The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (18 page)

Backpacking, as we know it today—the style of minimalist, dollars-a-day foreign travel appealing mainly to First World young adults—had yet to really catch on in 1962. There were historical precedents, of course, from the myriad variations on American hoboism to the upper-crust tradition of the European Grand Tour. Modern backpacking has its roots in post-WWII prosperity, which swelled the ranks of young middle-class Americans, Australians, and western Europeans with the means to indulge their wanderlust. Then, according to Israeli sociologist Erik Cohen, the emergence of leisure-friendly airfare in the late 1960s fueled an international backpacking explosion.

Distinguished sociologists have done more research on grungy hostel-hoppers than you might immediately suspect, and Cohen is the Margaret Mead of the discipline. In his 1973 paper “Nomads from Affluence: Notes on the Phenomenon of Drifter-Tourism,” Cohen examines the motivations
of the young travelers he calls “drifters,” and he offers “a four-fold typology” of the kinds of folks you might meet on the road: the adventurer, the itinerant hippie, the establishment “mass drifter,” and the day-tripping “fellow traveler.” The same year that his “Nomads from Affluence” ran in the
International Journal of Comparative Sociology
, a twenty-seven-year-old expat Brit named Tony Wheeler was self-publishing what would turn out to be the first Lonely Planet guidebook, further fueling backpacking’s momentum. He and his wife had just traveled across Asia, along a route well known to Cohen’s “drifters” as the Hippie Trail. The Gringo Trail was simply the Western Hemisphere’s burgeoning backpacker equivalent, and in the coming decades, guidebooks like Lonely Planet would ensure that it stayed hopping with plenty of “itinerant hippies,” “fellow travelers,” and all the rest.

Thompson, by contrast, was sort of a proto-backpacker, running with a crowd of what you might call “working drifters”: other reporters, embassy folks, volunteers for President Kennedy’s brand-new Peace Corps. He mentions hanging out with some Ivy League English teachers in Barranquilla and a Fulbright scholar in Bogotá. In a sense, Thompson and his peers were actually
blazing
the Gringo Trail, and Cohen credits these “young professionals, who seek to combine travel with work in their chosen profession” as one of his four main “antecedents to the modern drifter.”

If nothing else, Thompson was certainly an antecedent to the poverty aspect of backpacking. Broke again in Quito, he wrote to his
Observer
editor, “I am traveling at least half on gall. But in the course of these travels I have discovered that gall is not always the best currency, and there are times when I would be far better off with the other kind.” How many subsequent generations of rucksack-toting seekers
would stumble across South America adhering to Thompson’s Law of Travel Economics, “Full speed ahead and damn the cost; it will all come out in the wash”?

My own meager currency reserves were what attracted me to Quito’s Secret Garden hostel, where a dorm bed costs $9.80 a night. Wherever the Gringo Trail begins and ends, I am pretty certain it runs smack-dab through the middle of the Secret Garden. A narrow building with serpentine staircases and five mazelike stories—each crowded with cheerful English-speaking twentysomethings—the Secret Garden is what I imagine a frat house would look like at a nice liberal arts university in Whoville. The morning I arrived, the place was filled with attractive German girls gushing to their moms on Skype. As I humped my backpack up five flights to the reception area, I passed no fewer than eight of them, sprawled on couches, leaning on balconies, and chatting away on their laptops. The reception desk was on a sunny rooftop patio, with a bright yellow wall covered in posters for Spanish lessons and bike tours. Two American volunteers checked me in, both in their early twenties. He was a student and a part-time glassblower, eventually headed to Bolivia to volunteer with a land conservancy; she was killing time en route to a yoga retreat in Cusco.

Bohemian travel motivations like these are in no short supply around places like the Secret Garden. Over the course of the next week, I found myself in many discussions about Amazonian weaving workshops and endangered sloth rescue centers. It had been a decade since my own short college stint abroad, the last time I’d mingled in a crowd of starry-eyed backpackers, and I’d forgotten just how ritualistically the conversations tend to unfold. The first line of questioning between any two hostel-mates is like a loosely
choreographed dance, with steps that everyone knows and some room for improvisation:

And so on. None of this is to say that the conversations are fake or insincere. Relationships among backpackers are
simply the friendship equivalent of mutually agreed-upon one-night stands. Everybody is just passing through, so the odds of forming meaningful, long-lasting friendships are slim. But regular backpackers can likely recall whole weeks spent in the very pleasant company of people they knew only as “the Danish guy” or “that couple from South Africa.”

