A chatty man; in our ten minute journey from the bus terminal, we cover much ground, including his goal to run all the world’s major marathons and our Ecuador itinerary, which culminates in the city of Cuenca. Here, the Uber drivers are the friendliest in the country, apparently. Enjoy this beautiful city, Salamon says, dropping us off with an enthusiastic café recommendation and his business card.

The next two weeks will be spent teaching English at the Canadian English Institute, our fourth volunteer experience of the trip. To our left, a human-sized maple leaf painted red, a standout feature on the otherwise white walls, and a reminder of previous homes in Vancouver. These days, homes are temporary, so we knock on the door of this latest one — we lose track of the total count weeks ago — and Teegan, a smiley American volunteer, lets us in, offering a quick tour of the space. Our room: a double bed with a closet and window, nothing luxurious, but free of charge. Here’s the kitchen, she says of the rusty hot plate and adjacent microwave. We later learn the tap water is permanently cold and the cutlery consists of two forks, two spoons, and a handful of dull knives.

‘How’s the work?’ We ask Teegan, holding our breath.

We are coming from Puerto Cayo, where the average volunteer workload lasts an hour and is usually interrupted by a coffee break and a chat. It’s so chilled, Teegan promises, and I believe her, this girl with no reason to lie, who is smiling on a Sunday evening, carefree about the upcoming week of work. Backpacks dropped and facilities tour complete, we stroll down the road, unaccustomed to the sounds of city traffic, the short stretch filled with more people and cars than we see in two weeks on the coast. We order a pizza each, a celebration for the easy fortnight of work ahead.

On Monday, we arrange our personal walking tour of the city, as has become tradition over the last few months. We aren’t working until the afternoon, so begin with breakfast at an unassuming café in the historic centre which serves spectacular cappuccinos. We sit downstairs and spend an hour trying not to stare at a group of Americans who occupy the two tables next to us. My eavesdropping is not intentional; the space is small, their voices echo, and every anecdote involves an extravagant gesture.

Breakfast complete, I drag Baba to a hidden bookshop I find online, my contribution to the itinerary. I imagine we follow in the footsteps of everyone who comes before us when we walk straight past the narrow stairway, spinning in circles until the entrance is pointed out to us by a local. Baba stays downstairs as I head up, shaking hands with a thin, towering man who introduces himself as Mauricio, the bookshop’s owner. Welcome, he says, reading my mind and pointing me straight towards the English collection. We understand each other, Mauricio and I. Shelves overflow with worn paperbacks, Jenga-like stacks of every book ever published on the wooden floorboards. It’s total heaven. I soak up every title I can until I feel the imaginary pull of a waiting boyfriend; he is surprised I don’t take longer, which sums up the story of my life.

Back at the institute, we meet Carolina, the volunteer coordinator. So far, our only interaction happens over WhatsApp, where the entire thread is a series of misunderstandings, my questions and her slightly confusing answers. The day before our arrival in Cuenca, Carolina texts me in a panic; the director forgets to grab our sheets from the launderette. We’re welcome to stay in the room, of course, but there are no clean sheets, so what would we like to do? I practice the art of not responding — primarily because I run out of mobile data, though I also have little to contribute to this problem that is not mine — until she shares a solution that doesn’t involve us sleeping on a bare mattress on our first night in Cuenca.

In person, Carolina is giggly in a girlish way, big eyes and bold lashes, long black hair that tumbles past her shoulders. Volunteers are in charge of speaking sessions, she explains. Less teaching and more chatting; we have total free rein over the games we play and activities we do.

‘Will you be in our first speaking class with us?’ Baba asks.

I watch her lips stretch into a smile, the suppression of a laugh at such a ridiculous suggestion. I can’t decide whether her trust in us is immediate, or her care is minimal.

‘Don’t worry,’ Carolina says.

This becomes her tagline across the next two weeks, an automatic response to any question we ask, as if she thinks the English exist in a constant state of concern.

At 3.25pm, I make the ten-step commute to the speaking classroom at the end of the corridor, ready to begin my first class. I am teaching two hour-long shifts back to back before Baba takes over at 6pm. A text from Carolina: sending kids. I didn’t know kids were a possibility, and I brace myself as eight young bodies shuffle into the room, eyes to the floor. We pull additional chairs from a neighbouring classroom and gather around the table, elbows bumping. Mine are two of about six feet that touch the floor. To start, a quick round of introductions, names, ages, and how long you’ve been learning English, though I realise when eyes widen and giggles erupt that this last question is lost on them, so we scrap it. The whole thing takes two minutes, after which I jump out of my chair and launch into a game of Hangman on the whiteboard, channelling the voices of every teacher I’ve ever had, though speaking only to myself.

Half an hour into class, the perceptive ten-year-old with a button nose and crooked teeth can sense I need a lifeline, and suggests a board game from the shelf. It’s not wildly educational, and I end up translating most of the game’s silly statements into Spanish, but the children are entertained and it gets us through the remaining thirty minutes.

‘Bye, teacher,’ the kids mutter in unison on their way out.

When a group of adults approach for the 4.30pm class, I’m surprised I don’t scare them off with my smile, cheeks red-hot with relief.

As the days pass, we fall into our version of routine in the city. Mornings are spent exploring Cuenca’s sights, strolling along the riverbank towards blue-domed cathedrals and archaeological museums. We find a local gym, and I join Baba for about fifty percent of his sessions, flirting with the idea of a resuming a regular exercise routine. On Wednesday, our first weekday off, we take Salamon’s café recommendation and fall madly in love with the spot, Sinfonía, where the coffee is strong, the staff kind, and the carrot cake topped with a perfect crust, complete with spoonfuls of cream cheese frosting, a sprinkle of cinnamon. We visit twice, prevented from going a third time only because we can’t make the opening hours. The upset takes a moment to recover from; I’d already planned on ordering the banana cake, alternating bites with sips of their frothy flat white.

In the afternoons, we teach. I am a working woman again, albeit for two hours a day under a coordinator who barely bats an eyelid. Baba and I exchange the odd complaint and eye roll — I can’t be bothered today — not because our feelings are particularly strong or negative, but because complaining about work is a rite of passage of which we’ve been deprived. When our shifts end, we somehow manage in the kitchen, recreating the rhythms of the past and taking turns cooking dinner, hogging the already limited selection of pots, pans, and plates as we alternate between rice and pasta, pairing each with tuna or beef depending on our cravings. Every sauce is sauteed with vegetables from the market; we are locals now, so we must shop like them, flexing our negotiation skills and trusting vendor recommendations.

After week one, we say goodbye to Teegan and await her replacement, Jeff, ready to show him the ropes and answer any potential questions; seven days go by, and we pick up a thing or two about the institute and its assortment of students. According to Carolina, he is supposed to arrive on Saturday. By Monday, her messages remain undelivered on WhatsApp. Maybe his phone broke? Perhaps it got stolen? Together, we speculate about the possibilites. An unfamiliar look flashes through Carolina’s eyes, reveals a tightness in her tone. Worry, I realise.

Week two arrives, and we swap to take the earlier shifts, between 10.30am and 1.30pm. Morning classes, we soon realise, are populated with teenagers, who master the look of bone-deep boredom, who ask no questions and pretend your words are lost on them, until they translate every sentence, word for word, to their neighbour. Baba and I confer in the staff room (aka our bedroom) to swap lesson plans and activities when we are running low on inspiration, comparing how many times we each have Messi or Ronaldo in a game of Who Am I? Baba eventually bans both names from being included, encouraging more imaginative suggestions until he shoots himself in the foot; he is unable to guess Millie Bobby Brown, much to the disappointment of the teenage girls in his class. We each develop our favourite students and compare them in the short breaks between classes, swapping longer stories over dinner. Baba likes a kid called Walter who dreams of becoming a marine, while I have a soft spot for Juan Carlos, both because he can hold a conversation and has a daughter called Alice.

I take a leaf out of Baba’s teacher playbook and organise a role play exercise in which my two teenagers must act out various everyday scenarios, speaking only in English. A typically shy eighteen-year-old with thick black hair, round glasses, and a deep love of video games chooses to act out going to the doctor.

‘Ready?’ I ask.

His eyes focus as he gets into character. Seconds later, I watch him come alive, leaping out of his chair and clutching the top of his head with both hands. Help me! I cracked my head open skateboarding and need an emergency doctor’s appointment! It is the most consecutive English I hear him speak, the most sincere emotion he expresses. All medical vocabulary exhausted, we move onto the next scenario. With an imaginary click of the fingers, he is at the barbershop requesting all his hair be shaved off.

‘That will be $20,’ I say.

‘No! Too expensive.’

Without a flinch, he turns and explains his situation to the other student, a smart and polite sixteen-year-old who quotes him $5, which seems to satisy him. After drama class, we play a quick game of Who Am I? to round off the hour. It is when I teach this same boy who Justin Bieber is that I understand, intimately and immediately, the fulfilment of the profession.

Outside of work, we fill our free time in much the same way we did living in London and Vancouver. On Tuesday, I put on mascara for the first time in weeks, and we tuck ourselves into a table by the bar at a café on jazz night, ordering $4 glasses of vino tinto. When the music begins, I find it hard to concentrate. In front of us, a woman joins a single man at his table. She orders a glass of red to match his; they shake hands and clink their glasses twice in the space of ten minutes, throwing their heads back in laughter, only breaking in conversation to sip their drinks. But it’s a real life romcom, I say when Baba begs me to stop staring.

On Wednesday, we wake early, pack our backpacks, and board a bus to Cajas National Park. A short fifty-minute drive and we arrive at the high-altitude nature reserve, famous for its lakes and rugged hiking trails which look nothing like the forested mountains of British Columbia. Luck is on my side in more ways than one; the sky, though cloudy, is free of rain, and Baba is in the mood both to take and pose for photos. We pause often during our two-hour trail around Laguna Toreadora, experimenting with angles and doing our best to capture the sights through every medium: phone and camera, digital and film. Halfway through the walk, we perch on a rock overlooking the laguna, as windswept as the moorlands, and eat our packed lunch: two ham, cheese, and tomato sandwiches each, which we chase with pineapple, freshly chopped and packed in glass Tupperware. It tastes more tangy than sweet, but the juice is perfect, dripping down our fingers and pooling on our tongues.

My final class arrives and, with it, an endless file of teenagers who flood into the room, one after another, standing around the table aimlessly until I pull in more chairs. I start the class in the same way as always, with a round of introductions, but I know by this point to expect feeble, clipped responses. A brother sister duo who differentiate their names but otherwise deliver identical answers about their hometown and favourite food.

‘And what sauce do you like on your chicken wings?’ I ask.

‘Barbecue,’ one says.

‘Spicy,’ the other adds.

Ten extra seconds of class killed, I move onto the next game.

On our last Saturday night in Cuenca, we find ourselves alone at the Canadian Institute, the two permanent members of staff. Teegan is long gone, all teachers and students leave for the weekend, and Jeff, bless him, never shows. We scroll through nearby takeaway options, limited when you filter exclusively for those with a good discount, and spend half an hour debating which of our two choices will be the best value for money and have the highest protein content. We choose a pork fried rice and sushi combo and set ourselves up in the downstairs classroom, using the dangling HDMI cable to play an episode of How I Met Your Mother on the mounted TV. Printed on the wall next to me is a Canadian city skyline, skyscrapers in the foreground and mountains in the back. If I squint, we could be back on our sofa in Vancouver, sharing a much-anticipated Saturday night takeaway, making the most of the weekend after a long week at work. It is a world we leave behind, but a life that, apparently, we do not.

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Puerto Cayo, if we are ever able to get there, is a small fishing village on the coast of Ecuador, and home to our third volunteer experience of the trip. This time, we sign up to spend two weeks with Frédé, a retired French Canadian looking for help around the house and garden while her husband is away. I’m so sorry, I text our new boss / host from my cramped window seat, unable to feel any of my limbs, we’ll be much later than anticipated.

At 10pm, thirteen hours after leaving Baños, we arrive at Frédé’s house. We apologise profusely upon entry, though Frédé bats our sorries away, beaming and bouncing around with the energy of a newborn puppy. She welcomes us with open arms and a saucepan full of prawn pasta, ready to reheat, with homemade poppyseed bagels on the side. I fight the urge to rub my eyes; where are we? Why is this woman being so nice to us? Welcome to paradise, she says as she tours us around home for the next two weeks. The casita is a studio of our own, complete with bed, bathroom, and kitchen, stacked with long-forgotten appliances — coffee machine; proper blender; a full-sized fridge freezer all for ourselves! — and more utensils than we owned living in Vancouver. Frédé bids us goodnight, though continues to text me about drinking water and WiFi passwords, perhaps unaware that she has already given us more than we could possibly need. We eat our microwaved bowls of pasta in a daze. Somehow, we are here; the journey is behind us and a whole fortnight stretches ahead with no long distance buses in sight.

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On Sunday morning, our first full day in Puerto Cayo, we wake to the high-pitched cries of birds, refreshed and relieved to be in a bed and not a bus, and potter over to the main house for breakfast at Frédé’s. She twirls back and forth between the pantry and around the kitchen island to toast bagels, chop avocado, fry eggs, and brew a pot of coffee. We insist on doing something to help and Frédé insists on us sitting back to relax, so we use the opportunity to ask her about herself. A move to Puerto Cayo with her husband following an early retirement; she cites, enthusiastically, no kids and no car for her ability to do so. They bought the lot twelve years ago and, for five of those, lived in the casita while building the place from the ground up. What an enormous achievement, we say, and we mean it; the house makes an impressive statement, complete with a pool, ocean view, and rooftop for pretty Pacific sunsets.

‘You drive manual, right?’ Frédé confirms, a question she’s already asked over text. I had assumed she was just checking, on the off chance that we might need to turn the car around or move it up the road.

As it turns out, she doesn’t drive at all — hence the lack of car and fast-tracked retirement — so the role of chauffeur is Baba’s, the only one of us I’d trust behind the wheel in rural Ecuador. After breakfast, we all bundle into the small Chevrolet for a trip to the nearest big supermarket. The thirty minute drive is filled with potholes and stories. We learn more than we could possibly expect to about Frédé — if we’re going to spend two weeks together, she’d rather get it all out in the open early — laughing loudly at her jokes and slight mishaps in English, her second language. She tells us of a recent time when she was hired to photograph a local art exhibit, photography being a passion of hers, and called for two people to interact in front of the camera.

‘Have intercourse, I shouted,’ Frédé interrupts herself with her own laugh, hearty and contagious. ‘They looked at me like I was crazy.’

She’d love to photograph us, she says, before changing the subject swiftly, as is her way, launching into a story about narcissists and how to recognise them, all the while directing Baba left when she means right, and vice versa. He is used to this, trained by my own lack of direction, though is somehow more patient with Frédé than with me. When I question him on this, his comeback is that she’s given us a home and is trusting him to drive her husband’s car in Ecuador; both fair points, so I don’t argue further.

We make a brief stop at the local bus terminal to buy a pound of ground coffee from a smiley Ecuadorian man. According to Frédé, it’s the best coffee in the area, and who are we to refuse local recommendations? The man won’t let us leave without a photo, so we climb behind the table and giggle as Frédé shows off her photography skills, bopping side to side and bending her knees to find the right angles.

‘Get the plant in it,’ he says with total sincerity.

The photos are taken on my phone, and I can’t help but wonder about the number of pictures this man appears in without ever seeing, the little dose of happiness he shares with his corner of the world.

Coffee secured, we drive five minutes further to the supermarket, an oversized store which sells everything from TVs to saucepans and where everyone who lives on the coast of Ecuador happens to be shopping this Sunday. It verges on overwhelming, though we are in no position to complain; this is the best selection we’ve seen since Colombia, and we have a casita to fill. We divide and conquer, powerwalking through aisles and weaving between local families, pulling packets of rice and pasta from the shelves, scouring every fridge until we realise milk is kept elsewhere in Ecuador. The trolley is stacked with essentials: four tins of tuna, strawberry ice lollies, a bottle of wine, and a kilo of Greek yoghurt.

On the drive back, boot full and car heavy with the weight of our collective groceries, Baba needs few directions, recognising the route and skirting around potholes with practiced ease.

‘You can drive a bit faster, you know,’ Frédé teases.

On Monday, we wake early, brewing a pot of our newly bought coffee — not quite up to Colombian standards, though better than most offerings in Ecuador so far — and make a yoghurt bowl each, fuel for the morning of volunteering ahead. Our working hours are between 8:30am to 12pm. On Monday’s agenda is to wash the car and help Paolo, the gardener, cut the overgrown yuca tree. Paolo, using what I can only imagine is a lifetime of expertise, assesses the situation for a few minutes before proposing a plan and requesting the tools to make it happen. A small, agile man who weighs less than I do, Paolo scales the tree with ease, tying a rope around each branch. The gardener saws while Baba pulls on the rope, guiding dense, heavy branches to fall without destroying everything and everyone in their path. My role, you ask? I hold the ladder to keep Paolo steady, though I can’t help but feel he’d manage just fine without this, and it’s a job he gives to make me feel involved. I extend my contribution by ferrying loose leaves and yuca branches to the compost heap, contemplating how I got here, how this has become a Monday in my life.

Monday is the busiest day of volunteering; as the week goes on, the tasks become easier. Three and a half hours of work turn to three, then two, then one. On Tuesday, Baba mows the lawn and I agree to rake the grass, though he soon takes over both tasks, deciding it’s the more efficient approach. I hold a hose and water the plants, helplessly dry under the hot coastal sun. It’s a task I repeat often over the two weeks, and one I learn to master: suncream and shorts for optimal tanning; earphones in and podcast episodes queued for excellent entertainment.

