Meeting Interesting People
Most people say they want to travel so they can see things.
People want to see all the National Parks, see the Grand Canyon and all the great things there are to see. That's not my main reason for traveling.
What I like best about traveling (whether it's in my motorhome or other forms of travel) is the people I meet. This is especially true when I'm traveling internationally.
Just another day in paradise
Recently I was sitting at my computer in my rented apartment in Costa Rica. I heard a noise out in the coffee-banana jungle beside my balcony. I went out on the balcony and looked out at the dense jungle of mostly coffee plants and banana trees. Here's the view I was looking at.
As you can see, you couldn't walk through that jungle without cutting a path.
There was a young Costa Rican girl back in the dense jungle with a machete whacking away. She is a neighbor who lives a half a mile up the road.
Shortly she appeared out of the jungle with a big stalk of bananas. She handed it up to me as I leaned over the balcony. It was so heavy I could hardly lift it.
Somehow she cut her way through the jungle back to some banana trees, cut a tree down with her machete, and cut the stalk of bananas shown below. By the way, a banana plant is not really a tree.
I don't know why, but bananas are always cut green.
Here's a picture of her on the balcony with the stalk of bananas. I intentionally didn't use her name or show her face in order to protect her privacy.
The bananas grow pointing up. As you can see, she cut the stalk at the top.
I have bananas that are ripe now that she cut last week. I'll have one with my oatmeal in the morning.
It had just stopped raining and the sun was not shining, so the pictures are not bright.
This was not the girl's first rodeo. She has been cutting her way through the jungle with a machete and cutting down banana trees all her life.
A banana tree only has one stalk of bananas, so when you cut the tree down, a new tree grows from the roots and soon you have another tree with bananas.
This is just one of the many interesting people I've met in my travels.
I have been hiking and tent-camping in the jungles of central Africa to find and spend time with the silverback gorillas. I've done whitewater rafting on a river in China, spent time in the outback of Australia, ridden elephants in India to see tigers (you don't want to be walking around looking for tigers), and visited a dozen other countries.
Bottom line: Seeing the many different places was nice, but I liked meeting all the interesting people even more. And most of all, I like to get to know the people I meet.