I spent several nights just hanging out on the Secret Garden’s rooftop—signing up for in-house dinners of curry and veggie lasagna, swilling beer around the fireplace afterward—because I so enjoyed the ease of these English conversations with a rotating cast of strangers. This, of course, is part of the siren’s song of the Gringo Trail. In your nicer hostels, it is alarmingly easy to be lulled by the relative comfort and the companionship of your countrymen, and I got the feeling there were folks around the Secret Garden who hadn’t left the premises for days. As Cohen writes about the “mass drifters” in his “four-fold typology”:

I’ll leave the comprehensive typologies to the sociologists, but after a few days at the Secret Garden, a few different backpacker “strains” certainly seemed to emerge. For starters, you had your garden-variety vacationers: athletic Norwegian students hiking the Andes between semesters; a pair of British secretaries sightseeing on their two-week holiday. These folks tended to spend less time around the
hostel, having shorter timeframes and itineraries to follow. Budget is the primary difference between this crowd and the workaday tourists at the hotel up the street.

Then you had your earnest world-changers: a bronzed and bearded Ohioan who’d spent his summer fighting developers in the coastal mangrove forests; intern after willowy intern promoting literacy, hand-washing, or sustainable gardening along Quito’s vast and slummy urban edge. The world-changers were a distinctly Gen-Y crowd, and many seemed to be hopping from volunteer gig to volunteer gig without much of a long-term plan. Most of them seemed to be more passionate about the general
idea
of helping people than about the specifics of their jobs, and in no instance did I meet anyone at the Secret Garden who was being paid for his or her work.

Then there were the seekers, the vaguely New Age types for whom travel is an exercise in self-improvement: the elfin yoga instructor at the registration desk; an Australian who loudly shared the spiritual lessons she’d so far learned on her tour of holistic massage schools. I met at least half a dozen ayahuasca enthusiasts, fans of the psychoactive and allegedly sacred vine that’s increasingly marketed to gringos by “shamanistic retreat centers” and other purveyors of higher consciousness. Over beers on the rooftop, many of them acknowledged that, yes, the scene around the holy drug was indeed becoming commercialized, but that
their
shaman had been the real thing, man, a 130-year-old woman who ate nothing but burs and turned into a jaguar at night. Strangely enough, it was these ascetic would-be medicine men who tended to get the most excited when I mentioned Hunter Thompson.

Finally, you had your hedonists: a squadron of young Israelis, just released from their compulsory military stint,
partying their way across the continent; a hardworking chef to the royal family of Bahrain, boozing off stress in Quito simply because the airfare was cheap. I shared a room with an Australian playboy and hostel volunteer who was refreshingly candid about having come to South America primarily to get laid.

Whether they’re tutoring the locals or humping them, nearly all of the Gringo Trail backpackers seemed to share certain rhetorical habits. I noticed, for example, that my Secret Garden hostel-mates rarely talked about “going” places, but instead about “doing” them. “We did Galápagos last week,” one of the Norwegian students told me, “and now we’re deciding whether to do Colombia or stay in Ecuador.” “Have you done Machu Picchu yet?” asked a couple of the ayahuasca devotees. “You should totally do Baños before you leave Ecuador,” said the cook from Bahrain. “The hot springs there are amazing!”

If you want to read into this that many backpackers tend to treat the places they visit like theme-park attractions rather than complex landscapes and communities, you would not be alone in doing so. This is a common criticism of the Gringo Trail, that it alienates travelers from their environment rather than engaging them in it, presumably by creating a bubble of veggie lasagna and Skype from which travelers need only peek when they think there’s something worth seeing. You might then be tempted to ask whether there aren’t some parallels between this “do Ecuador” mentality and the old imperialist attitudes of segregation, superiority, and antagonism. And there again, our friend Erik Cohen and others will have you beat. “The easy-going tourist of our era,” the sociologist wrote in 1972, “might well complete the work of his predecessors, also travelers from the West—the conqueror and the colonialist.”