Every morning, at 8:30am on the dot, Frédé strolls from her house to the casita, coffee in one hand and fan in the other, marvelling at the sticky heat as if it is new to her. She takes a seat at our outdoor table, where we finish the remains of breakfast, and we chat about the plants and the weather, how we slept and when we want to use the pool. She tells us about meals she cooks and Scrabble she plays, teaching us Québécois swear words to help us better understand her expressions. By Thursday, Frédé confesses that she doesn’t feel like working, and that we shouldn’t either. We ask if she’s sure, and wonder briefly if there’s a catch; perhaps less work today means more tomorrow.

‘Absolutely! Enjoy paradise,’ Frédé sings before returning to her own house, where we know she intends to do the same.

And enjoy paradise we do. Before our arrival in Puerto Cayo, we prepare ourselves for the potential of boredom; we sign up for two weeks, after all, fourteen long days with only each other and Frédé for company. A week into our stay, when sipping iced coffee from the hammock outside our casita, I realise boredom never arrives. We spend afternoons reading, writing, and studying between World Cup matches, and appreciate the free time to call friends and family. All is good here, don’t worry about us! We wander down to the beach, digging our toes into the sand and feel like the only people in the world, the shore vast and almost completely deserted save for the odd runner and stray dog pattering around in search of food scraps. When the days feel too relaxed, we find a sliver of shade, unravelling our skipping rope and setting up a yoga mat for squats and crunches in the garden. I twinge my shoulder doing a burpee (the torn rotator cuff from Mindo is healing slower than I would like) and Baba tells me to man up, an order that boils my blood and supercharges my workout, which I suspect is exactly his desired outcome. He later apologises, and I realise it’s the first negative emotion I feel all week, the only thing I could possibly think to complain about.

We use our fridge of groceries to make meals that seem simple, but feel and taste more elaborate than typical backpacker staples. Frédé gifts us an entire jar of basil, grown fresh in the garden, and insists we make pesto, supplementing the garlic that we have with olive oil, a pack of almonds, and a bag of grated parmesan. We add lemon juice — behind the casita is a lemon tree, and we make the most of it, squeezing lemon halves over every meal, the juice tart and tangy — and blend the ingredients together, repurposing an old jar for our new condiment. That evening, we cook chicken pesto pasta, mixing in generous spoonfuls of sauce though barely making a dent in the jar.

To top up on groceries, our options are the single mini market in Puerto Cayo, where you aren’t allowed inside to browse, and have to request individual items and their prices from the shopkeeper, a way of shopping that limits you to about five items before you start to feel like a burden. Otherwise, it’s the food truck which comes to the door on Tuesdays and Saturdays, useful for eggs, fruit, the odd onion, and little else.

With limited resources and all the free time in the world, the mind runs wild. We find ourselves with two ripe bananas and not enough ingredients for a full banana bread, so opt for banana pancakes for lunch. A meal I make once every three years, and yet, in Puerto Cayo, inspiration strikes. We dream of the pancakes all morning, debating which of our other ingredients we can use to elevate the dish. Two bananas, three eggs, and 3/4 cup of oats blended together and topped with all three available options: strawberries, blackberry jam, and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. When we run out of sweet treats for dessert, we use our imagination, reevaluating the fridge with hungry, determined eyes. Find yourself with a cup of leftover cooked rice? Add in milk and eggs whisked with sugar and boom, you have rice pudding! We remain skeptical until it works, piling oversized portions on our plates for dessert and savouring every last mouthful, praising ourselves for the ingenuity.

Though the week’s workload is lighter than we even ask for, we cherish Friday, our first full day off. We pay $1 each to hop on a bus heading south, and walk thirty minutes from the road towards Playa Los Frailes, widely known as Ecuador’s most beautiful mainland beach. From where we’re standing, it’s impossible to disagree. The sand is silky and pristine, the people few and far between, with water calmer than most we have seen travelling. The morning’s clouds clear and make room for the sun to warm our shoulders, the backs of our necks.

We subconsciously, though mutually, decide that today is for making up all the steps we haven’t walked all week, so delay laying down to continue our walk towards the viewpoint. As we begin the climb, we pass groups of friends in leggings and hiking boots, and feel slightly underprepared in our Birkenstocks and sliders. Luckily, the climb is more hot than it is hard, and we make it up, clammy but in awe of the panoramic views. Back on the beach, we find a log by which to perch, laying down a throw and watching pocket-sized crabs scuttle across the sand, unable to believe that such a beach exists and we are two of so few people on it.

On one of our last days, Frédé delivers on her promise and insists on giving us a photoshoot. We follow her as she marches around the garden, camera hanging from her neck, the lens foggy in the afternoon humidity. We begin by posing next to the welcome sign outside the casita, and I imagine we’ll take a few quick snaps in the garden, perhaps by the palm trees, a sweet memento of our dreamy two weeks on the coast. Frédé senses our nerves in front of the camera — I’ll admit, we are not sure how to act — and, in a bid to dispel them, directs us with the sort of cues you’d expect from a primary school drama teacher desperate to direct the best Nativity in the town’s history. That smile! So natural! Get closer! Come on, closer! We need props! She rips a red flower from a nearby tree, first used as a hairpiece and then something to hold in both of our hands.

‘I love hands,’ Frédé says, as if the flower reminds her of the fact, and before we can wonder what to do with this information, Baba has a palm on each of my cheeks, Frédé is snapping away like she is seconds from getting the money shot, and I can barely breathe from laughter.

We continue modelling, prancing around the garden, playing with perspective and contrast. We struggle to take a single cue seriously, but continue until Frédé is pleased with the selection. The gallery gives us a good laugh, though will largely remain private, all closed eyes and double chins; to think I almost wore mascara and contemplated washing my hair.

On our last evening in Puerto Cayo, we mooch over to Frédé’s for a final dinner, finding our seats at the table where we first sat for breakfast two short weeks ago. This time, we face the ocean, watching the sun set as Frédé stirs and strains behind us. Dinner is served, she says proudly, loving to cook for people who love to eat, handing us heavy plates, piled high with creamy chicken pasta. Baba and I receive portions equally as large, which means I chew slowly, barely making it through every bite and Baba, despite being full, agrees to the seconds that Frédé thrusts upon him. For dessert, a traditional Belgian chocolate mousse, a recipe she tells us about in the morning and one we spend all day salivating over. She hands us each a glass ramekin directly from the fridge.

‘Wait ten minutes,’ Frédé instucts, as the flavour is better that way.

Baba sets a timer, and we try to distract ourselves with conversation, though are unable to concentrate on anything but the promise of chocolate. At nine and a half minutes, we can’t take it anymore, digging into the silky mousse, rich and smooth and perfectly sweet. Our spoons clink against the glass as we scoop out every last sliver.

‘Ha ha,’ Frédé teases. ‘You’re all finished and I still have some left.’

We thank Frédé all evening for a delicious dinner and dessert, plus the bottle of Argentinian Malbec that she insists on us finishing; she doesn’t drink, and we have no intention of letting wine go to waste. The thanks continue through the following morning, when Frédé’s neighbour arrives to drive us to the bus terminal to begin our journey towards Cuenca, our next and final stop in Ecuador.

Thank you, we say to la mejor jefa, whose loud laugh will echo across the rest of our travels. Thank you, we say for the casita and the pocket of peace in an otherwise packed agenda that takes us around an entire continent in ten months. An experience that never did have a catch, where the promise of minimal work and maximum enjoyment is said and meant. Where days unfold slowly, and every moment is its own, that first sip of freshly brewed coffee, the crisp outdoor shower after a morning in the sun, the golden hour of sunset, best enjoyed with a glass of chilled beer, which we personally prefer with a slice of homegrown lemon, if you have it.

‘But I don’t need it.’

‘You don’t need it.’

Baba laughs because he knows I’m right. A platter of chicken wings, even on special, would be a poor use of budget; we’re still full from lunch and here for a different reason entirely.

We are sitting side-by-side in the Ecuadorian version of a pub garden, facing a screen on which players take shaky breaths and clasp hands and pull up their socks in high-definition. Ecuador are about to take on Germany in their third group stage game of the World Cup. Ecuador’s streak, so far, amounts to a loss and a draw; in the bar, the pressure is palpable and the promos promising, the stakes high but expectations low. Baba wears his yellow football shirt, with a point to prove about the type of luck it can bring. As a compromise for the sacrificed chicken wings, we pay $10 for four beers which come out one by one, glass bottle dripping with cool condensation. If we still want the wings later, we can come back to them.

We are in Baños, an adventure tourism hub nestled at the edge of the Ecuadorian Andes, about three hours south of Cotopaxi. We arrive on Thursday, late afternoon, hungry but clearly not hungry enough, as we spend an hour debating between Italian and Asian fusion for dinner before we can’t take it anymore and stomp to the supermarket for a much-needed snack. A handful of crisps later, we come to our senses and choose pizza, which is so good that Baba compares the dough to Via Tevere, our favourite pizza restaurant in Vancouver. It’s a delusional comparison, but matches the mood.

Like in Mindo, Baños’ town centre is hugged by the thick mist of cloud forest, at its heaviest in the mornings. After our hostel breakfast, a small, sad affair served with watery coffee, we don rain jackets and spend our first misty morning climbing hilly streets lined with Jeeps and quad bikes, dodging vendors with offers of canyoning and white water rafting, waterfall tours which take place day and night.

To make up for a disappointing start on the food and coffee front, we settle into the window seat of a corner café, ordering two cappuccinos and a muffin to share, banana and chocolate, toasted so the chips melt into the dough, decorated with a generous sprinkling of sugar for added crunch. We lounge around for an hour, reading and chatting about the abundant adventure on offer, making up excuses because of the weather — why don’t we save canyoning for somewhere it’s really hot? — and form loose plans to enquire about a waterfall tour at night, though I sense we are doing this just to do something, the memory of Mindo’s waterfall hike still fresh enough in our minds to feel we don’t yet need another.

Outside the window, the people of Baños drift by, walking their dogs through the park, running errands and bumping into friends. Look up and you see the restaurant Baba pencils in for lunch later, a rooftop spot which serves menú del día with dessert. Slightly to your right and you see our hostel, so close that its WiFi works in the coffee shop across the street. I see the day stretch out before me: long and lazy, lacking in steps and filled with bread and rice and beer.

We must do something, I decide. Out of the fun, free activities in Baños that pop up from a three minute Google, the most promising is a viewpoint: in exchange for a short climb, panoramic views of the town and its surrounding forest. It’s not a mega three-hour extreme canyoning adventure tour, but it’s something. I pitch the idea to Baba, who agrees that we have hours to kill and bodies to move, so we wipe the chocolate remains from our lips, pay the bill, and get marching.

The climb begins reasonably, a dirt road with a modest incline, and becomes unbearable all at once. We loop around the hill a few times, overtaking the only other couple to brave the trek — both are dressed in crisp white, a detail I notice because I could never, especially out in nature — and point towards what must be the viewpoint. It’s a silly idea, but we don’t realise that yet. Ahead of us, stairs. Ahead of that, more stairs. I roll up my sleeves and pause after every set, bending my body in half to catch my breath. The morning mist turns the air sticky, so I roll up my trouser legs too, the makeshift shorts providing little momentum. Is it a prank, I wonder, did I misread the reviews? Where are we climbing and will it ever stop?

At the final set of stairs — I know because I send Baba up to confirm before starting the climb myself — I am overtaken by a man who I can only assume climbs stairs for a living, he is that light on his feet, that far from being in pain or breathless. Up top, the wind is strong and the views are sweeping, as promised. The couple in white arrive after us, though sit for a mere few minutes; we, meanwhile, make the most of the pay off, reaping the rewards of this activity that we don’t have to pay or plan or pack for. We overlook Baños and retrace our morning steps from above. There’s our hostel! The coffee shop! The rooftop where we’re having lunch! The bar where we’ll watch the Ecuador game!

At said bar, we sit and decompress at half time, each a beer down to match the 1-1 score, the morning burst of activity a mere ache in our quads. The second half arrives, and the bar vibrates with the energy that something really good is about to happen here. At the 77th minute, the pub garden, surrounding town, and rest of the country erupts in celebration of Ecuador’s late goal. The blow of the final whistle is drowned out by cheers of happiness and hope, relief and disbelief all at once. For the first time in twenty years, two things happen: Ecuador reach the knockout stages of the World Cup and Baba is distracted enough to forget all about a chicken wing deal.

We pay up and leave the bar to a Baños electric with energy, a chorus of car horns, windows rolled down and passengers loud in victory, cheers and claps and vamos Ecuador to everyone we pass. Traffic is slow and no one is frustrated by it; teenagers climb onto the backs of moving trucks to be spun around the block, the streets a blur of yellow. You wouldn’t blame a clueless onlooker if they were to congratulate Ecuador on winning the whole tournament.

Back in our room, our street-facing window gives us a bird’s-eye view of the celebrations below. We get inside, drop our jackets, and decide this is one of those moments in life that need to be experienced fully, so we sprint back down the stairs to circle the block once more, joining in with the cheers, here long enough to feel part of it. As the car horns die down and the traffic dwindles, we settle on our hostel rooftop to take everything in, including the two-for-one happy hour cocktail deal. Let’s go clubbing, Baba says, high on the winning atmosphere and the double shot of rum in his mojito. I wish him well for this adventure, one I don’t plan on participating in.

On Friday morning, our final day in Baños, we separate for a morning of solitude. Baba, having skipped the club for a burger and an early night, heads to the gym, a session which he follows up with a full body massage. I, still nursing an injury adjacent to, though probably not exactly, a torn rotator cuff, skip any activities which may worsen my shoulder, and take myself instead to Termas Antiguas La Virgin. I don’t care that these are the oldest and most historic thermal baths in the region, but I do care that they’re situated beside a waterfall; if I’m going to sit in a communal bath, there may as well be something to look at.

I pay $4 to enter, push myself and my swim bag through the metal turnstile, and smile at the staff, who stare back with curious, confused faces. I am, it turns out, the only non-Ecuadorian on the premises that morning, an interruption to what feels like a regular ritual for couples, families, groups of retired friends.

‘Do you want to rent or buy?’ The woman at the kiosk asks when I stop off to buy an obligatory swim cap.

There is no price difference between the two options — I wonder briefly why someone would pay to share lycra with strangers — so I buy, adding a swim cap to the list of possessions I stuff into my forty litre backpack to haul between eight countries across ten months. Swim cap secured, I change into my bikini, leave my bags in a secured crate, and begin the act of pretending I know what I’m doing. I spot signs instructing mandatory showers pre-soak, so I wait patiently while a group of teenagers finish shrieking and splashing each other with cool water, and rinse myself off.

I begin with the bath nearest to the waterfall, descending the steps and finding a space to perch, smiling at the locals with red faces and sweaty upper lips. I am unfamiliar with the benefits of thermal baths, but I try to channel the positive effects of the murky brown water while admiring the waterfall which towers above. Five minutes pass, and I follow the flow of the locals, who rinse themselves under another set of showers, freezing this time. I look for eyes to meet, an acknowledgement of the mutual shock to the system, but don’t find any.

Still far from getting my money’s worth, I try the same again in the second pool, larger and decidedly busier. This is where the locals come for their morning workout; one woman hovers by the entrance, gripping the stone edge as she kicks her legs out with vigour, caring little about who she splashes in the process. Men swim up and down and side to side, directionless and disorientating. Among them, children jump onto floaties and shout instructions for games made up on the spot. I avert my gaze to look back up at the waterfall, in case I am roped into playing somehow. It is a poorly organised local leisure centre swimming pool, with the water cranked up to thirty eight degrees.

The rest of my visit passes this way, as I take turns bobbing between pools, getting cold then hot then cold again. I leave no angle of the waterfall unadmired before I get changed and head towards the turnstiles to leave, where I see I have narrowly avoided an army of Ecuadorian children queuing, in zig zag formation, for entry. I later learn that the country’s president declares that day, Friday June 26th, a national holiday in celebration of Ecuador’s victory over Germany, so all the teachers and parents of Baños must be searching for a way to fill the unexpected free time, seeking — like myself, like we all are — the type of adventure that exists under their very noses.

Follow our journey to Puerto Cayo

We tumble out of the bus, which barely slows to a complete stop, onto a patch of spiky grass on the side of the highway. Entrance is a loose term, but we are somewhere in the vicinity of Cotopaxi National Park, located in the Andes Mountains, our next stop in Ecuador.

Though Ecuadorian locals jog across all four lanes of the highway with ease, this is a level of confidence I don’t yet, and may never, have in myself, so we opt for the safer route, strapping our backpacks on our backs and hauling ourselves up the grassy hill to begin the crossing via bridge instead. The air is cool and crisp, the altitude higher than Quito and Mindo, with lower air pressure and less available oxygen. I am mildly more prepared this time; half the job is in recognising what needs to be done, I remind myself as I ration sips of water.

On the other side of the bridge, four stray dogs wait to welcome us to our home for the night. Baba warns me to keep walking, which I have every intention of doing, until the pack block my path, circling me like wolves. They are gunning, I realise, for the plastic bag in my hands, inside of which is a half-eaten packet of spicy crisps, the modest remains of our bus journey snack. I contemplate tossing the bag to the side and making a run for it, the bounce of my backpacks quick and heavy to match my beating heart.

