travel inspiration | On My Canvas

Learning Spanish in Chile–A Mind-Numbing Experience

ubiquotous graffitis in valparaiso in chile.jpeg

Covid-Related Travel Update, Jan 2024: Chile is open to international tourists. Visit the Chile government’s official website for travel-related information and regulations. Don’t forget to read the government’s rules to be followed in public spaces here.

I went to Chile in July 2016 to teach English in a state school. I’m not a trained teacher, but I was volunteering as part of the English Open Doors Program, an initiative of the Chilean government.

All my friends, family, relatives, and acquaintances asked me what made me go to Chile. I told them I didn’t think much. They asked me if I could speak Spanish; I replied I would learn Spanish in Chile.

My family concluded my idea to travel to South America was an immature escape as the journey would leave me all alone and financially unstable. I was sucked into a whirlpool of emotional hurdles stirred by my loved ones who asserted they cared.

I was fired. I had just ended a two-year relationship I believed was my long-lasting love. The Titanic sank. I was going to be twenty-nine soon. Friends were getting married. Babies were being born. I did not know anyone in Chile. I did not speak Spanish.

Before I left, an uneasy feeling lingered in my stomach. Like the one that makes you shuffle through your pockets when you walk out of your home. Later I understood I was scared: of being alone, of unknowns, and of not knowing Spanish.

I did not know that in a couple of months I would learn the foreign language and speak it fluently.

Covid-Related Travel Update, Jan 2024: Chile is open to international tourists. Visit the Chilean government’s official website for travel-related information and regulations. Don’t forget to read the government’s rules to be followed in public spaces here. My guide to Chile visa would be helpful for Indian citizens.

What does this Chile Travel Guide contain?

Covid Update January 2024: Indonesia is now open for all travelers.

My Best Things to do in Bali

Bali has been a relief from the chaos of the overcrowded and the ever-rushing world. Though I had heard really touristy things about Bali, I love the place.

I have spent most of my twenty days in Ubud, old Bali with a modern twist, a village called Laplapan, which is close to Ubud, and also biking my way to far away floating temples, hidden beaches, and rice fields whose pictures were able to enchant me enough.

Before I came here, I thought Bali would be a tourist jungle packed with hotels, restaurants, tour shops, yoga centers, and bike rental shops, along with some greenery. But Ubud and Bali are places that have all these things and also have artistic temples the Balinese people visit daily, lush paddy fields in the heart of the island, cute ducks wobbling around in open pastures, deserted turquoise beaches (such as Nyangnyang beach), hidden jungles, a cool river cutting through the middle of Ubud, splashing waterfalls, a colorful underwater world, and all with the backdrop of a gaping volcano. I have captured my first glimpses of Bali and some travel tips for the island in the linked post.

Covid Update January 2024: Indonesia is now open for all travelers.

Travel Tips for Bali: Collected From My One-Month Journey

I write this piece while sitting on the balcony of a beautiful Balinese home, with a lush green garden, with the blooming frangipani canopying over the sunlit courtyard and its tiny temple, and with towering palm and coconut trees swaying in the distance. And as I listen to the water falling over an artistic fountain while drinking tea, I know that there is nowhere else I would want to be in this moment.

Having been in Bali for ten days, my wanderlust soul and ever-wandering eyes have experienced and seen a lot.

Update January 2024: I also have a complete travel guide for Bali and a guide on Bali Visa on Arrival – For Indians and Others.)

Getting stuck on borders multiple times and having paid a lot of extra money for the last moment flights because I could not cross into the neighboring country without a visa, I realized that an Indian passport is not the strongest one. Though there are ways to make it stronger. A valid US tourist visa (or a US business visa) not only allows you to visit the US, but with a valid US visa you can also travel to many more countries which let you in with a “visa on arrival” or an e-visa (if a US visa is stamped on your passport). For example Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Georgia, Mexico, Philippines, Turkey, and more.

To make my dream of traveling to the US and these countries come true, I just applied for a 10-year B2 US tourist visa, and, it was approved.

Please read through the detailed process of getting a tourist visa for the USA from India. I also pledge to clear all the myths that envelope the US tourist visa process.

In the nine months that I was travelling through South America (SA), I visited three countries: Chile, Peru, and Bolivia.

White roses, pink bougainvilleas, golden marigolds, and red hibiscuses bloom throughout the day in my parent’s garden, but then comes night, and the queen of the night takes over. These memories from SA waft through my being as the scent of the queen of the night drifts through my parent’s garden and settles in our wistful dreams.

Hope you enjoy these amazing memories from the time I was traveling in South America.

peru lake titicaca amantani island boat image

Covid-Related Travel Update Jan 2024 – Peru is now open to international travelers. And as per Supreme Decree 130-2022-PCM in Peru’s official gazette El Peruano, Covid entry requirements and all other regulations and restrictions were lifted. You can also look at the official website of the Peru government for more information. My guide to Peru Travel Visa would be helpful.

