinner, Enrique and his wife insisted that we sleep in the only bedroom. Despite endless protestations from us, Enrique, after a 10 hour truck journey, slept on a mat in the lounge with his wife along with their two small boys. I had never before felt so humbled.
The next morning, we continued on a three week hitchhiking adventure down the coast, stopping at any town which took our fancy. Throughout the trip, Tjalling, who was fluent in Spanish (along with four other languages) made me practice it. When we stayed at someone’s house, he’d make me talk to them. When we stayed in hostels, Tjalling would make me check in and check out again when we left. Through his prodding, I learned to hold a basic conversation in Spanish in a relatively short time.
One day, we arrived at the beachside town of Canoa, where we found a small set of bungalows built on the water’s edge. We liked it so much that we stayed for five days. We swam, we snorkeled, we lay naked on the beach at night; we read; we told jokes; we played cards. Above all, it was one of the first times in my life were I was content to just “be”. It was an amazing sense of freedom, and those three weeks renewed my sense of trust in life that comes so naturally to us as children but that most of us forget when we grow older.
Before we knew it, the time came for Tjalling to board a banana boat bound for Panama. I was devastated at the thought of leaving him, but by that stage, I had yearnings to see the things he had already seen and told me about in this amazing continent - the Inca Trail, the Nascar lines, the salt plains of Bolivia, the Atacama desert. I wanted to see it all, but at the same time I wanted to be with him.
“My liefje,” he said to me as we ate prawns under the moonlight at a small local café near the southern border of Ecuador the night before he left, “Ek het jou lief.”
In Dutch, this literally means, “I have your love”. (We spoke to each other more in Dutch than in English, since Afrikaans, a Dutch hybrid, is my second language, while English is his third) .
“But you need to do this travel thing,” he continued. “Let’s just go where the wind takes us.”
And so, the next morning, I kissed my Dutch Explorer goodbye, again. Armed with a little more Spanish, a little more confidence, and a large pain in my heart, I ventured southwards towards Peru.
I traveled for two months after that, by myself, and loved every second of it. Sure there were scary moments. Walking though a market town while people are grabbing your backpack trying to steal from you is no picnic. But on the other hand, I met amazing people of all types and nationalities. I saw Macchu Pichu as the sun rose. I bathed in a hot spring in the Atacama Desert and partied it up at Carnaval in Salvador de Bahia and Rio De Janeiro. I marveled at the Colonial architecture in Santa Cruz, and held my breath as I did the most dangerous downhill bike ride down a windy road north of La Paz in Bolivia. I met seven crazy Chileans who didn’t speak any English, and traveled with them down the coast of Brazil, stopping at remote surf spots along the way and walking along the beautiful beaches and lush forests. Above all though, I learnt to enjoy my own company, to be resourceful, and to trust in the flow of life.
One day, I was wandering through a desert town in Bolivia, preparing for a four day safari into the salt flats. I walked into the only Internet café in the town and sat down in front of a computer. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a girl sitting next to me who looked extremely familiar. I looked straight at her, and then realized who it was.
“Bec!” I exclaimed.
It was Bec, the girl who I had shared a room with that first night of my tour in Banos. Bec turned to look at me and as she recognized me, her eyes widened.
I went out for drinks that night with her and the rest of my ex tour group, and they were all intrigued to see that I was ok and not lying in a ditch somewhere. In truth, I was more than ok. Seeing them that night made me realize how much I had experienced since I’d met them. I was battling through with Spanish, while they were still moaning about the lack of English. I had met weird and wonderful people and had been forced out of my comfort zone, whereas they seemed to be in exactly the same place. To see the group again and to realise I had made the right decision for me was a wonderful moment of closure.
I visited Tjalling in Amsterdam about a year ago. It had been four years since I’d seen him off that sunny morning in coastal Ecuador. As I walked out of Schipol International Airport, he was there to greet me. Though his long hair had been cropped short, and his shorts and rough t-shirt had been replaced by blue jeans and a soft black sweater, it was the same old Tjalling, with his sparkling eyes and dimples and affectionate squeezes.
We spent that weekend reminiscing about our time in South America, but we knew instinctively that things wouldn’t work with us now. I was back living in London, while he was about to take off again to lead a tour group through South America. Luckily, we set no expectations, and there was no sadness when he drove me back to the airport that Sunday evening.
At the boarding gate, we kissed. Compared to the last time we’d said goodbye though, this time it was peaceful, happy, generous.
“Goodbye my liefje,” he said. “My crazy South African girl.”
I laughed and walked towards the boarding gate, turning to look at my Dutch Explorer one last time. It was crazy how one brief month with someone I’d hardly known had absolutely changed my outlook on life and made me into the person I am today. I blew him a kiss, before turning to walk through the gate. Though this time, I didn’t need him to nudge me on my way.