‘What are you doing?’

Baba, a few metres in front, drops his bags with a thud and marches back towards me, snatching the bag of crisps which, at this point, I am holding high over my head, practically on my tiptoes, as if asking the dogs to topple me over and swallow me whole. I stomp ahead, barely able to watch for the rest of the short walk. We lose three out of four dogs, though one remains totally enthralled by the promise of a paprika-flavoured afternoon nibble.

‘You won’t even like these,’ Baba says, trying and failing to hide his exasperation now. In response, the dog froths at the mouth; it is a flashback to dog bites of the past, and a story for another day. I dodge the specks of saliva and pray for it to all be over.

We shake the hungry hound only when we arrive at our hostel, a quaint gingerbread house of a building. We squeeze ourselves, our backpacks, and our surviving packet of crisps, crumpled to mere crumbs by now, through the narrow doorway. Inside, we are greeted by the hostel’s owner, Fernando, a sweet and smiley man with two dogs of his own, he is excited to announce. The man doesn’t know me well enough at this point to register my sheer horror, so we don’t blame him, but we do move the conversation along quickly. We are upgraded, at no extra cost, to an ensuite instead of the shared bathroom we pay for, so follow Fernando upstairs as he colours between the lines of Cotopaxi, making it his mission to ensure this is the most comfortable stay of our lives.

‘We have alpacas,’ Fernando beams as he points out the window of our upgraded room — cramped in a cute, cosy way, all bed frame and mattress with a vase of fresh daisies to add some flair — beyond which is endless farmland, shades of green and gold beneath heavy, low-hung clouds. Sure enough, a pair of alpaca siblings graze in the grass, not a care in the world between them.

After assuring him that we don’t need anything else, Fernando leaves us to it, though encourages us to step out onto the shared balcony for a better view of the park, home to one of the highest active volcanoes in the world. It’s a suggestion I imagine he regrets shortly afterwards; we step out to marvel at the view and inhale the fresh mountain air, free of the thick humidity of Mindo. Baba pulls the door closed and locks us outside, the alpacas humming in pity from down below. We rattle the door and try the one key we have before resorting to plan B; luckily, Fernando and I are on a WhatsApp basis. I text him our dilemma and he replies immediately, sending a staff member up within minutes to rescue us.

A last minute addition to our Ecuador itinerary, we book a single night in Cotopaxi, so have just one morning to fill before catching our next bus to take us further south. We are curious about Laguna de Limpiopungo, a scenic lake surrounded by grasslands and set against the backdrop of Cotopaxi’s volcano, a twenty-minute drive from the hostel. To get there, Fernando offers an estimate of $20 each way, which feels more expensive than we are hoping to pay, until I text a handful of local taxi companies who charge a minimum of $80. Gracias but no gracias, I politely reply. It’s a lot of money to see a lake, we think.

Plans still unmade, though released from the trap of the balcony, we find a seat at the hostel restaurant for dinner. We order steak and grilled chicken in their resepective sauces — peppercorn and mushroom, well-seasoned and delightful — which arrive royally, on oversized plates with generous portions to fill them. As I swirl a thick, fluffy chip around the dregs of my sauce, I text Fernando, a last ditch effort to reduce the price of our plans.

Does anyone else at the hostel happen to be going to the laguna tomorrow? Maybe we can share a taxi?

Francisco will be by in five minutes to talk about options.

I obviously have no idea who Francisco is, but we remain seated, eager to be presented with any alternatives.

Around seven minutes later — I’m not counting, but dinner is over, so there is little else to do but watch the minutes tick by — we feel a cool breeze as the door opens behind us, and with it comes a man we can only assume is Francisco. Dressed in a heavy-duty jacket and belted jeans, he greets us and the party of hikers in the restaurant, slurping soup after a long day in the great outdoors, and makes his rounds chatting to the kitchen staff. We wait patiently until he arrives at our table and shakes our hands, his grip strong and skin rough from decades of outdoor work, pulling out a chair to take a seat. I notice his baseball cap, Yankees, and his skin, a canvas of wrinkles when he smiles.

‘So you want to see Cotopaxi,’ Francisco begins, pushing aside our dinner plates to make room for his map.

The options are such, he explains, turning his head left and right every few seconds, holding equal eye contact with each of us, detailing a 4-hour round trip glacier hike which we have no interest in doing, but we’re not in a rush, and I can’t bear to cut him off, this kind man who enjoys sharing his knowledge with visitors. He traces his finger over the map and arrives at the laguna, when I interject briefly to say it’s this we’re interested in. Walking is prohibited, it turns out, so we can take a taxi each way, as we know, or drive up and bike down. The latter option is the same price — it’s $10 each per bike — but easier to swallow, somehow, than a $40 return taxi trip to stroll around a lake. It’s less a sight to tick off and more of an adventure this way, we agree. I can’t remember the last time I rode a bike, I warn Baba, setting the expectation early.

‘Do you have gloves?’ Francisco asks. ‘I’ll include them with your helmets.’

Not only do we not have gloves, but Baba forgets any thermals entirely, not a huge problem until arriving in Cotopaxi, easily the coldest place on our journey so far; that night, we use the portable heater to warm our room before bed. The offer of adventure plus much-needed resources for warmth feels as good as any. We’ll think about it, we say, and confirm as soon as we can.

Later, Francisco circles back to our table, where we still sit, impossibly long after finishing dinner, to ask the waitress about breakfast. Ours is a life measured in meals.

‘$35 for everything tomorrow,’ he says, knocking twelve and a half percent off the asking price. A generous discount, except Baba hears $32, so is disappointed when I translate the truth. We’re paying for an activity, we convince ourselves, a memory.

The next morning, we wake early from the comfiest sleep of Ecuador so far, and dress in every layer we have. We eat breakfast, a much smaller and sadder portion of food, though Baba orders the hot chocolate to end all others, frothy and flawless, and lets me take more than one sip. Though we are looking forward to a trip with Francisco, we are met by a different driver, a quieter man who speaks only to assure me our gloves are in the front seat. We spend the drive up taking note of the road we’ll have to cycle down, steeper and rockier than I expect. I gasp at a downhill slope; any descent now will mean the reverse later.

When we arrive, the driver lifts our bikes from the back of the truck, points down the road and instructs us, simply, to cycle back the way we came.

‘Carry your helmets with you,’ is the last thing he says before driving away, leaving us alone in Cotopaxi, ten layers and two bikes between us, with only one way to get down.

The laguna, from where we’re standing, looks tiny, and we tell each other as much until we realise the loop extends around the lake’s perimeter, taking us further into grassland, dry and straw-like in parts, green and vibrant in others, the colours of an oil painting. We walk forwards but glance backwards, gasping when the tip of the volcano peers out from behind the clouds. The whip of the wind, the kiss of the sun. We wonder where we are as it feels like nowhere we have ever been before. New Zealand and Ireland and Ecuador and its own place entirely.

An hour or so later, we make it round the trail to find our bikes, not stolen. We snap a final few pictures of the volcano before clicking on our helmets, ready to go. Ten minutes into the ride, we pause to strip off layers; still, at this point, on flat ground. I am pedalling, wind in my hair, gloves on my hands, loving life. The descent begins, slowly at first, and then all at once, a slope which feels steeper than I can manage on my two wheels. I change my gear from second to first, a dumb decision, and can’t change it back again, panicking that I’ve broken my only means of transportation down the mountain. We pause the adventure for Baba to fix the self-inflicted problem, riding my bike up and down the path and teaching me a valuable lesson about gears.

‘Right,’ Baba begins, just minutes after we resume biking. ‘How are we going to play this?’

I can only imagine he is referring to the pace at which I am cycling — or letting my bike roll down the hill, grip deathly tight on my brakes — and the fact that it is painfully slow for him. I won’t be going any faster, I say, so feel free to go ahead without me. He paces ahead, though pauses every few hundred metres, filming me while he waits. I smile and squeal past the camera, flying down now, getting the hang of this thing. When the uphill arrives, I push my bike in a pant and a puff, enjoying the trail more when the terrain evens out, when I can pedal and look up to admire the view, scenery changing with every curve of the mountain.

We arrive back at the hostel, breathless and beaming, dropping off our bikes and picking up our backpacks to catch a bus towards our next stop, Baños. Onboard, we sit and share the sticky remains of our spicy crisps, which somehow survive a second walk past Cotopaxi’s guarddogs. I watch the videos Baba takes of me, and my vision of myself as a pro mountain biker shatters immediately. Long shots of the view as he presses record too early, expecting me to whizz into frame and out of it again in a flash. When I do appear on screen, cheeks pink from the wind, I am moving at such a glacial pace that it looks like my bike could actually be broken. To the camera, I laugh nervously, unable to lift a hand even to wave, too worried about losing control, God forbid a rock spins my tire and sends me toppling down the side of Cotopaxi volcano, landing me in a grey, dusty heap, twisted limbs and layers upon layers of thermal clothing. I continue laughing as I watch the clips back, less nervously this time, texting friends and family about my accomplishment, attaching only photo, not video, evidence of the unexpected adventure.

Next up: Baños

We introduce ourselves to the owner, Isabela, a petite Ecuadorian woman with striking blue eyes and hair down to her belly button. She looks and sounds like she has never felt stress a day in her life, her voice soft and unhurried as she walks us through our responsibilities and shift patterns (11am to 4pm for one, and 4pm to 9pm for the other; we do not expect these hours, nor that we’ll be working separately, but there is something about Isabela that makes her difficult to refuse). The hostel mirrors her energy, with signs advising silence from 10pm. It’s the sort of place that makes you want to light incense and meditate and walk around barefoot, and not only because they have a no shoe policy.

The day we arrive, Tuesday, happens to be my sister’s birthday — there is a temporary power outage in the hostel, the lack of WiFi meaning I get just five minutes to talk to her using limited mobile data; she sips on a Moscow Mule, pixelated and pleased — and day one of two that we have free of volunteering. We celebrate both occasions by trotting around Mindo’s three main streets, finding our bearings in our home for the week, smiling at locals as we hop from coffee shop to lunch spot to the town’s park, where we sit and admire the surrounding cloud forest, misty and romantic.

We take advantage of our free evening to try a nearby restaurant, El Chef. Perhaps the chef himself is out of town, as my burger is unforgivably overcooked. I wash it down with sips of fluorescent orange Fanta, and we pass the glass bottle back and forth as we share our predictions for the week. A relaxed forecast, we feel; with few guests at the hostel, we expect to lounge around behind the front desk, lavishing the week of free time to read, write, and study. I force Baba to confirm no regret about accepting this volunteer experience; out of the two of us, I have very few responsibilites in planning and organising our ten month backpacking trip, though choosing volunteer programmes is slap bang in the middle of my scope of work. I begin on a back foot, so am determined to redeem myself in Mindo.

We return from dinner to an enormous party of older American adventurers checking into the hostel, all hiking poles and steel water bottles, suddenly tripling the anticipated number of guests. Once the flock is upstairs and out of earshot, yet another man appears — we are housing most of Mindo by my count — rattling the wooden gate as he fails to punch in its entry code. To prevent the entire hostel from collapsing, I open for him, and he tumbles past me in a thick cloud of beer and cigarette smoke, stomping up the bamboo stairs with more force than the entire party of Americans combined.

‘Está borracho?’ Isabela asks me, wanting to confirm the drunkeness that she can see and smell.

‘Súper,’ I answer, and in turn confirm that he is a paying guest and not a random drunken man I accidentally let on the premises, which would be a mortifying start to my week of responsibility.

‘We saw him at the bar in town,’ Baba says, dismissing my certainty that I have never seen this man before in my life.

Whether this familiar stranger is drinking for my sister’s birthday or our free day or, the third cause for celebration, France’s first World Cup match — a 3-1 victory against Senegal — he is hours past blissful and in totally blind territory, swaying and slurring and spitting over the balcony railing.

‘Ignore him,’ Baba says, attempting to distract me with a card game. ‘It’s not our problem.’

I lose three games in a row, too focused on trying to ignore the man, who curls into a hammock and lights a cigarette, muttering to himself as he swings back and forth past a big, bold no smoking sign. Surely, we whisper to each other, he’ll stumble through the door to his room and collapse into bed. Any second now.

Collapse into bed he does, though it’s not his; he manages to pry open an unlocked door to an unoccupied private room and what isn’t at all our problem mere minutes ago becomes it now. Baba, on Isabela’s request to help kick him out, finds him stark naked in bed, totally immobile, and unable to understand any of the languages being hurled at him (he is French, so we can safely assume the World Cup is to blame for his behaviour). Like the puma situation in Salento, I don’t see this with my own eyes, so we’ll have to take Baba’s word for it.

Let’s go to bed, we agree, taking control of the night before it has a chance to spiral further into madness; we miss the opportunity to meditate when we first arrive and here are the consequences. It’s only night one, I realise, as I lie in bed considering the very real possibility that this is it, we’ll have to cancel all our upcoming volunteer experiences and I’ll never be trusted to organise anything ever again. It’s safe to say the drunken French man goes nowhere, and I can tell from the way he smiles at me the following morning, when the moment is over and all that’s left to do is laugh, that he remembers nothing. We steal a moment to debrief with Isabela, giggling at our shared secret, rolling our eyes in unison: hostel guests, what are they like?

Aside from this gossip session, Isabela largely leaves us to our own devices. I volunteer myself for the 11am to 4pm shift, where I overlap for an hour with the hostel handyman, Luis, a kind Ecuadorian with fluffy black hair, a habit of mumbling, and absolutely no interest in speaking any English; Baba and Luis largely communicate via hand gestures, increasingly animated when Baba wears his Ecuador football shirt. Luis arrives at eight sharp every morning on his motorcycle, spends four hours powering through sweeping, wiping, mopping, and stripping sheets as he turns over rooms, private and dorm, in record time, as if racing against himself to make them available for early check in. He sits for a cigarette to conclude his shift before waving me off — hasta mañana! — with at least two loads of laundry, which I fold between hostel check ins.

My first check-in arrives as a party of three, breathless and hunched from the weight of their backpacks. I check the spreadsheet and know to expect two reservations; my speech is rehearsed and I am ready. Only, as it turns out, this party doesn’t have a reservation, an eventuality I am wildly underprepared for. I fumble through my welcomes, read aloud the room prices, and accidentally put the three newbies in our dorm, which sleeps ten people, a maximum I have no desire to reach, though I am relieved to get them in any room at all.

The respite lasts seconds, for the three muskateers leave the dorm as quickly as they enter it, making it their mission to ask me every question that could possibly be asked about Mindo. Can we book a night walk? Which canyoning experience do you recommend? What’s the earliest we can feed the birds? Is there an ATM nearby? Are the showers hot? I hold my breath and text Isabela frantically, booking the trio into back-to-back tours, building an itinerary too exhausting to be enjoyable, but what do I know? Nothing, it turns out; I ask all the wrong questions during our volunteer training and can offer answers solely from personal experience: yes, the shower is hot because I have been in it. I breathe out only when they leave for lunch.

Once we exhale the chaos of our first two days, we spend the rest of the week searching for calm in the cloud forest. Our long mornings together mean we try every breakfast spot in Mindo; over the dregs of a cappuccino, we meet Ben, a British man who now lives in Ecuador. We swap stories of our travels, making note of his Mindo recommendations. He is an English teacher, he tells us, and everything about him instantly makes sense, equally soft-spoken and expressive, an active listener and a keen sharer of knowledge all at once. This is the best coffee in town, he promises. When we next see Ben, it is to give him a guilty wave as he cycles past us in a different coffee shop — I’ll give it to him, the coffee is not as good.

To break up the rhythm of our mornings, we make plans that cater for each of our favourite activities. For Baba, we pay $2 each to use the local gym, where he takes us through a full body workout that leaves me sore for days afterward. My activity of choice is a chocolate workshop. We follow Fernanda, personified proof of cacao’s dopamine trigger, as she giggles and guides us around the factory before stuffing our faces with chocolate of every variety: bars, fondue, liquor. The amount of chocolate we eat before midday is enough to rival only Christmas morning. What we don’t eat we spread on each other’s faces, a task that comes more gently to Baba, who smears chocolate across my cheeks and forehead in soft, careful strokes. I am so worried about avoiding his beard that I forget melted chocolate drips. Though I avoid staining his new shirt (yellow is an unforgiving colour), I am so dangerously close that I don’t hear the end of it.

Over the week, we rank recommendations from other hostel guests. One review, delivered with such vigour and endless accompanying videos, has us climbing a dirt road at a ninety degree incline at nine am, under a sun already hot and high in the sky. We pay $10 to hold small tubs of sugar water, which attract more bees and flies than hummingbirds, although the feeling when a bird does land on your hand is wonderful, a simultaneous ability to stop time and control every force in nature. The birds generally prefer Baba, perhaps charmed by the bigger surface area of his hands, though I do have two land on me at once.

We get in the groove of cooking most meals at the hostel, developing our favourite cashiers at Mindo’s local mini market, where we enter most mornings to buy ingredients for the day ahead: beef mince, eggs, onions, and the occasional carton of chocolate milk as a treat. Once, I stomp through the afternoon rain to pick up a $4.50 bottle of Chilean Malbec and drink a glass while I cook a spag bol, Love Island playing on my phone in the background, which feels every bit as dreamy as it sounds.

‘Where’s our ham? Baba asks.

