Guilty of high season

2007-02-01 08:56

Georgina Guedes

When I was at home in South Africa, I used to be a super-organised person. Work deadlines were fastidiously managed, weekends were planned down to the last hour, and holidays booked a year in advance.

I walked fast, talked faster and thought on my feet, but never, ever acted on a whim.

Since I've been backpacking around the world, things have changed substantially. It's still important to be organised, but more essential to be easygoing.

Travel started to chip away at my need for a plan in Thailand, where my boyfriend, Ter, and I started our trip. Although there were marvellous things to be seen and done, sometimes we just needed to slow down, kick back and do absolutely nothing.

The heavy, humid tropical heat and a new-found taste for beer helped me to accept that sometimes, just letting life wash over you is a good enough way to spend a week. Or more.

Once or twice, I even had to grit my teeth and bear a Change of Plan. Changes of Plan are generally frowned upon by the super-organised, unless they are a brilliant solution to an unexpected problem that has presented itself.

Changing The Plan for no apparent reason, other than because something other than The Plan started to sound interesting, is the kind of action that would have made the old me come out in hives.

Not the new me. The new me can roll with the punches, and I've even been known to suggest a Change of Plan myself.

So, given all this soul searching and personality modification that I've been going through, it has come as a bit of a rude shock to me to find myself in Argentina smack in the middle of the high season, where all the suppressed resources of my former self are required.

Occupado!

All of a sudden, it's no longer possible to waltz into any town, hail a taxi, name the hostel of our choice and be delivered there, assured of finding a room to our liking.

Instead of the hordes of room touts clutching at the hems of my garments has we walk past in the centre of town, I am now greeted by the blank stares of bored receptionists at hostels where the rooms are all "occupado".

Whereas before, although remnants of the former me still compelled us to book important trips like the Inca Trail a couple of weeks in advance, we would still always meet people who had booked the same tour the day before, now, everything we want to do is booked out until the end of April.

We've had to start phoning ahead to make room reservations a week in advance, when we don't know what we'll be doing, in Spanish, which we barely know how to speak.

We've had to give up on some adventures, like the Chilean ferry through the ice floes, because of bad planning on our part (somewhere, my former self hangs her head in shame) and overbooking on theirs.

And in Argentina, the land of business-class buses, we've been made to sit in normal seats because we've only booked our tickets two days in advance.

Instead of being part of an obnoxious internationally-representative band of travellers, we are now mingled with locals on holiday. They treat us with better grace than Capetonians welcome the annual Christmas invasion, but it's strange to be thrown together with people travelling in their own country.

Even stranger, they all drink a strange kind of bitter tea called maté through a straw, and eat caramelised condensed milk on toast for breakfast (probably to take away the taste of the maté).

And so, grudgingly, I have allowed the filofax-weilding, telephone number-memorising, Post-it-sticking, early-rising me back out of the depths of my consciousness to run the Argentinean part of my holiday.

She's a bit horrified at how badly things have fallen apart, and promises to have thing back on track in no time.

Georgina Guedes is a South African woman who gave up her job to travel the world with her boyfriend. She hopes that by the end of her trip she'll have found a balance between order and chilling.

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