The Lemon Life | online magazine offering a fresh perspective on post-grad life.

Words by: Jamie Phillips

Image by: w00kie

The meeting of strangers while traveling is a given. When you become one of the cargo pant wearing, oversized pack toting, sunburned and bug bitten gringos, meeting strangers becomes a part of your daily routine, like brushing your teeth or finding a food stall that doesn’t scream, “I am crawling with e-coli”. It’s also one of the more pleasant parts of traveling: connecting with people who are on the same wavelength as you, sharing stories and tips, and finding a companion or two with whom to participate in the tourist-y activities. In a backpacker-oriented hostel like the one I stayed at in Cusco, you’d have to actively avoid making new friends.

Being that it’s so easy to befriend strangers, it sometimes follows that you join a few of them on some excursion or other. Exploring the Peruvian Andes or the Inca Ruins is certainly more fun in a group. You can curse the Incan penchant for stairs together, or make up games to play while trekking through the murmuring jungle.

Here is my recently discovered recipe for getting into random situations with strangers:

Step One: The universal icebreaker “So, where are you from?” My answer is usually countered with, “Alberta? Never heard of it. Is it near Ontario?”

Step Two: Bonding. One hour or less of conversation in travel time is the equivalent of weeks in regular life. Within the hour, you become fast friends. Chatting then turns into going dancing in one of the ubiquitous discotheques, where every night is Friday. And Cusco parties until the sun peeks over the mountain tops. 

Step Three:  Accepting the invite. In the hostel on a crisp Cusco evening, one such random hostel friend, an outgoing Israeli boy, whom we’ll call “Avi”, invited me to go white water rafting for three days with him. The trip was to start early the next morning. 

Side Note: My intuition has been my best friend in the decision making department. No one wants to get stuck on some river in the Andes with a bunch of creeps or mathletes.

Result: At eight o’clock the following morning, bleary eyed and a touch apprehensive about the impending Class Five rapids promised by the Peruvian guides, Avi and I stepped onto a bus full of Israelis. Out of 21 people, I was the only non-Israeli, besides the guides (who, incidentally, spoke a little Hebrew). It was like traveling to Israel by proxy.  I felt like Hunter S. Thompson when he tagged along with the Hell’s Angels: a sociological tourist.

That’s another great thing about traveling and meeting strangers, you really never know what’s going to happen next. Say yes to one little rafting trip in Peru, and all of sudden, you’re learning about Israel, getting a rough lesson in Hebrew while the Peruvian guides cook up kosher versions of each meal for the religious of the group.

The Israelis were a fun group to travel with, exuberant but with an aptitude for relaxation. By day we ripped down the Apurimac rapids in neon inflatable contraptions, putting a hopeful trust into the guide’s abilities to keep us from breaking ourselves on the rocks. By night, we camped on the beach, played endless card games under the stars and I grew accustomed to the swells of staccato Hebrew, always accompanied with laughter. And Avi and I exchanged cultural information – an Israeli tidbit for a Canadian anecdote.

Conclusions: conversing with strangers can lead to grand adventures. Mazel tov!    

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