He is making lunch, the menu for which is nothing exciting, but still something we look forward to. The ham’s in the fridge door, as I remember it. Except, it’s not.

We spend a solid ten minutes turning the place upside down, pulling every item off shelves, peering into bins — multiple — and exchanging impassioned theories as to whom it could possibly be, the resident thief of Mindo, and their audacity to pull off such a crime under our noses. It’s not a reaction to be proud of, I’ll admit, but two packs of ham is a sizeable asset while travelling.

I text Isabela about the ham mystery, because apparently we lose all dignity. She is in disbelief, offering to check the security cameras. Check the cameras! We laugh. I respond jokingly and quickly, before we have time to mull the suggestion over and agree — yes please, Isabela, check the cameras — which would paint us pathetic in a way I can’t quite bear being.

We have no choice but to eat the meal without ham, so assemble the rest of the sorry, second-choice ingredients. Minutes later, Isabela texts. She has the culprit. Luis, the reliable hostel handyman, throws away our ham that morning, convinced it’s past its expiry date. Our faith in hostel humanity is restored, though we settle on a new theory: Luis fancied a little something to bulk up his own lunch, and didn’t expect us to be so eagle-eyed about it.

‘I bet he’s munching it right now,’ Baba says, bitterly, between bites of his egg roll sin jamón.

Luis pays us back the next day, profusely apologetic about the mistake.

On Sunday, our first full day off since arrival, we plan to visit the nearby waterfalls, a short taxi ride and cable car trip away. We bid goodbye to Luis, who is increasingly chattier and friendlier since the ham incident, and set off on foot past the main square, thinking we’ll be able to negotiate a cheaper taxi rate the further we walk. Our smugness fades quickly as we overshoot, past the point of any available taxis, and have no choice but to begin the two-hour climb by foot.

Fifteen minutes in, an Ecuadorian couple takes pity on us, slowing to offer us two seats in the back of their car. We consider the risk — it couldn’t be lower; there is one road towards the waterfalls so, unless they drive us off a cliff, we are pretty much guaranteed to get there safely — and jump in, sharing stories about our backgrounds as we weave up the narrow dirt road, a climb too long and steep to be enjoyable without an engine and wheels.

Once off the cable car — my estimations that this will resemble a ski gondola are way off; think more like a rickety, open-air fair ride, held up by the laws of physics and a healthy dose of trust — we opt for the trail that takes us to five waterfalls, the first four of which pass by in a blur. Hiking with Baba is like going for a jog with an Olympic athlete; during our first holiday to Greece years ago, he leaves me on a walk up to a viewpoint, helplessly excited by the destination and frustrated at the slowness of my journey. By the time we are in Mindo, I know how this goes. Together, we power ahead at full pace, overtaking every tourist on the path, of which there are many.

Mission accomplished: we arrive at the fifth waterfall to find we have it completely to ourselves. Baba goes for a dip, and I watch him wince under the water, its flow stronger than he anticipates. Once Baba dries off and I have a photo of the waterfall from every angle, we head back down the trail, fuelled by the promise of an arepa each at a restaurant we wait all week to visit, another enthusiastic recommendation to check off the list. We order two with the intention to share, though end up preferring our own; mine is stuffed full of shredded chicken, avocado, and cheese, the corn dough balanced, crunchy and fluffy in equal measure.

On our last morning in Mindo, we bid our goodbyes to Isabela and Luis, she as relaxed as ever, and he with that same, unreadable twinkle in his eyes; will he miss us as colleagues, or is he thrilled to be rid of us? Who knows? I lift my backpack for the first time all week, a task that is made significantly harder with my only souvenir from Mindo: a newly sustained shoulder injury. I climb down from the top bunk in the laziest way imaginable, my foot slips, and I tear my rotator cuff. This is my theory; Baba’s is that I pull something, though he conveniently misses both the audible rip and the sharp cry I let out on the way down, earphones in and none the wiser, enjoying the luxury of his danger-free bottom bunk. We agree that I will never take the top bunk again, an admittedly unbalanced, but necessary, exchange.

With minimal complaining — there could be much, much more — we haul our repacked bags to a breakfast spot for the second time that week, joking with the owner as if we’re known him for years. I order the waffles again because I can’t stop thinking about them, and Baba orders his second tigrillo, a hearty Ecuadorian breakfast dish of mashed plantain sautéed with eggs and cheese, with a side of grilled meat. We wash this down with sugary black coffee, fuel for the bus ride ahead. We admire, for the final time, the low-hanging clouds and forest greenery, a postcard snapshot of our week in Mindo, and stroll to the transport terminal to which we have directed hostel guests so many times, smiling at the familiar faces along the way.

Our next stop, Cotopaxi

In Colombia, we have the hang of it, or feel like we do, at least. Over six weeks, we graduate from novice backpackers into seasoned ones, travellers who recognise the best supermarkets and beer brands, know the banks with the lowest ATM fees and what to order from a menú del día. In Ecuador, everything feels new, because it is. We know nothing, yet to find comfort in the discomfort, unfamiliar with the country’s rhythms and quirks. We are back at the beginning once more, which is how we find ourselves eating chicken feet at a corner restaurant in Quito’s historical centre.

I’ll explain: day one of three in Quito is devoted to our own walking tour, courtesy of Baba, who plans the route, due to take us through two parks and into the old town, the colonial heart of the city. We set off from our hostel, caffeinated and confused about how to dress for the temperatures — 18 degrees and cloudy — a drastic drop from the scorching heat of Cartagena. I opt for trousers, a thermal long sleeve turtleneck and, as if that isn’t enough, I layer my jacket on top, thin but designed for insulation. One step outside and I realise I am vastly overdressed, with only myself to blame.

I tie my jacket around my bag, pull up my sleeves, and march on; we have a city to see. We enjoy the parks, green and tranquil. A brief reminder of London, if you remove all the people and add in a selection of stalls selling hand painted canvases and fresh pineapple. This is the only flat part of the walk; Quito’s historic centre is defined by two things: hills and people. We traipse around the old town, as busy as Rome in the summertime, the streets exploding with tourists and locals, families of twelve who insist on walking with held hands and linked arms. We huff and puff in unison — breathlessness transcends languages and cultures — as we follow each other up and down steep streets, every so often cranking our necks to admire cathedrals and pausing to perch in plazas, racing each other to unoccupied stoops and ledges, sitting wherever we find space.

Lunchtime arrives and, with it, a welcome moment of peace and solitude, free from crowds. We pop our heads into two places before settling on a corner restaurant, a hole in the wall advertising a variety of dishes with pixelated photos on oversized posters. We don’t check the reviews — a rarity for us, and a mistake we won’t be making again — but, faced with minimal options and thinning patience, this is the path of least resistance, so we take it.

We are two of three diners in the restaurant, the third being a hungry Ecuadorian man with no shame; he slurps his soup loudly and chews with his mouth wide open. The waitress, completely uninterested in our presence — in fact, it actively feels like a burden on her — ambles over to take our order. I play it safe with arroz con pollo (chicken and rice), which is rumoured to be served with plantain, according to the picture and its accompanying description. The rumour turns out to be false, but announcing this to the waitress may provoke a reaction I won’t know what to do with, so I eat what I am given. Baba, distraught at the thought of ordering a regular dish when there is a $2.50 menú del día on offer, opts for what he thinks he knows.

Our meals come out within seconds, as if they have been on standby for us all morning, the hungry backpackers who find nowhere else to go. Baba’s starter: a bleak bowl of pale broth, inside which float limp grains of rice, the odd chunk of carrot, and chicken feet, wan and scaly. A sad source of protein, I imagine they are intended to add flavour to the broth though, by the look on Baba’s face, they have failed at this.

‘How is it?’ I ask.

‘Fine,’ he says in the moment.

He finishes what he can of his food; for seconds, more rice, and a chunk of boiled chicken which looks mildly more appealing, though just as slimy, as the feet of his starter. I manage approximately half of my portion — the dish is somehow simultaneously oversalted and bland — before I ask if we can take the rest home; these days, home is wherever we have a bed and can store our backpacks. The waitress tosses a box in my direction.

‘$6.25,’ she says when we are due to pay, throwing our maths off balance. By our calculations, the bill is an even $6. ‘It’s 25 cents for the box,’ she clarifies long after the fact and with an eye roll. She’s sick of the sight of us, I know it.

Later that day, when debating what to have for dinner, unenthusiastic about the options near our hostel:

‘By the way,’ Baba begins, a start to a sentence which could lead to any number of things, though I have a feeling I know how this one ends. ‘That menú del día was shit.’

On day two, I volunteer myself to plan the walking route. Where Baba’s tours are balanced, dictated by an area’s must-see sights and restaurants with rave reviews — usually, Quito’s historic centre being an exception that we won’t hold against him; his first choice runs out of lunch options, hence the improvisation — my routes are shaped around the best places to stop for coffee and a sweet treat. I scour the map to find a shortlist of spots in the La Floresta neighbourhood, north east of the historic centre, studying menus to narrow down the most appetising offerings at the best value for money.

This is a futile endeavour, it turns out, as just one of my options is open on a Sunday. I lead us to the cosy, colourful spot, panic briefly that it is closed and my hard-researched itinerary is about to go up in flames, until Baba points out the bell we ring to enter. Inside, we make ourselves comfortable on two sofas, the only customers there, and fire up our Kindles. We order a coffee each, sharing a ham and cheese sandwich and cake of the day — apple, my favourite. It’s not traditional, nor is it adventurous, but we finish every last crumb; it remains the nicest food we eat in Quito.

‘That was a good choice, right?’ I ask.

We are barely out the door, the waiter, still in earshot, clicking the lock closed behind us.

‘That’s supposed to be my line,’ Baba says. Right when I think that’s all he’ll give me, he continues the sentence, offering the reassurance I am looking for. ‘But yes, it was great.’

Eight thousand steps into the walk — no street in La Floresta is left unseen — we debate whether we can be bothered to walk to a nearby mirador, a bonus viewpoint on my proposed itinerary. Baba is indifferent, though leaning towards skipping it. I almost agree, though decide at the last minute that I want to try it, perhaps to give my tour more gravitas than the colourful cafe; after the chicken feet fiasco, the stakes feel higher than usual.

‘I have a feeling this viewpoint is going to be mid,’ Baba says. It’s not quite the optimism I’m after, but I don’t blame him; we’re barely climbing, and our current view consists of a roundabout and a business hotel.

Determination waning, we continue up the road, past the hotel, and gasp as the view opens up to our right. The mirador, it turns out, is not mid. I force Baba to take back his words and accept his apology as we look out over the cloud-covered eastern valleys, admiring the spot, so secluded, and its postcard view, so unexpected. We wonder why the viewpoint doesn’t come more highly recommended online, though feel pleased with its privacy compared to the packed plazas of the historic centre; here, Quito feels our own.

We are in Quito for Ecuador’s first World Cup game, and will remain in the country for the duration of the tournament. The occasion has the city painted yellow; friends, families, bus drivers and bartenders wear their football shirts with pride. Baba, desperate to join in the fun, leads us from street stall to stall as we compare shirt prices. We stop at a kiosk run by two Ecuadorian ladies who thrust options of various styles and sizes in Baba’s direction and deliver a dual monologue of compliments as he tries them on, caring little that he understands only part of what they’re saying. Their tactic works; he sits on the decision for half an hour and returns to buy the shirt. I try it on and we mutually decide that the shade, brighter than the sun, suits Baba more than it does me.

On the recommendation of our hostel receptionist, we make plans to visit Plaza Foch in La Mariscal district, an area less busy than the historic centre, but still a livelier option than watching the match on the 20-inch TV in our hostel bedroom. We Whatsapp a sports bar — the primary form of communication in South America, which suits me perfectly; they also love a voicenote — and tentatively ask if they have space; it’s the first game of the group stage and, judging by the spirit of the city, the locals are ready to celebrate. Their response is almost instant: of course! Perfect, we say, secretly surprised but grateful to nab a space, and ask for a table at 5pm, an hour before kick off. If there’s a space near a screen, that would be perfect.

‘We have a reservation,’ we say to the woman outside the front of the bar, who can’t hide her shocked expression as she leads us inside and upstairs.

‘They have a reservation,’ she announces to a server we pass, repeating herself once more to the lady behind the upstairs bar.

The place, we realise, is empty. We, the English backpackers, are the first to inaugurate the sports bar in the middle of Quito on the evening of the first Ecuador game of the 2026 World Cup. I am the only person not wearing an Ecuador shirt, Baba’s shiny new purchase earning him instant brownie points with the staff. We can choose any table we please, the reservation completely worthless, so we place ourselves directly in front of one of the many TVs and order a grilled platter, complete with meat and vegetables and served with a side of chips and salad. With this, a jug of beer to share. On the screen, crowds of Ecuadorian fans gather in droves to cheer and clap and celebrate the nation. As we sit sipping the beer — we mix this with Sprite to create our own shandies, proud of our ingenuity, which gives the drink a sense of pizazz to match the occasion — I wonder where they all are, these elated fans, and whether they plan on coming to Plaza Foch anytime soon.

Five minutes after kick off — right on time, by Ecuadorian standards — the bar becomes the busiest it will get, tables filled with groups of friends and families. One child with a red, yellow, and blue vuvuzela takes responsibility for keeping the vibes of the place high, though it is still far from an English pub on a regular Saturday night, let alone an evening during the World Cup. We sit for two agonising hours, gasp at every shot Ecuador has and misses — a not insignificant number — and hold our heads in our hands as Ivory Coast scores a winner in the 90th minute. The loss teaches Baba a new Spanish term: ‘páralo’ or ‘stop him’, which, unfortunately, the Ecuadorian defence doesn’t seem to hear that evening.

On our final morning in Ecuador’s capital, somewhere between our hostel and the bus terminal, I realise Quito, 2,850 metres above sea level, is the highest altitude city on our journey so far. Though it arrives embarassingly late, the realisation explains a lot: our relentless dehydration, the lingering beer-induced headache which refuses to leave, and the slight sense of delusion that I can’t shake since landing in Ecuador. I leave Quito with the same backpack and endless stream of questions for which I have few answers, clutching everything tight as we board our next bus, bound for Mindo.

Find out what happens in Mindo

Slate skies persist for our first two days in Cartagena, though this does nothing to deter the bustling, coastal city which bursts with colour and flavour, cocktails and street art, music and movement, lively from dusk to dawn and through to dusk again. Our hostel room shares a wall with a club that never shuts, so we are lullabied to sleep by Bad Bunny and Daddy Yankee on every one of the six nights we are there. Colombia, the country that gives me my first salsa lesson, won’t let us go quietly.

After missing every sunset in Palomino, I refuse to take no for an answer in Cartagena. Though the afternoon is a gloomy one, we buy cans from the supermarket and stroll through the city’s central plaza, alive with tourists and food stalls. Past the smoke of sizzling skewers, thick and meaty and tempting. Underneath the arch of the amber watch tower and into the Walled City, zig zagging across vibrant streets which sell everything from emerald rings to fresh pineapple to fluorescent football shirts — we are days away from the World Cup and the city vibrates with anticipation.

We arrive at the west-facing walls, a sunset spot that comes highly recommended online, where we do our best not to ruin anyone’s holiday photos and nab a free spot to perch in and amongst it all. Pops of pink between navy clouds, if we squint hard enough. Our evening is humid, the air thick with imminent rain and swarms of black flies the size of poppy seeds. They get a whiff of us and decide they’ve hit the jackpot. We use one hand to sip our beers, now lukewarm from the walk, and the other to swipe around our heads, stepping from side to side in a frantic dance to trick the sheer army of bugs which surround us, circling the backs of our necks. Our eyes dart between the sunset and other onlookers, many of whom are ducking and dodging and desperately fanning their own hands around to deter the flies that follow them, pesky and persistent. We finish our beers, the sunset over before it really begins, and label this one of many insider truths we learn over our first six weeks travelling, those that no one admits on Instagram.

By our third day, persistent grey gives way to skies bright and blue. Any last remnants of rain evaporate as the sun announces her return, and the streets ooze with sticky heat. It is perhaps too hot, but we spend days wishing for clearer skies to see off Colombia and you can’t have one without the other, so we swallow the feeling, lather ourselves in suncream, and map out our own walking tour of the city, losing ourselves amongst the murals and streets hung with patriotic pennant flags — yellow, red, and blue. The golden church of Plaza Trinidad and the Balamory-style streets, adjacent buildings painted pink and lilac and orange and green. Baba is one in a sea of boyfriends and husbands behind the camera searching for the perfect angle and lighting, crossing their clammy fingers that the captured shot is good enough. We are on a grand total of 823 photos in our shared album — much to Baba’s dismay; I pay for ungodly amounts of storage and rope him into the consequences — and we’re only on our first stop.

I feel something bordering on chilly precisely once in Cartagena; the evening is twenty nine degrees, but the sea breeze is surprisingly strong. The feeling is an anomaly, though; most days are in the mid thirties, so every walk is rewarded with the promise of something cool. We pause often for iced americanos, saying our heartfelt goodbyes to Colombian coffee, and fruit smoothies, served with sugar and a welcome side of air conditioning. We find an ice cream shop in the popular Getsemaní neighbourhood: open, but the display devoid of any offerings. The devastation is immediate, but short lived. A man — think of him as a lifesaver — appears out of nowhere, and we wait patiently as he takes eight ice cream pans from the fridge, unwrapping the cling film like my dad opens birthday presents — painfully slowly, God forbid the paper tears. Once unwrapped, he tastes spoonfuls to confirm each flavour, visibly proud of his tastebuds and their ability to recognise hazelnut from coffee. Mango, por favor, I order first, fanning myself with the rim of my cap, which he must recognise as a futile gesture, so serves me a generous scoop; this will make you feel better, señorita. I have a strong urge to hug this man, just one of so many who show us kindness in Colombia, but I fear I’ll only leave him sweaty and confused, so he may not get the message.