This particular easygoing tourist had plenty of time to contemplate all this thanks to two unforeseen events. The first was an e-mail from the US consulate in Guayaquil. As I’d told the old man back in the plaza, I had initially planned to stay in Quito for only a few days before moving on to that coastal city. I had tried to set up an interview at the Public Affairs Section of the consulate, which is the modern-day equivalent of the US Information Service that Thompson had covered in 1962. Unfortunately, said the e-mail, the public affairs officer had been called out of the country unexpectedly. Could I make an appointment with the embassy in Quito instead?

“Embassy people are shits,” Thompson wrote to a friend after leaving Ecuador. “Consulates are better—this is a rule.”

But I had no alternative. Anyway, Thompson was proving to be crotchety and wrong more often than he was right. So I e-mailed the embassy, hoping for a last-minute appointment and apologizing for the short notice. I had just clicked Send when my licentious Australian roommate walked in and collapsed on his bunk.

“You coming out tonight?” he asked, stretching his arms lazily above his head. He was a lean guy with the perpetually tousled look of a surfer.

“Um … maybe,” I said, in a tone that I hoped implied “Actually, I just bought a copy of
The Ecuador Reader
, and I’m sort of looking forward to raging the ‘Catholicism & Democracy’ chapter tonight.”

“Come on, mate,” he urged good-naturedly. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like pussy?”

I weighed my response.

“No, pussy’s … great,” I said. “It’s just that, honestly, I don’t really go out that often.”

“Fine,” he said, “but this is different. This is Carnaval!”

I didn’t need to double-check the date to realize he was right. Of course it was Carnaval. I had completely forgotten about the multiday pre-Lenten bacchanal, synonymous in South America with parties, parades, costumes, music … and the nearly continent-wide closure of all businesses and services, public or private. I checked the website and discovered that, yes, it would be another five days before anyone at the embassy would even be around to answer the phone. It seemed I would be spending the next week in Quito.

Like a lot of clueless non-Catholics, I associate Carnaval primarily with Brazil and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean. Trinidad and St. Thomas, sure. Certainly Rio and Bahia. I had heard it was big in Barranquilla. But high-mountain Quito? In the dustiest corners of my mind, I knew that the festival was a worldwide phenomenon, celebrated virtually everywhere they have Catholicism, masks, and feathers, but if I’m on my default setting, then Carnaval to me is an inherently coastal Atlantic affair, the province of beach towns and sunny former plantation colonies.

In fact, Carnaval is a pretty sterling example of cultural appropriation, a practice rooted in medieval Europe that most of us now unfailingly associate with the New World. Just like all those knockout cathedrals, it was a colonial import, emblematic of the new, European traditions and beliefs that were supposed to supplant the old. But rather than Europeanizing the people, Carnaval was indigenized by the zillion or so ethnic groups of Latin America, who now more or less own the holiday. In addition to the biggies along the coast, there are also massive celebrations in places like
Oruro, Bolivia, where celebrants don the masks of horned Andean mountain gods, and Cajamarca, Peru, where the fest centers on the chopping of decorative trees. In Quito, it turns out, costumes and music take a backseat to messy pranks. Ecuadorian Carnaval embraces elements of a pre-Columbian festival from the central highlands, where natives once bedecked one another with flowers, perfumed extracts, and maize flour. Over time, that’s evolved into playful battles in the streets, in which strangers (and a lot of kids) chuck water balloons and handfuls of flour at one another and unsuspecting passersby. More recently, the Ecuadorians have embraced squirt guns and a white spray foam called
carioca
, a cross between Silly String and shaving cream. Within a day of learning it was Carnaval, I noticed bottles of the stuff for sale on seemingly every street corner in Quito, accompanied by mighty-lunged vendors crying,
“Cariocas! Cariocaaas!”