Peru: Poems and Pictures

Oh dear friend, would you convey my message if you travel to the mystical land of the Incas.

Could you find that old lady who guided me to the bus and tell her that I dream of her hair as I dream about the Himalayan snow.

Could you find that little mystery-eyed girl who would be bigger by now and whisper to her that I would come again to play the game of “donde estas” with her in her home.

a lake in a national reserve in atacama desert chile

They say that the Atacama is the driest desert, but I disagree.

The Atacama Desert and Its Many Wonders

The blue lagoons quenched my interminable thirst for beauty,

the flamingos still fly right through my dreams,

the imposing mountains showed me how high we could reach,

and the deep valleys let me look so beyond that I didn’t even know existed.

Come, let’s ride this journey together,

because my friend,

you would need someone to hold onto,

when you are not sure if what you gape at is the reality,

or it is just another dream you behold.

Sleeping on the semi-sleeper first seat in front of the wide glass window on the second floor of the bus, which was driving from Santiago to Calama, I woke up to find ourselves driving next to the Pacific under a star-studded, deep-blue sky which was complemented by a shimmering rotund moon. Even the contour of the immortal rabbit that Ruskin Bond says was dropped on the moon was difficult to trace on the bright moon. It was like a painting.

Having admired the scenery, I dozed off again and kept waking up intermittently until we arrived in Calama. That was when I pulled myself out of hibernation and, an hour later, I was riding on another bus to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. At the end of this blended twenty-five-hour journey, I stumbled out of the bus like a zombie and the glowering February sun focused all its anger on the first-time visitor. Luckily, my hostel was a five-minute walk from the bus terminal. I strapped on my blue backpack and strode as I had loaded the directions to the hostel in Google maps.

One of My Hardest Travel Experiences: Or Was it So?

I donned my white formal dress, put on my red matte lipstick, lined my eyes with Kajal, brushed my hair and let them fall loose, strapped my G-Shock on my right wrist, checked if I had Chilean pesos, hung my black leather purse on my shoulder, picked up my black Lenovo phone and earphones, launched Google maps, and walked out of the Airbnb to go for my interview at the English teaching center located in downtown Santiago. I had had to visit the center a few times to secure an interview with the English owner of the promising institute.

I took the lift to the ground floor of the building and having exchanged pleasantries with the joyful guard, walked out, and found myself face-to-face with the glowering January sun. I strode through the almost-empty roads towards the closest bus stand which was frequented by the bus that would have directly taken me to the cosmopolitan center of the town.

Mythology has always fascinated me. As a child, I used to read all the thin and thick Hindu mythological books kept in the rectangular wall-hooked showcase temple in our mandirwala or the temple room. I grilled my mother about Shiva and Lakshmi and Parvati and Vishnu and Hanuman and the snakes and the elephants and the monkeys and the Ramayana. Then I visited college and opted for literature courses and read all the different versions of Mahabharata that I could put my hands on.

So while walking around Angkor Wat or the City of Temples, when I saw that the fellow international travelers were mesmerized by the temple but also confused, I donned my narrator cloak and recited tales of the Hindu mythology and exposed the personal lives of the millions of gods and goddesses that Hinduism has.

One of the stories that I narrated was the famous tale of the churning of the sea or the samudra manthan that has been depicted at the entrance of the temple and has been engraved beautifully on many of its walls and columns.

Now I am not that cruel that I would devoid you off this bewitching story. So here it goes.

white and black cambodia angkor wat temple.jpeg

My Cambodia Travel Blog on the Atrocities Unleashed on the Country

I was climbing the stairs of a high school in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. No, I did not intend to repeat high school to recognize the petals and sepals of a flower better. The school wasn’t ordinary. The faces of the men and women that had been tortured and killed in its classrooms stared at us from behind the glass frames hung on the bloodstained walls. The rusted iron bars, withering waterboards, and used bloody clothes kept in those classrooms narrated a gruesome story of the ruthless Cambodian massacre, that happened not so long ago. The metal shackles with which people were tied to the waterboards and to the iron bars were still chained to them; I assume those metal chains couldn’t be used for anything else now.

Unwillingly, I vividly imagined the bodies possessing those faces and donning those gory clothes tied to the iron rods with the cold shackles. A guard came throughout the day to beat them and torture them with electric shocks as the helpless stifled on the floor. Or to cut them with knives and suffocate them with plastic bags. Blood oozed out of the wounds of the tortured but medicine was out of the question. Four small spoonfuls of rice porridge and watery soup of leaves were given to them twice a day.

My skin crawled. I shivered in the scorching month of June.