We take advantage of the coastal city for a final big, blue, beautiful beach day before we travel to Ecuador, where the temperatures are set to drop dramatically and the landscapes veer towards cloud forest, where any sand is of the muddy, not silky, kind. We negotiate two plastic chairs under an umbrella and spend two and a half heavenly hours tanning and reading and running into the glassy water, so warm it does absolutely nothing to cool us off, but we float in it regardless; we make up two of a mere handful of tourists on the beach, and so feel as if the entire sea is ours. Here, the beach vendors are infrequent and generally take no for an answer, though I do find myself seconds away from accepting a beach massage from a chatty lady called Katherine (my sister’s name, hence the soft spot). She insists on giving me a free tester and, in the same breath, calls me beautiful, so I am obviously unable to refuse. Her grip is strong as she digs into the knots of my shoulders, of which she claims I have many.

‘Tu novio te está estresando,’ she says, and we share a private, girly laugh. I translate for Baba, who responds with an eye roll. I slither out from beneath her, though I feel I’ll regret it.

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In the evenings, we find dinner spots either under budget or wildly out of it — our logic being that with enough of the former, we can afford the latter, strategically timed before the budget resets for the next leg — and visit the city’s cocktail region: a narrow series of streets thrumming with music, laughter, and two-for-$30,000 cocktail deals. A steal, by our standards.

On our first visit, we don’t walk for long, nor do we prove difficult to convince, landing two seats at the first table, in prime people watching position. We order a cocktail each: a caipirinha for Baba and a mango margarita for me, which arrives in a huge balloon glass with salt and spice on the rim. The drink glows golden under the street’s flashing lights as we savour each sip, the sweet taste of celebration. We swap our favourite memories from the first month, in simultaneous disbelief at the quick passage of time and the amount that remains, stretching endlessly before us. A break in conversation and, because we’re in Cartagena and absolutely anything can happen, I turn to find a clown inches from my face. I scream, though the noise is swallowed by other sounds of the street, each bar with its own speakers, competing for the most popular playlist to lure in travellers and vacationers; here, everyone is welcome, as long as they laugh loudly and spend money freely.

‘I saw him coming,’ Baba says, the clown no longer in kissing distance, though still too close for comfort. ‘I was going to say something, but I thought it’d be funnier this way.’

This is exactly what Katherine the masseuse is talking about, I think.

The clown overstays his welcome, following up the surprise by mimicking every one of my actions, a performance that proves creepy and uncanny in equal measure. We eventually shake him, and I return to my margarita to slow my beating heart.

Night two on cocktail street and Baba’s drink arrives in a flash of neon blue. It takes one sip to realise he is paying for lighter fluid in a plastic cup. Cheap and discounted, but lighter fluid nonetheless. We must rectify our mistakes, so return for a third night, this time choosing a bar which serves drinks in glass, and order strawberry daiquiris, bright pink and perfect. We arrange to meet a mutual friend, Lucy, and her boyfriend, Tom, who are travelling an opposite route to ours, so we spend the night trading tales. They come from Ecuador — our next stop, tell us everything — and are off to Santa Marta in the morning — surely it can’t be any hotter than here, they exclaim. I remember thinking the same. We order another cocktail each, this time swapping to passionfruit on the server’s recommendation, and pause only to take breaths, sips, and gasps at the story of Lucy’s phone being stolen and the subsequent visit to a Peruvian police station, all broken Spanglish and wild hand gestures. Before we know it, five hours pass. We collectively call it a night and stroll back to our respective hostels, which happen to be across the street from each other, exchanging roadside hugs and wishes for safe onward travels.

We close off our time in Colombia at an Italian restaurant — naturally — where we splash out, ordering a cheesy prosciutto bread starter and a pasta dish each, sharing plump pink prawns and flakes of salmon that melt in our mouths. We acknowledge our mutual jealousy over the gooey, ice-cream-topped brownie which gets delivered to another table, and then let it pass, promising to prioritise dessert over starters in future. Plenty of lessons still to learn. For our last Colombian sunset, the sky is clearer, giving way to bright streaks of tangerine, apricot, and peach. The flies leave us alone as we take our final sips of Club Colombia — the country’s best tasting beer, in our opinion — and cheers to the past six wacky and wonderful weeks, saying adiós to Colombia, the first country to welcome us and our oversized backpacks, setting a high bar for the seven to come.

We are familiar with bus etiquette by this point — we take a lot of them — so we know to announce our destination when boarding. In our experience, the driver, and any other staff aboard, shout loudly and proudly upon arrival. Colombians are loyal like that; if you have somewhere to be, they won’t let you miss it. This time, we keep an eye on the route and watch our town come and go via Google Maps, a small blue dot drifting down the highway, getting further and further from Palomino by the second with no sign of stopping. I gingerly approach the driver, sliding open the door of his booth where he holds the steering wheel with one hand and roars into his phone with the other, none the wiser about our dilemma. I interrupt his conversation; Palomino is our stop, señor.

He is immediately furious in a way that overshadows any attempt at reasoning. But we told you our destination, I say, leaving out that we actually tell him more than once, on top of showing him our tickets. For a tense few minutes, he continues driving — he can’t stop now, we’re in the middle of the highway, dammit — cursing me under his breath. I watch the back of his neck burn bright red and feel as if I’m being taught a lesson, but I’m unsure what exactly this is, still clueless about the correct approach. He slides the door with a slam and I return to my seat, head hung, to begin brainstorming our emergency contingency plan. If he takes us to the bus’ final destination, that will be hours wasted with no guaranteed way to return to Palomino.

The solution presents itself within minutes. The bus slows to a stop, and we hurry to the front, bags bumping the bodies of innocent passengers, who I’m sure enjoy the show, to find our driver in cahoots with another, his bus heading in the opposite direction. I don’t overhear the full conversation, but I imagine it goes something like:

‘Are you going past Palomino? I’ve got two imbeciles on the bus who need to get there. Take them off my hands, will you?’

We remind him of our big backpacks in the underfloor compartment, which causes another minor outburst of fury, though he senses that holding them hostage would only make his life harder, and he’s had enough of that for one day. Backpacks retrieved, we swap buses.

‘Palomino,’ we say to the new driver about five times between us. He nods, a decidedly friendlier man — the criteria being that he doesn’t bark at me — and off we go, retracing the fifteen minute drive back to Palomino in silence.

It’s a slightly more dramatic start to the holiday than is intended, but we make it to our hostel, where we check into a modest private room with an ensuite, the first of the trip, which feels fitting for the occasion. I immediately make my newfound presence in Palomino known, dropping my backpack and changing out of my travel clothes, tossing packing cubes and loose items in a heap on the floor. Baba stores his possessions more neatly, folding tops and repacking items he doesn’t need, a practice that does not yet rub off on me.

Palomino is a small but lively beach town on the Caribbean coast. Everything you could ever want — from restaurants to bars to mini markets — is located on one straight road, a convenience that does not go unnoticed following our stint in the jungle, where the mere act of taking a shower requires a big bout of energy.

We stroll down this road to Grosso, a roadside shack serving Argentinian empanadas. We buy three to share, each stuffed with various meaty fillings, and bump into a couple we recognise from an earlier bus journey — I mean it when I say we take a lot of buses. Their six-month trip is coming to an end, so we briefly exchange itineraries and Palomino recommendations — they boast about the sunsets, which I mentally add to our growing list of plans — before excusing ourselves to enjoy our lunch, hard-earned by this point.

‘Don’t forget the chimichurri,’ they say.

Forget the chimichurri I do not; the sauce is served in a wooden bowl with a spoon too small for the quantities I need. I work with what I have and lather my empanada halves with the herby condiment, oil dripping from my fingers. It is, I realise instantly, the greatest chimichurri ever to exist; we are not due to arrive in Argentina until later this year, so the statement holds for now. The sausage empanada on special proves our favourite, though the difference in taste is minimal for me and entirely defined by the accompaniment.

Once I all but lick the plate and sanitise my hands to clean them of the oily remains, we continue our stroll down the same road, which opens up to the beach, vast and quiet during low season. We wander down the soft, sticky sand, find a log to perch on, and I watch longingly as Baba goes for a dip. I am not wearing my bikini — big mistake, huge — so our visit is brief. On the way back to the hostel, we first stop at a bar advertising three mojitos for $15,000 (about £1 per mojito, a steal even by Colombian standards). The drinks are served in modest plastic cups, weaker than we would like, but we are in no position to complain. Our holiday begins here, we think as we sip a cocktail each, splitting the third, and play a couple of hands of cards, an essential I pretty much always have on my person these days.

The following morning, we shuffle ten steps down the corridor to the hostel lobby, where breakfast is served. We are each presented with a plate of eggs scrambled with onion and tomato, a piece of toast, and a generous rainbow of fruit. We mutually decide we aren’t fans of papaya — it doesn’t taste as nice as the bright colour would lead you to believe, though we eat it regardless — but enjoy the pineapple, watermelon, and banana, which we pile onto an enormous fluffy pancake and drizzle with honey. We refill our coffees and savour our sips, reminiscing on the puny breakfasts of days past; this, we think, is how every day should begin.

Our plan is set; we’ll start the day slowly, relaxing on the hostel rooftop before lunch, and then saunter down towards a spot where the river meets the sea for a long, lazy afternoon of swimming, watching the sun sink towards the sea until it sets; bliss. I change into my bikini early and pack my beach bag, complete with towel, water bottle, and Kindle. I spend an embarrassingly long time debating which book to read on my beach holiday — I pick my next reads with the same intensity as others pick cars or neighbourhoods in which to live — and I am saving it to begin when the time feels right.

We feel the raindrops when we leave for lunch — a hearty menu del día served with a fruit juice so fresh and delicious we practically salivate when we are offered seconds for no extra cost — but it is only afterwards, at the exact point we are due to pick up my beach bag and set off for the afternoon’s adventures, that the skies open. It is the rain of London and Vancouver combined: that is to say, total downpour. All the rain in the world is conspiring to pour over Palomino, fat droplets collecting in oversized puddles which threaten to swallow the town whole. We retreat back to the covered hostel rooftop and revise our plans to the soundtrack of rainfall. I wonder briefly if it will let up before the evening, the skies miraculously clearing for Palomino’s famous sunset, but the thought is interrupted by the rumble of thunder. I accept that this is a fate beyond my control.

With nowhere to go, all that’s left, it seems, is for me to crack into my book, for the moment feels as right as any I will get, and for Baba to study for his upcoming law exams. When we are both bored of our respective activities, we devote our remaining energy to researching restaurant options. Over the three and a half days we are in Palomino, we must spend at least a third of that time browsing menus, comparing dishes and prices, tossing options at each other like beach balls. Look at this one! What would you get? Should we treat ourselves to a starter? We scour the Google reviews for mentions of the portion sizes, dismissing any that are below moderate, shortlisting those described as generous. We eat just one disappointing meal, blinded and misguided by the rave Google reviews, though we don’t let this deter us. We have, after all, eaten worse, and the ratio of good food still outweighs the bad.

On our final full day in Palomino, we don’t take any chances. We head off almost immediately after breakfast, and discover a new trail to lead us to the sea, double checking the directions with a kind lady we stumble across. She is almost entirely submerged in the river, handwashing clothes with concentration and a bright smile. We follow her instructions, emerging from beneath a canopy of trees to a part of the beach we are yet to touch, and finding a calm, clear spot in the sand to lay our towels. We take turns running into the sea while the other guards the belongings, though I slip into such deep and immediate relaxation I fear I wouldn’t notice any approaching bag snatchers; luckily, there are none. We take two dips each, the scorching sun drying our skin within minutes of leaving the water. I announce aloud that the sky is clearer than yesterday, and perhaps we could catch the sunset tonight instead.

‘Why do you have to jinx it?’ Baba says, and I wonder the same thing myself. I must exercise the ability to keep thoughts private, I think, compartmentalising this in the same category as neat unpacking: a good idea, though unlikely to happen.

We lounge around until we feel ourselves getting peckish, and stroll back along the beach towards our beloved Grosso, where Baba eats two halves of an empanada and I eat half the vat of chimichurri. For dessert, we make a stop at an ice cream shop that is closed for our first two days, taunting me. In Colombia, we learn early on to distrust advertised opening hours; like Google reviews, these lack accuracy and are often fabricated at random. This time, though, they must realise I’m having a wonderful morning on holiday and don’t want to be the ones to ruin it. We order a scoop of blackberry ice cream to share and race to finish it before the sweet droplets melt in the heavy heat of early afternoon.

The rain returns for the rest of the day, right on schedule. I am less stressed now, grateful for the sunny morning and free time to sort logistics for our onward journey to Cartagena, our next and final stop in Colombia. Dinner is decided — our shortlist leaves Barba Beach, an Arabic restaurant next door to the hostel — but we spend a not insignificant amount of time debating what to order, fearful the fairly priced shawarma will not be enough. We arrive, and all prior discussions go out the window; we let the waiter take charge. He sways us into a mixed platter, complete with tender chicken, crispy falafel, and fried kibbeh. On the side, a fresh salad; aside from the onion in our scrambled eggs, this is the first vegetable we eat all day. We lather our bread with three different dips, my favourite of which is the creamy baba ganoush, though the red pepper dip is also remarkable, sweet and smoky. When the bread is finished, we resort to leftover lettuce for dipping, mopping every last sliver from the plate.

‘Are you full?’ I make the mistake of asking Baba, a hangover from the days of cooking our own meals and controlling the serving sizes. Full is, of course, an overstatement — when backpacking, the feeling itself is alien — but he is content, and that is enough.

On Saturday morning, we eat our final breakfast — I feel myself warming to papaya by this point — check out of our hostel, and hike our backpacks up the same central road towards the highway; there is no official bus stop in Palomino, as we now know. We leave Palomino having seen more rain than sunsets, but I will hold nothing against it, this quaint beach town that, once we’re able to get there, welcomes us with friendly faces, cheap prices, and the sorts of sauces that could genuinely change lives.

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We take an hour bus from Santa Marta, known as a colectivo, perhaps for its collective ability to squeeze as much sweat out of its passengers as possible. We tuck ourselves and our numerous bags into cramped seats, mustering what little energy we have remaining to politely decline the variety of snacks and drinks sold by locals, who hop on and off the bus with practiced ease, caring little whether it is already moving. We are dropped off at the side of the road, and so begins the walk up to the property; this is, by any standards, a small hike, complete with steep hills and river crossings. Our phone signal drops, all sense of civilisation behind us. No matter; we consider this our preparation for the Lost City hike, which we pre-book for the following week, a 60km, four-day trek through the Colombian jungle which leads to ruins more ancient than Machu Picchu. If we can do this, we can do anything, we remark to each other as motivation, breathless and dripping in the afternoon heat.

We arrive at our final push: a set of stone stairs so steep it is only possible to take them one at a time. Ready to greet us are two energetic puppies, who sniff around our ankles and leave dusty pawprints on our thighs, scoping us out. If I could understand their barks, perhaps they would be warning me of what is to come. Turn around, they might be saying, you don’t belong here. A small ginger cat lazes in a patch of sun, unfazed by our arrival; powerless, she knows, to change the outcome.

The owners are an American couple who discover the place on their honeymoon, dropping their urban lifestyles to be at one with nature. We’ll call them D and C, husband and wife; they unironically refer to each other by these labels all week, a constant reminder of the commitment they have made. Once the puppies deem us safe — and possibly stupid for ignoring their cries — C gives us a tour of the property, which is all built into the mountain, across three levels, so the climb is not, and never, over. C braves the hill in flip flops, and I marvel aloud at her ability to keep her feet steady, landing in the right grooves to avoid a devastating slip; one is all it would take. She does this a lot, she says, used to the terrain. As it turns out, this is the first and last time I will watch her climb the hill. That’s what I’m here for, but I don’t know that yet.

Up at the top of the property, with views of a rich jungle landscape — life’s a climb, but the view is great — we meet D, a seemingly friendly man with long, lanky limbs, which he uses to saw and shave and sand in his makeshift, outdoor workshop. Every surface, including the floor, is piled with rusty power tools I couldn’t name if I tried. We stand back as the couple talk over each other, brainstorming ideas for the space, intended to be a future dorm for guests and volunteers. Look how much storage there is! The area to which they point — currently empty bar rocks, dirt, and sand — has all the potential in the world. They are dreamers, this much is clear to see. In that moment, we feel inspired, ready to tackle the ideas that exist in their heads and help bring the vision to life. We are eco warriors! Power to permaculture! What’s for dinner?

Having settled the important question of food — C offers us lunches and dinners (breakfast is already included) for a fee which feels easier to justify than hauling our groceries up the mountain, only to have to cook them ourselves — we get to grips with the place. We brave the outdoor shower, avoiding the pile of ant compost near the drain, and feel grateful for the porcelain toilet, a welcome change from the outhouse of Minca. We learn the rhythm of the generator, filled with enough petrol to turn on Wi-Fi, fans, and lights for a couple of hours in the morning and evening. For the rest of the time, we are left powerless, forced to disconnect and count our growing number of bug bites, their itchiness impossible to ignore.

Our dorm is a dusty wooden shack which we share with a friendly Mexican-American couple. Their volunteering is done, they announce with noticeable glee. Despite my prying, they keep their opinions to a minimum; our experience may be different, they suggest. The topic is quickly changed as they promise morning monkey visits to the outdoor balcony. That night, we sleep little; the fans are off, and the beds are built at a low height — a decision which feels deliberate, somehow — so we feel precisely none of the nightly breeze. The next morning, right on schedule, we are greeted with the howls of cotton-top tamarins, twisting their tails around the balcony railing, prevented from making a bed for themselves only by the mosquito nets which substitute windows.

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‘I prayed for a big man,’ D tells Baba on our first proper day, as he puts him to work digging dirt to clear space for the upstairs dorm-to-be. This soon becomes the most rewarding activity he is assigned all week. Otherwise, the Big Man is sent to do everything from cutting avocados to scrubbing the sides of the pool to going down to the local village to collect petrol for the generator. We befriend the third volunteer, an older Russian man, small and hunched in stature and naturally grumpy by nature; he barely gives the experience an hour before launching into a tirade of fierce complaints, which Baba receives first in English and I later hear in Russian (we compare notes and, sure enough, the man is bilingual in pessimism).

We remain positive, but privately confused. The tasks — all of which are named projects, for the sole purpose of making them appear more important than they are — are plucked from the heavy, humid air seemingly at random. We soon learn that D’s morning promises about the day’s order of events are mere thoughts said aloud. His is a mind that changes in minutes. Today we’ll work on electric and carpentry loosely translates to: I can’t actually be bothered to go and get groceries, so you go for me, and if you could grab me a pack of cigars and take out the rubbish while you’re down there, that would be great. Their life is an endless carousel of projects on the back burner — there are still hectares of the property yet be to discovered; D makes a loose suggestion that we can spend a morning cutting through the trees to create a private path to the beach, a mammoth activity that I feel will take more hours than there are in a week. My feelings are futile; this never materialises. We instead dedicate our efforts to cleaning leaves out of the pool using a broken plastic net, the fixing of which is briefly considered another potential project. I stand by, twiddling my thumbs as D and C mull over the idea of melting the plastic to stick it back together.

‘Or we could just buy another one,’ D says, and the dream dies a death.

While D prays for Baba, strong, capable, and eager to lend a hand, it appears C prays to have a week off chores. I spend my days sweeping pathways, cleaning the bathroom — an activity for which I am given no tools or products other than a squeegee, a type of mop with a rubber blade which limply pushes water from side to side and is mildly effective in scattering the compost heap created by the ants, whose work never stops — and doing laundry, not for the hostel guests, but for the happy couple. I am less eco warrior and more a glorified maid, I realise, though I struggle to see the glory in it.

As the Big Man is lifting heavy things and raking the part of the jungle deemed to be the garden, his white vest turning soil brown, I am in D and C’s bedroom, a square wooden studio complete with bed, toilet, sink, sofa, and hammock, midway through folding my fourth pair of D’s boxers. He, meanwhile, lounges on said hammock and looks out over his land, insistent that their bedroom is missing a birdcage. Caged birds don’t feel like they fit the ethos, C tells him gently; it’s not a good look for their natural, animal-loving, eco-project situated in the deep depths of the Colombian jungle, where wild birds are free to roam as they please. To this, he grunts, which I suspect could mean any number of things.

‘Do you do laundry at home?’ C asks me to change the subject, though this feels less like a conversation starter and more a bid to sense check my boundaries, which I now realise are flaccid and weak. When I tell her I do, she smirks; I am used to this, then, as if folding my boyfriend’s laundry in our shared home is a task equal to folding a stranger’s briefs. I justify this because it beats the alternative of having a power tool and being expected to decipher minimal, unclear instructions to use it without slicing off a limb in the process; I don’t know that a dodgy volunteer experience would be covered under my travel insurance. It is not lost on me, though, that I am the sole female volunteer and, as such, am given only those tasks I am seen fit for, whether in the kitchen or below the washing line. Neither Baba, nor the Russian man, touch a single clothes peg all week.

I proceed to pack their clothes into plastic storage boxes based on how often they are worn. Naturally, I am given no indication of which clothes these are, so I fold and roll items entirely at random, using my best judgement, the same judgement that led me to choose this volunteer programme in the first place, and is therefore null and void. In and amongst the Marie Kondo of it all, I overhear the possibility of dinner being vegetarian, due to them being low on groceries and sources of protein. No one asks for my opinion, yet I feel overcome with the urge to interject: Baba and vegetarian are two words rarely used in the same sentence. If dinner is to be vegetarian, we’ll make our own arrangements.

That night, they go back on their vegetarian plans, but it’s a narrow miss. As the days go by, the lunch and dinner portions get progressively smaller. I dismiss this as jungle-provoked paranoia, until C and I cook a bolognese, for which she suggests using two thirds of a pound of beef, roughly 300g between four people.

‘We’ll bulk it up with veggies,’ she says, her expression deadpan.

I anxiously spoon out our portions, serving myself less, and think back to our life in Vancouver, when I would cook a pound — 454g — for the two of us and worry that I’d need to brainstorm an alternative for lunch, as the leftovers would be pitiful. Baba scoffs the bolognese in mere minutes, and the sadness washes over his face; we coin the term ‘hupset’ years ago, a tragic combination of feeling hungry and upset because of it. It’s an expression I now recognise with dread; the Big Man is officially on his last legs.

The experience unravels at the speed of a jungle sandfly leaving a cluster of sharp, red bites around my ankle. One morning’s project is to get rid of dog food — it is left to rot in the fridge which keeps nothing cold; the lack of power is both romantic and impractical, depending on which way you look at it — set aside for us in a hefty saucepan. Baba digs a hole in the ground to bury the rancid remains. The gravity of the request only hits us when we lift the lid of the pan, the contents of which we tip into the hole at lightning speed, met with the sort of waft that stays with you for years afterward. It is perhaps the worst smell I will ever encounter. Midway through the task, when I am bent almost in half scrubbing the saucepan in the kitchen sink, I let my mind wander, desperate to be anywhere else, and consider those boundaries of mine, verging on pathetic at this point.

Right as we are hungry and fed up, dreaming back to days spent doing whatever the hell we wanted and cursing ourselves for being good samaritans — we signed up for this, willingly — D asks us to move our bedding from the dorm to the tent at the top of the hill. There is a hostel guest checking in, allegedly, so best to move us out the way to give them a premium, private experience. We oblige — the steep climb will prepare us for our upcoming trek, we mutter to ourselves, poor sods endlessly searching for the silver lining — and suffer through a sweltering, sleepless night amongst the bats, bugs, and building materials. We wake early to the sound of music. The older Russian volunteer insists on rising with the sun each morning to play his saxophone — for him, a moment of respite; for the rest of the jungle’s residents, human and animal, an unsolicited alarm. The sound would be more romantic were he not a total beginner, but we commend his determination and commitment to the craft.

The expected guest who kicks us out of our dorm never materialises, and we are left wondering whether they exist at all. This is only the second worst revelation of the morning. Baba spots a bat nestled into a rock above the showerhead, which we continue to see almost every time we use the bathroom; the porcelain toilet, such a welcome sight mere days ago, is directly adjacent to the shower, and, by extension, its visitor. I don’t know what’s worse: that it’s there, or the inevitable fact that it’s likely been there all week, peering over me while I’ve been cleaning and showering, tragically oblivious.

‘Are you sure you want to do the Lost City trek?’ Baba asks that evening. The trek is through the depths of the jungle, requiring four more days of ruthless bugs and incessant humidity, on top of the hours of uphill climb.

‘No,’ I say, barely giving him time to finish the question. I see my opportunity and I seize it, nearly ripping the knots of the hammock in which I am swinging in relief. The jungle life, I fear, is not for me. We discuss the decision for all of five minutes before cancelling the pre-booked trek. We wait for the evening’s Wi-Fi to beg for a return of our deposit, though it is explicit in the agency’s terms and conditions that they are entitled to keep this for cancelled visits. We make the sacrifice and consider it money well spent, launching into an animated discussion — suddenly, we have a new lease on life — about how to spend our saved pesos and time.

At 4pm on Friday, the end of our fourth straight day of volunteering, we are free! We practically sprint down the hill to the local town, where we buy crisp cold beers and food with humane portions. I fail as a translator and Baba accidentally ends up ordering higado, aka liver. It is a poor choice by any stretch, but we’re too relieved that our work is over to do anything but laugh. The single shop in the town, which would ordinarily feel devoid of appetising snack options, suddenly has everything we could ever want. My cheap, unbranded ice cream tastes gourmet, as if flown in from Italy that morning.

We spend the rest of our days in and around Tayrona watching the Champions League final at a bar with fantastic drinks deals, and taking the colectivo bus to Los Cocos beach. The waves are fierce, but we are nothing if not strong by this point, mentally and physically. We paddle around in the ocean and read our books beneath the big blue sky. We walk, barefoot, further down the coast and marvel at the vastness of the view, perching in a spot on the sand where it feels like we have the whole place to ourselves.

We end the afternoon with a drink each, and then order another one, mostly to prolong the time before our last night in the jungle. We need a holiday, we decide with utmost earnestness, and book three nights by the beach as a reward for our efforts, dreaming of sunset strolls and sipping cocktails, of ordering excessive food because we can, and only folding laundry that is our own. I see the twinkle in Baba’s eyes, and sense it is mirrored in my own. With the last sips of our drinks, we admire the heavy afternoon waves crashing onto the shore, and realise with total clarity that we have made the right decision. While the fitness for Lost City may be there, the desire, unfortunately, is not. I am jungled out, no closer to knowing what permaculture actually means, and ready to relax.

‘I can’t go any further,’ the driver says, eyeing the dirt road with skepticism. ‘The car won’t fit.’

My meek pleas to try are ignored, so we negotiate a fraction off the original fee and set off by foot towards our hostel.

After a quick Maps mishap — our phones lead us in different directions, an Apple vs Android divide that is common for us, but one we are never quite able to settle — we find ourselves on the right track and at the bottom of a steep hill. I sense this is the part where I’ll have to take my own backpack, which Baba has been hauling in and out of cars and off airport conveyer belts all morning. I strap all 11kg of my belongings on my back, with an extra few kilos on my front, and we get climbing.

We choose this hostel for its proximity to Minca, a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, picked from a handful of others tucked further into the jungle, reachable only by mototaxi. I’ll admit, I underestimate the fifteen minute walk, a rollercoaster of inclines and declines through rocky terrain. It takes careful, calculated steps to not topple over my own backpack and end up in a dusty heap on the ground, an inconvenient obstacle for the scooters which whiz by, familiar with the swells in the road in a way which we, the only passengers on foot, are not. The weather is cooler in Minca, we are promised, though we are yet to see this materialise as we trek through midday sun in thirty degree heat.

The walk is not the only factor I underestimate. We arrive at the hostel, red-faced and slick with sweat — this soon becomes a constant here — and find that they aren’t kidding about the ecolodge of it all. The smiley, barefoot man at reception shows us around, waving a casual hand towards the toilets: outdoor, no flush, a hole with a roll of toilet paper and a bucket of sawdust. Down there, he says, the showers. He doesn’t add that these are cold, if you’re lucky enough to catch them at a time of day when there is water at all. Perhaps this is implied.

Once he recovers from the surprise that I speak Spanish — I am so hot and flustered I struggle to remember my name, let alone form words in any language — he points us up a rickety staircase, so narrow it is a miracle I make it up free of injury and with my backpacks in tow. Our room is another flight up, at the top of the bamboo structure. The effect is that of a treehouse in the jungle, a roof with open walls and views that belong on a postcard. We sit on our tight, two-person hammock to catch our breath, peeling our sticky arms apart when they touch, and reminisce on the modern comforts of Medellín, the king bed, TV, and private bathroom a thing of the past. Here, we are grateful for smaller luxuries: mosquito nets and communal hammocks which look out onto Sierra Nevada sunsets.

It is from these hammocks that we watch Arsenal win the Premier League — gone are the days where we need a bar with oversized flat screens and echoing commentary; in Minca, all it takes is a screen and a strong enough WiFi connection for the match to load with minimal buffering. The momentous occasion elicits shrieks that echo across the jungle. In response, the cries of hummingbirds, resentful about the disruption to their peace. We are not the only fans at the hostel, which attracts Brits in big numbers. We overhear calls to home, travellers who share pans of the view while wishing to be back in London to join the fun; even the emerald green of the Colombian jungle is not green enough for some, it seems.

Once we stage a virtual celebration, which involves texting other devoted fans and liking every piece of Arsenal-related content on Instagram, we decide the occasion is worthy of making our own fun. Back down the dirt road we go, a walk that feels monumentally easier without backpacks and with a title win under our belts. We skip down in a cloud of dusty delight, ordering cheap beers from the first bar we stumble across, served by a kind German who cares little about what we’re celebrating, but is happy to contribute to our fun.

The next morning, still riding the high of victory, we wake early and set off for Cascada Oído del Mundo, a small waterfall about thirty minutes from the centre of Minca. The hike up is spent panting, our steps fuelled by the promise of a cold water dip. We arrive, pay a small entry fee, and keep our gasps quiet so as not to disturb the one local family there at that time of the morning, splashing around in the shallow pool with their dog, who looks as relieved to be in a body of water as we are. We outstay the family and a handful of others who arrive to admire the scenery, all the while dipping in and out of the crisp water like otters, pausing to lounge on rocks until the sun warms us enough to sink back in.

By the time we make it back to the hostel, hotter than before our swim, I am dreaming of all the other bodies of water I could get into: a second waterfall, a great big lake, a delicious pool, preferably with an entire menu of zesty, discounted cocktails that I can justify within my backpacker budget. I forget the fantasy and settle instead for the shower, which I spend twenty minutes talking myself into, an outbuilding of bamboo with no working lightbulb. The water is cold; the pressure is low; I can’t see a thing, but the feeling can only be described as euphoric. It is not the pool of my dreams but, in that moment, it is close. Want less, have more, as they say.

We devote the rest of our days in Minca to exactly this: small pleasures, lounging around in hammocks with our Kindles, trying and failing to avoid distraction from the snippets of other conversations drifting through the air. I am a serial eavesdropper in an environment primed for precisely this purpose. Baba has never listened in on a stranger’s conversation in his life — a fact which causes me great stress — so is uninterested in partaking in any gossip. I focus on my book in an effort to restrain my nosiness; the results vary and depend on who surrounds me.

We cook in the hostel kitchen, exercising patience as we wait for our pasta water to boil, the hob flame weak even at its strongest setting. Thirty minutes later, we mix in tomato sauce and cooked ham, confused when the cheese oozes with what we later discover to be guava jelly, sweet and tangy and definitely not intended for our purpose, but we eat it anyway. Post dinner, I swallow my craving for a sweet treat; though easy to secure in cities, the jungle, it turns out, has a diabolical selection of chocolate. I accept that the guava cheese is a two-in-one, and this will have to do. Mine is the life of a minimalist, I think as I swap my selection of electronic devices in and out of the one charging socket in the bedroom.

By night four, we marvel at our own ability to acclimatise to the eco of it all. Somewhere along the way, we miss the memo that the average stay at the hostel appears to be two nights, so we outlast most other guests that we encounter, seasoned old timers in a sea of new faces yet to establish their shower schedules and identify the cleanest toilets. On our final evening, we watch the sun burn orange and dip down through the jungle foliage, swatting away flies with less vigour, now familiar with their persistence. We rotate through our small collection of card games against the backdrop of a pink streaky sky, sipping cold cans of beer — these they do sell in the jungle — as we wait for dinner, a wood-fired pizza and plate of nachos with all the toppings to share.

If our stay were shorter, I may not have achieved perhaps my biggest accomplishment of all: learning the art of timing my toilet breaks strategically. I realise that when you’re lying on a hard hostel mattress, wishing to be lulled to sleep by the birds and the bugs, there is nothing that disrupts the peace quite like realising you need to go to the toilet, which not only requires getting out of bed, where you’ve found a groove of comfort in and amongst the discomfort, but down two precarious, lightless sets of stairs — to an outhouse, just in case you missed that part — and back up again, in one piece. You do it once, on the first night, before you understand what it entails, and then you do everything in your power to never have to do it again.

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To make the most of the central location, we spend an evening in La Provenza. This is the city’s nightlife hub, a pedestrian street of fluorescent lights and outdoor speakers blasting reggaeton from a decade ago. We pick a well-reviewed spot, order a mojito and a daiquiri, and pass the time people watching. It isn’t hard to spot the tourists, who are lured into bars by promises of cheap shots and shishas, flaunting their newly bought souvenirs with pride; two men at an adjacent table wear matching Colombian sombreros, known as sombreros vueltiaos, and order a Stella Artois each. We spend a good twenty minutes observing one couple whose sole reason for being there is to get the perfect video; she adamantly flips her hair and blows kisses to the camera, while he adamantly tries to meet her growing demands. By take ten, I get the sense that she is still unsatisfied, but will take what she can get. The pair are accompanied by a friend, a third wheel who can’t have possibly known what he was in for, who waits patiently for the filming to end and his night to begin.

Back in our king bed, the cocktails — the bill for which is more expensive than most dinners to date — prompt a mild panic about the budget. As we review our outgoings, still steady on our projected spending, it’s clear it is not the irregular cocktails, nor the meals, that are the problem. The big kickers are the transport and accommodation. We brainstorm ways to make this up over the next few weeks before rolling over in our king bed to turn on the TV, preloaded with every streaming app we could ever need and still logged into the accounts of those who came before us. The money is already spent, so we may as well enjoy it now.

We follow the advice of every person who has ever visited Medellín (or at least those who post TikToks about it) and sign ourselves up for a walking tour of Comuna 13, once known as one of the city’s most dangerous areas which has since been transformed into a loud, proud, and colourful tourist hotspot. Our tour guide, Cristian, a man born and raised in the neighbourhood, meets us outside of the metro station with a green umbrella and genuine smile. He is a former teacher, he explains, which is sadly no longer a profitable profession in Colombia, so he made the switch to being a tour guide and seems happier for it. This is a form of teaching too, he beams. Inspired to learn, we spend two and a half sweaty hours following Cristian through steep, narrow streets as he explains the social, economic, and political fallout of the 90s and early 2000s.

‘Let’s go, gringos,’ Cristian says to Baba and I, the rest of the tour group hailing from various parts of Latin America and therefore considered local. Together, we stand on each of the six newly constructed escalators — the primary tourist attraction, symbolic of social mobility — and learn about the meaning behind each piece of street art, rebellion expressed through vibrant, creative means.

We wash down the heat and history with green mango popsicles, served in a cup with a shallow pool of lemon juice for dipping, and take the opportunity to hear city recommendations from a local. Cristian scoffs at the area in which we’re staying — El Poblado is filled with backpackers, he says in a tone free of sarcasm, as if we genuinely don’t strike him as the type; I privately thank him for recognising my freshly washed hair, no small feat when travelling and showering in a private bathroom — and says La Provenza is fun, but geared almost exclusively to tourists.

‘If us locals want a drink or somewhere to hang out, we go to Laureles.’

And to Laureles we go, a less popular and more residential neighbourhood dotted with peaceful parks and dogwalkers who stroll with no sense of urgency. We match their pace, savouring the fact we have nowhere else in the world to be. At lunchtime, we skip the mile-long queue for the westernised Crêpe and Waffle and opt for a local menu del día, a true traveller staple. After devouring the soup, chicken, plantain, rice, pasta, salad, arepa, and glass of juice, I take my first breath, grateful for the elastic waistband of my trousers. It turns out we’re not done, as the waiter offers us a cup of coffee, insisting this is free and very much included in the deal. He’s delighted when we agree, bringing over two cups of strong, black Colombian coffee in hand-painted, dainty mugs. These days, we take what we are offered when we are offered it.

We return to Laureles once more to watch Arsenal take on Burnley in what is dubbed Medellín’s Arsenal bar (naturally, Baba does his research). Fifteen minutes before kick off, the place is packed with Colombian fans in an array of Arsenal shirts from past seasons, clinking beer bottles with collective nervous energy. Their distance from London does nothing to deter their passion for the team. I sit in front of a man whose plastic chair inches closer to mine with every cheer. He shouts instructions — derecha, corre, así, noooooo, intended for the players, but delivered directly into my ear — as if he were pitchside. The game ends with another important win. All paid up, we go to leave, stopped by a fan whose name we don’t — and may never — know.

‘Foto,’ he says earnestly.

And that is how we end up on the Colombia Gunner’s Instagram, radiant at the shared victory. I am grateful I packed my Arsenal shirt, which has already gotten more use than most other clothes in my backpack.

Saturday night in Medellín is spent at our first salsa class, an activity I have been nervous about since we landed in the country. I consider myself many things, but a natural born dancer is not one of them. We time our arrival at the local dance studio for just before seven thirty pm, when the entry fee is $7,000 COP (£1.38 per person), buy a beer each (which costs more than the entry fee), and sit timidly through the language exchange portion of the evening while we debate how this is going to work and where we will all fit. We sit beside a Peruvian native and Medellín local who comes here at least twice a month, he says. I swallow the last sip of my beer and imagine, with dread, the thought of being partnered with him. It would make a great story for his friends, at the very least, the poor little English girl with absolutely no sense of rhythm.

At eight fifteen, everyone gets up in unison. Tables and chairs are pushed to the side of the room, and so begins the warm up. Two minutes in and I realise I may be worse than I ever thought possible, struggling to mirror the instructors as they roll their hips from left to right, an action deemed worthy of inclusion in a warm up, and so one which requires minimal exertion and far less effort than I am putting in.

The room, relatively crowded until this point, empties out quickly as we are divided into beginner and intermediate, the latter group ushered into a separate space to flaunt their talents amongst themselves. Our Peruvian friend goes with them, thankfully. We beginners remain with Julian, an energetic instructor who gives every impression that he is not in the business of eating anyone alive and genuinely hopes that we enjoy ourselves this evening. Baba and I remain a few rows back, sufficiently concealed, and, along with everyone else, begin to follow the basics as Julian explains them. One, two, three, five, six, seven, pauses on four and eight. I grasp the steps, miss the beat entirely, and am relieved that I at least understand the instructions, delivered almost exclusively in Spanish with the occasional English count or encouragement thrown in. Poor Baba follows along on pure instinct, catching glimpses of the instructor through other bumbling bodies. His only other salsa experience is in Liverpool, England, which he confirms is a vastly different affair. I translate the instructor’s tips and tricks in a whisper and hope he isn’t using me as an example.

‘This time, move your shoulders,’ Julian says. ‘Not so stiff.’

He does an impression which gets the crowd chuckling — shoulders rigid and raised, body locked into place, a soldier bracing themselves — which I am convinced is intended for me.

For the first half of class, we dance individually, moving backwards and forwards, side to side, stepping diagonally and launching ourselves into a turn, a move which can only be considered beginner in Colombia, where babies must be born dancing. I experiment with a shake of the shoulders and decide that nobody cares; surely I’m not the worst in the room. My suspicions are confirmed in the second half of class, when women are partnered with a range of men, some with shoulders which simply don’t move, an unshakeable stiffness. I dance with one man who makes it his mission to ignore every instruction he is given, grooving as he pleases, making salsa his own. We laugh through it together, strangers holding clammy hands and trying their best, for it is the effort that counts here.

At the end of class, the lights go out and the space turns into a salsa club of sorts. We stay to practice our freshly learned routine, and watch in awe as those more experienced twist and turn and shake their hips, seamlessly able to predict their partner’s next move, a goal I save for a later date. We leave the place breathless but elated, dodging requests to enter other bars and clubs, who perhaps want to offer a space to show off my newly acquired moves. I continue to practice in the privacy of our hostel room, not only forcing Baba to watch and critique — I take the feedback as professional, not personal — but to get up and dance with me again, insistent that we’ve gotten this far; we can’t lose it now.

On Monday, our last night in Medellín, there is a salsa class on the rooftop of our hostel. And, what do you know, we’re at it again. This time, we’re in a much smaller group: six people plus the instructor. We pretend we haven’t done a salsa class before, perhaps to lessen expectations were we to admit the truth, and follow along with the same steps. This time, I make every effort to look up and smile, trusting that my feet will know what to do. Midway through the class, the instructor chooses me to demonstrate a move. Of course, this has nothing to do with my skills and everything to do with me being stood in the middle of the group, but I take it, delighted to be chosen. My practice is paying off.

‘If you take the same picture four hundred times, it’s not special anymore,’ my boyfriend, Baba, says as I elbow him out of the way for a clearer view of the window, which he is not using to its full potential. I ignore him, snapping picture four hundred and one of the rolling valleys, peaks crowned with clouds so close they could be in touching distance. This is week one; little does he know I’m just getting started.

To break up my photoshoot, we use the patchy bus WiFi to research our destination. We look up food spots, of which there is no shortage, comparing prices against our weekly budget, debating where we can stretch and save and splash. Across four nights, we eat our way through the colourful town, which welcomes travellers and locals in adundance. We try our first bandeja paisa — a Colombian delicacy, this is a platter served in a piping hot skillet, filled to the brim with rice, beef, pork belly, beans, plantain, avocado and salad — and order enormous empanadas, weighing a kilo a piece. The stall is run by a friendly Venezualan lady, who asks me which sauce we prefer and proceeds to ignore my answer and give me both; empanadas without sauce are not empanadas, she informs me. She is right, of course.

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We find a sports bar minutes from the main square; our only criteria is that it be open before midday on Sunday morning. We arrive at ten thirty to watch Arsenal play West Ham, a game which has me holding my breath for almost two hours straight. Locals gather to sip coffee and morning beers, peering with curiosity at the obvious tourists planted directly in front of the TV, gasping, clapping and cracking our knuckles as we wait for critical decisions to be announced. I learned long ago that it is more fun to get involved in football than to resist, but my blood pressure is worse off for it. We celebrate the win with a shot each; the bartender serves us with a wide, relieved grin. He has spent the morning looking over our shoulder and understands the stakes.

Salento, we realise, is full of must dos. We must visit a coffee farm; it’s the coffee region after all. We stroll along a dirt road for forty minutes to find a family-run farm tucked between forests — literally called Finca Entrebosques — where a kind, bilingual guide called Andrés takes us on a private tour, teaching us about the various types of Colombian coffee and chuckling as we get almost every single one of his trivia questions wrong. He does not take it personally. We pick our own beans, compare the smokey smell of roasting to the rich, earthy smell of grinding, and end the tour with a cup of freshly brewed coffee, which he measures out using scales, explaining, with pride, the precise science behind a perfect cup. When the coffee chatter is done, naturally the conversation turns to football — as eighty percent of conversations with Baba do; it’s the great uniter among internationals — and we (they) reminisce on some unbelievable 2018 World Cup goal. The walk back to the hostel is uphill, so we arrive sweaty yet satisfied, having acquired a handful of mosquito bites and an increased appreciation for the craft behind our morning ritual.

Another must is the Cocora Valley, which offers iconic hiking trails to see the tallest palm trees in the world. Preparation begins the night before, when we grab a takeaway hot dog and watch Disney’s Encanto which, it turns out, is inspired by the exact region in which we’re staying. Baba remains patient as I bob along to songs with lyrics I don’t know but still try to sing. We study our hostel leaflet; it recommends to begin the hike first thing in the morning, for better weather and fewer crowds, so we finish the film and get an early night.

To get to the valley, you take a Jeep from Salento’s central plaza, a thirty second walk from our hostel. We arrive just before six thirty am, pay the return fee, and are assigned a Jeep which we realise has no space left in the back. I tell the driver, who looks at me as if there is no such possibility. He dismisses my claim with a wave of a hand and sticks us not in but on the back, standing, without so much as an instruction to hold on. Hold on we do, and tight. I regret my choice of vest; the wind is strong, but the drive is magical, sweeping views of the valley everywhere you look.

We get to the starting point and realise the hiking instructions on the hostel leaflet are vague, at best. Our Jeep’s passengers have dispersed in various directions, some opting to take advantage of the early morning light for pictures instead of embarking on a hike. A man — let’s call him Nice Man One, as we’ll come back to him later — begins explaining the route he is in charge of selling, which is more challenging that we anticipated and a steep incline. The longer he speaks, the more it feels like even he is talking us out of it. This isn’t the one we want, we mutually decide, and after some back and forth, we manage to understand that we can still do the loop without paying the $25,000 he asks for.

‘Walk that way, through the forest, and then you’ll end with the palm trees,’ he says. ‘A circular route, 9km, about three or four hours.’

Within minutes, we are immersed in the rolling hills we saw on the drive. I pause to take a picture of grazing cows and, as I do, a man appears out of nowhere, marching past us to set up shop in a small wooden shack ahead. There, he — Slightly Less Nice Man Two, we’ll call him — charges us $10,000 each to do the loop. If it wasn’t for the cow picture, Baba is quick to point out, we may have skipped past for free.

For this fee, we are granted another set of vague instructions — we’ll walk over five bridges and then left at the first turning, about 12km instead of the 9km we are promised earlier — which we desperately try to match up with the words on our leaflet, an entirely useless piece of paper at this point. At seven am, in low season, there are no crowds to follow, so we do our best, picking lefts and rights almost completely at random, following our gut instinct.

The hills soon transform into cloud forest, where we climb rocky terrain past waterfalls and hummingbirds. We count bridges: one, two, three, crossing the rickety planks one at a time, holding on for dear life as we do so. Our early start means we find ourselves running low on energy, so we pause to refuel on sandwiches — ham, cream cheese and tomato, homemade in our hostel kitchen and surprisingly delicious — and handfuls of mixed nuts.

The fifth bridge crossed, and our eyes are peeled. We follow every slight left, optimistic until we see each path ends up winding back to meet the right. This can’t be what we’re looking for. We keep climbing.

Ten minutes later, the fork in the path finally arrives. There is a sign — practically the first on the entire route — accompanied by a crooked wooden plank with some information about pumas. It’s less a warning sign and more a series of fun facts about the animal, where it originates and the altitudes at which it is typically seen. This is the first time we hear of pumas; nothing on our leaflet, obviously, and not mentioned by any of the men we meet that morning. It’s worth saying that we spent three years living and hiking in Vancouver, where such signs are common. Bears, pumas, cougars; we understand the risks involved.

Now that we know where we’re going, we climb for perhaps thirty seconds towards the first patch of sunlight we’ve seen in an hour of shade. Baba, who is slightly up ahead at this point, stops. I sense hesitation and roll my eyes, certain there is another ambigious left or right path to choose from. Here we go.

‘There’s an animal,’ he says, voice low, eyes wide, body still.

‘What animal?’

‘A puma.’

I don’t have time to clarify before we’re zigzagging back the way we came, hearts pounding, skipping over rocks and looking back over our shoulders every two seconds to make sure we’re in the clear. Back over the five bridges we go, past the waterfall — we don’t stop to admire it this time — and out into the valley, where we are grateful that the only animals in sight are cows who have eyes only for the grass and not for us.

During the descent, which we complete in record-breaking time, we discuss the sighting. It definitely isn’t a horse or donkey, we conclude with less panic and increased certainty. He sees the animal from behind, its legs muscular, fur uniform and the exact tawny brown colour you’d expect from a puma basking in the sunlight after a busy morning of hunting prey.

By the time we make it back to the shack, Slightly Less Nice Man Two does not expect to see us.

‘Creo que veo la puma,’ Baba says, a sentence which translates to ‘I think I see the puma’, as in right here, right now, the one puma in the open valley at this altitude. I fill in the blanks, taking the man on an enthusiastic, breathless journey across the five bridges and up to the left, just like he told us, reminding him of the sign which warms of pumas at those altitudes.

To say he doesn’t believe us is a little strong, but his attitude veers on dismissive. It would be extremely rare, he claims, near impossible in fact. Half in pity and half so we don’t go completely insane, he suggests a couple of other potential animals. We memorise the names to Google later and, though I didn’t see anything with my own eyes, I feel pretty confident this was no ocelot, nor was it a tapir.

‘Did you take a picture?’ He asks, as if that is a perfectly natural reaction to being faced with a puma in the Colombian wilderness. We respond with a series of exasperated noises and give up trying to garner his sympathy.

Ten minutes later, still debating the possibilities and arriving to the same, steadfast conclusion, we are back where we started. Nice Man One is just as surprised to see us transform the supposedly circular loop into a there-and-back trail. He is more engaged in the story, however, dropping his jaw and raising his eyebrows at all the right moments, at least pretending that he believes us.

‘What are you supposed to do when you see a puma?’ I ask, although I speak with more vigour, using ruder words for emphasis. We have built camaraderie by this point.

‘They’d be more scared of you than you are of them,’ he says with a smile and then, to make me feel better, ‘but you probably did the right thing.’

Back on safe Salento ground, we shower off the hike and spend a good thirty minutes trading Google discoveries. We research everything from the chances of spotting a puma in the Cocora Valley at those altitudes — not nearly as low as was made out by Slightly Less Nice Man Two — to what exactly is the right response in such circumstances. And for my mother, who is no doubt reading this in horror, we learn it is not quite as dangerous as it seems, and there is truth to the idea that they fear us equally as much as we fear them. By this point, Baba is not only entirely convinced by what he saw, but filled with regret that he didn’t whip out his phone for a quick picture as proof of his suspicions. Look who wishes he took more photos now.

That afternoon, we take a delirious walk around town, where we order meat platters that could feed at least three people and pick up a bottle of cheap Argentinian Malbec — when in Colombia — from the supermarket as our reward for survival. We spend the rest of the afternoon in bed, resting and recharging and considering the many morals to this story. Despite the leaflet’s instructions, we probably didn’t need to take the first Jeep of the day. Considering it is low season, we perhaps shouldn’t have volunteered ourselves as the trail’s inaugural hikers. And, as long as you’re in no immediate danger, take more photos, even, or perhaps especially, of suspected pumas. You never know when you’ll need the evidence.

After a £3 taxi from the airport to La Candelaria district, we drop our bags in the hostel, get acquainted with our six-person mixed dorm room — me, bottom bunk, a decision I regret as it ends up being about five degrees colder than the top, but otherwise is a surprisingly comfortable set up — and take our first walk. The streets bustle with students and locals out for weekday drinks, zigzagging through rush hour traffic with unfeigned confidence.

For us, the intention of this walk is to get our bearings, withdraw some cash, and grab something for dinner. I’d say we succeed only in understanding where our hostel is in relation to the nearest Oxxo (Colombia’s version of 7-Eleven, except it also sells beer, a big plus). In my sleepwalking state, I fail to properly convert currencies and convince myself the ATM is trying to charge me the equivalent of £19 just to withdraw cash (we rectify this the next day; my maths was shockingly off). And dinner? Let’s just say it seems simpler to go to bed a little hungry than to make a decision about what and where to eat.

Of course, the walk is successful in the fact that it’s Bogotá around which we’re strolling, and not the streets of Madrid, where we had a layover twelve hours earlier. We flew from Heathrow to Madrid and needed to get our boarding passes from Iberia before our connecting flight. We stroll up to the desk, feeling a slight sense of smugness that everything is going to plan; our early start was worth it, and we each got a row to ourselves on the first leg. Backpacking is made for us, we think.

Let this be a public service announcement for any Brits travelling to Colombia. You must have your outbound / return flight booked prior to arriving in the country. This is perhaps obvious information for some, but we’re backpackers (at this point, for a grand total of about five hours; I’d managed to haul my backpack across three London tube lines and my boyfriend carried it through both airports), so assume we have full flexibility in our travel plans; if we like Colombia, we can extend our trip, right? Wrong, apparently.

Heads hung in shame, we sit ourselves on a stoop to the right of the Iberia desk, just inches from the floor, and tackle our first bump in the road, booking an affordable-seeming flight on the rough day we think we’ll have completed Colombia, or our version of it, at least. We hastily fill out immigration forms, which no one ends up checking, but are part of the art of preparation, which we are learning is important. We return to the desk not once but twice more; by the time we are granted our boarding passes, we have spoken to every lady working there, some more sympathetic than others.

It is one of those experiences which becomes funny within minutes, the type that merits a strong black coffee and an overpriced sandwich de jamón y queso just because, a little something to take the edge off. When we make it through immigration in Bogotá, ten plus hours later, it is a sign of our ability to problem solve; we have earned it.

At our hostel, we speak to travellers who treat Bogotá as a quick stopover, a one-to-two-night-max stay, a means to get to the next place. We stay for four nights and, though I’d perhaps recommend three to anyone looking for my advice, it feels like a good introduction to whatever the next ten months will look like.

In Bogotá, we discover menús del día, a standard menu of soup, followed by a meaty main, washed down with a juice or lemonade, the done thing for lunch amongst locals and tourists alike. And for good reason; it’s quick, filling, and ridiculously cheap. On day two, we spend $20,000 COP (the equivalent of £3.94) and, by day three, we challenge ourselves to find a cheaper alternative: success, for $16,000 COP (£3.14; on a budget, every penny helps) we leave feeling stuffed, sleepy, and satisfied. Here, we learn another important lesson; if pasta is on offer, I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is almost never instead of rice, but on top of. Our plates are served complete with almost every version of carb: pasta, rice and, in case that wasn’t enough, a generous portion of chips.

In Bogotá, we cram in as much culture as we can, hopping between Botero Museum (my personal favourite) and Museo de Oro (Gold Museum) within the same morning. We take the funicular up to Monserrate, a mountain at over 3,000 metres of elevation that looks out over the entire city. As we ascend, I am nervous about the altitude, only because a boy we meet at our hostel warns us of the dizzying, out-of-body effects. Luckily, we are left breathless by the view more so than the elevation.

In Bogotá, we find a local cafe, Café del Mercado, a cosy, two-storey spot filled with hanging plants and the kindest people. We return twice, trying everything from their panini to empanada de carne to carrot cake, and where I drink the flat white to end all other flat whites. The owner — perhaps the sweetest woman in all of Bogotá — sees us reading on our Kindles and is quick to offer up the Wi-Fi password, as if she thinks we’re working away on fancy devices. It’s the sort of place you can lounge around for an entire morning, picking items from the menu at random because everything is baked and brewed with love.

On the morning we leave Bogotá, the alarm is set for five thirty. We cram any last items into our backpacks, shuffling around in silence so as not to disturb our dormmates. The consideration is, sadly, not mutual; the last thing I see before closing the door is a man stark naked, climbing back into bed after using the bathroom. As we sit on the bus heading for the Colombian countryside, the landscape filled with every shade of green imaginable, I try my best to erase the image, and feel grateful that we had the sense to book a private dorm for our next two destinations.

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Until, one morning, Natalie wakes up in what feels like her farmhouse, but without any of the contemporary comforts that she’s used to. Cold, filthy and confused, our protagonist has actually woken up in 1855, at a time in which the lifestyle she so enthusiastically promotes on Instagram is the default for women, not a choice so much as their only option.

And so we are swept into this wild narrative — part satire, part social commentary, and part psychological thriller — as we learn what happened in Natalie’s life for her to end up here.

Though the life of a tradwife is far from my personal reality, Burke has a lot to say about the act of performance, both because her protagonist is an influencer, a performative career by nature, and because she is a woman. The performance of womanhood? There’s a truth I can begin to understand.

In a scene midway through the novel, Natalie is on the phone with her mother, desperate to discover how she does it, it being the seemingly unending list of duties that are part of the package of womanhood:

‘It’s lonely, you know. Housework. But it felt a bit less lonely when I pretended I had a little audience sitting on the couch with me. Watching me vacuum or take out the trash. Cheering me on!’

At the end of the phone call:

'I said goodbye to my mother, hung up the phone, and stared at myself in the mirror. Tried to imagine a small group of women standing in the corner of the bathroom, watching me, holding little score sheets, stern-faced and mascaraed, like an Olympic judging panel. I hesitated, then picked up the pill and dropped it into the toilet. There it was, undeniably: the sudden swell of applause.’

As women — as people, really, but I’ll speak to my experience as a woman — we perform every day. Even for the ones holy enough to avoid social media, those who don’t feel compelled to share their weekend coffees or Friday night dinners, the performance shows up in other ways. In work meetings, on public transport, when your bag gets stopped at security and you’re desperately racking your brain to remember what illegal item you might have smuggled in there, trying to play it cool as a moustached security officer rummages through your underwear before declaring you free of danger and ready to go on your merry way.

I am not delusional enough, for example, to think my Substacks are read by a huge audience, but I do know they’re read by a handful of people, some of whom I know personally. An audience of strangers vs acquaintances vs friends vs family, all with varying swells and volumes of applause. I write, then, differently to how I would write in a journal or a private notes app, where I first began drafting this piece, a version filled with many more typos and unfinished thoughts than it is now. If an audience, albeit a small one, is going to read my writing, I want them — you — to read work of which I am proud.

This is my performance of authenticity. The writing is real; the sentiments are true to me; the words themselves are a curation, written and deleted and retyped as I find the right thing, the truest thing, to say what I mean and mean what I say and at least try not to care if I piss anyone off in the process.

Like for Yesteryear’s Natalie, the concept of performance has shown up at different times, yet constantly, throughout my life. My first adult job was at an entertainment PR agency, managing the reputations of an array of public figures, people who spend most of the waking day concerned about their image and reputation. In other words, the success of their performance.

I remember one night in particular. Mid-November, London’s streets sparkling with lights, the air thick with festivity. I was accompanying a client to an annual event attended by a collection of powerful, influential figures. That year, the event looked a little different; its red carpet, typically a big ceremony, full of camera flashes and startled faces, was sliced in half, made an intimate affair for the crème de la crème of the celebrity circuit.

Everyone else, including my client, was invited to the party, where you strolled through the gate and up the stairs and past the security guard to enter the cloaked, claustrophobic world of showbiz.

‘Will there be a red carpet photo?’ She asks.

We’re midway through our second cocktail of the evening, a strong, spicy number with salt on the rim. I'd spent half the night introducing her to other agency clients and industry figures, names I imagined would be of great interest to her. From where I stood, everything was going swimmingly.

‘No, no. Don’t worry about it,’ I said. I’d misunderstood, but I didn’t know that at the time.

As it turned out, the missed photo opportunity didn’t fill my client with relief, but frustration, which I found out via an uncomfortable phone call with her manager the following week. The subtext: what was the point in attending the event if she had no red carpet picture to show for it? I realised then that an open bar and a chance to spot pretty people flirting with other pretty people, all dripping in diamonds and designer, is only exciting for a certain cohort of people, and she was not one of them.

It was the celebrity equivalent of running a 5k and forgetting to press record on Strava. The achievement was in the perception of the performance and, in robbing her of an audience, the achievement ceased to exist.

Since leaving that job, I’ve spent a lot of time considering the layers of our public performance, and the contradictions and fictions and fantasies sold to us in showbiz, the business of show. A world I know intimately, a performance I directly helped orchestrate. Like most experiences in life, this is one I have started to process through writing.

Here’s the first paragraph of something I’ve been working on, a project I’d put on the backburner and now, perhaps thanks to Yesteryear, feel ready to revisit, a tale about ego and loyalty, perception and performance, and the stories we spin for the world and for ourselves.

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Parents Bud and Catherine are experimenting with a new ‘arrangement’ — namely, an open marriage — that neither party feels particularly prepared for and leaves Bud sleeping in his car in the garage of their family home. Their three daughters, Abigail, Louise, and Harper, are in different phases of teenage angst and all the experiences that come with the age range, from undying, all-consuming love to similarly undying, all-consuming boredom. Each member of the Flynn family has, in some way, lost their way from the flock, to echo and explain the book’s title.

Unlike other family sagas (up there with my favourite type of book, so recommendations are warmly welcomed), this is by no means a plotless novel. Once Cash sets up her characters, she throws them into total turmoil. It’s tough to detail too much about the plot without giving it away, but let’s just say that the Flynns get wrapped up in the dodgy dealings of local billionaire, Paul Alabaster, which turns the second half of the book into part dramedy and part literary thriller. It’s unexpected, but it works.

As Cash pivots between character perspectives, which she does with humour and honesty, we sympathise with each lamb, lost in their own ways, faced with the stark difference between their dreams and realities, desperate but seemingly unable to make the two meet. I sympathise because I’ve been there; I am there; I, like the Flynns and many others, am a lost lamb.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve wittled my belongings down to two suitcases, one duffel bag and a small personal item that must fit under the seat in front of you. Everything else was either sold, forcefully shoved into the hands of friends and strangers (though, disappointingly, the man who rocked up at our flat for a Playstation 5 had no interest in a vase, a stack of plates or a baking tin) or thrown away, ruthlessly. At one point, my suitcase was so overweight that I was lobbing clothes into a growing pile on the freshly swept floor. I never liked those leggings anyway. My suitcase still ended up being overweight by almost four kilos; luckily, the lady at the check-in desk understood, without needing much explanation, that I’d done everything I could physically and mentally do. She fiddled around with the numbers on her end and let me through with a sympathetic smile.

I said goodbye to all the friends who made a foreign city feel like home for the last three years, and I travelled over sixteen hours to stay with my family, in a home in which I’ve celebrated Christmases but never lived, in a country where I know no one and don’t speak the language.

While reading Lost Lambs, I highlighted much of Madeline Cash’s writing, largely because it’s full of the sort of wit I’d love to recreate, but here’s an exchange between the two heads of the Flynn household that made me laugh, pause, and reread:

‘I’m leaving,’ said Bud instead of leaving.

‘I wish you’d surprise me just once. Just one time,’ said Catherine. ‘You know, we’ve never had sex in the shower.’

‘The fantasy is better than the actual implementation.’

‘Come on,’ said Catherine. ‘Am I really the woman of your dreams?’

‘Who cares!’ said Bud. ‘You’re the woman of my reality.’

There is a dream and there is the reality and, in either case, there is no set version of anything, no right or wrong way to move through the world. I look around to friends buying houses and starting businesses while others are renting rooms and taking life season by season. Some friends are having babies, while others are having the types of nights that start with a civil glass of wine and end in whiskey shots with the bartender and a taxi home at two in the morning. Sometimes, like Bud, what we say does not equal what we do, and what we want does not equal what we have.

I adored the last chapter of Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs, in which the Flynn family, and all their mismatched plus ones, are observed at dinner by a neighbour. It’s the first time throughout the book that we see the family as a unit. A flock of lambs, lost when they’re alone but finding their way together. For me, the next month is a stop gap filled to the brim with plans, flights, and catch-ups with friends and family, the people who make me feel a little less lost and a lot more whole.

There is nothing stable about it, and yet it’s still more stability than I imagine I’ll have when backpacking, where I’ll be bleating and baaing my way around a continent I’ve never been to, tasting foreign foods and meeting new people and slowly bridging the two versions, bringing, with every bite and laugh and sunset, the reality a little bit closer to the dream.

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My boyfriend and I landed in Vancouver in April 2023, fresh-faced and so ready to explore our new home that we plodded along Broadway in the pouring rain, opening bank accounts and sorting social insurance numbers with big fat grins on our faces. Everything was new, with so much yet to be discovered. We’d rented an Airbnb for a month, the basement flat of an oversized, beautifully designed house in the west of the city, our suitcases permanently open, piles of clutter increasing by the day. There, we woke up each morning to the pitter patter of three young children with zoomies overhead. We converted supermarket prices — surely meat can’t be this expensive — and discovered local bars and made friends in the most unlikely of places.

Our first friend, D, was made on a bus, as the three of us headed to a bar in the city to watch an Arsenal match. He introduced himself with a name so Irish that neither of us could understand it, so we were grateful for the nickname. Arsenal lost that day, but the three of us became fast friends. D invited us to his girlfriend’s birthday gathering on the beach that weekend, his generosity cementing our first friendship group and introducing me to two immediate girlfriends. Since that day, the three of us have been in a group chat that doesn’t go two days without fast, frantic, loving messages.

Since that Airbnb, my boyfriend and I have lived in four separate apartments — five if you count a month-long stint in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico — dotted around various neighbourhoods in the city. We’ve each had three jobs, been on countless camping trips, and even looked after a diabetic cat for six months. As a certified non-cat person, this wasn’t my finest hour, but that’s a story for another day. I’ve survived three winters, thrived for three summers, and been to one ice hockey game, where I sipped on an overpriced beer and cheered along despite minimal understanding of the rules or stakes.

Last month, we flew back to England for a Valentine’s Day wedding, where we spent the weekend dancing and laughing and drinking Prosecco with good friends, some of which we haven’t seen in the three years we’ve been away. The questions, I’ve noticed, have a similar ring to them.

‘How’s Canada?’

‘How are you finding it?’

‘Do you like it?’

I can understand this path of questioning which, on the surface, seems straightforward, an easy opener to encourage further conversation. Though, somehow, any answer I can think to provide feels lacking in accuracy, falling short of meaning. Three years is simply too long of a time to sum up in a tipsy conversation with an old friend.

Canada is a thirty-six-hour roadtrip from Vancouver to Calgary, a group of friends crammed into two cars filled to the brim with sleeping bags and tents and portable BBQs, driving down roads dotted with snow-capped mountains, taking pictures on every device I own in a bid to capture the most photogenic journey of all time.

Canada — or at least BC — is weekends spent outdoors. In the summer, on beaches and by lush lakes, following local recommendations for secret spots that, despite being easy to miss, are unmissable. In the winter, layering up thermals and bearing the discomfort of ski boots for sweeping mountain views and fresh powder, a group of people who didn’t know one another a few short years ago, racing down slopes and refuelling with burgers and pints and shots of Fireball.

Canada is also littered with bureaucracy. It’s firing out applications for jobs you’re overqualified for, only to be met with a silence that leaves you wondering whether to blame the company or the format of your CV or the fact you’re not Canadian, and therefore run the risk of being seen as a temporary employee which, of course, has some truth to it. It’s filing your own taxes and realising that cheques, at least in this country, have not gone extinct.

Canada is a collection of new friends, most of whom are sat in your same, lopsided boat, thousands of miles and an entire ocean away from home, living in the unfamiliar and doing their best to make it work. Young women who decided to follow their boyfriends — in part, what I did, though this is also a story for another day — taking the giant leap of moving in together for the first time abroad and realising not just the importance but the sheer necessity of female friendships. It’s circles widening, groups merging, pals from different worlds bumping into each other at bars and ski resorts, all part of the same messy, beautiful whole.

I’ve found it wonderful and challenging. Simultaneously full of adventure and new routine. The best thing I’ve ever done, I think. Some days, I like it, content with the life I’ve built and the ways in which I’ve grown and changed as a person. Other days, typically around the five pm mark on a summer Friday or Saturday afternoon, when the sun doesn’t set for hours and you’ve just cracked open a fresh can from the cooler, reaching for a chip to dip into salsa, I love it.

Because two things can be true at once, it’s also undoubtedly, indisputably difficult. I’ve cried a lot in Canada. I’ve been unemployed for months at a time, questioning every single one of my decisions. And, though I’m lucky not to have experienced strong or regular homesickness, I do still crave a crisp G&T at a pub garden on a sunny day and would chop off a limb to be able to stroll down the road for a piping hot roast dinner on a random Sunday in January.

The grass, it turns out, isn’t greener in Vancouver or London or Barcelona or Sydney, all cities in which I’ve been lucky to live over the last decade. The grass is green wherever you choose to water it. As I write this from my sofa, on my second cup of coffee of the morning, I look out at a grey, rainy cityscape, where my grass is being watered for a final two weeks. Three years later and Vancouver is still the same expensive city it was when we first landed but, from where I’m currently sitting, everything feels a little less new and a little more familiar and about a million times more special than I ever imagined it would be.

Bye for now, Vancouver. Thanks for everything.

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These films shaped much of my worldview. And, though I’ve never had a man sprint through the snowy streets of New York City on New Year’s Eve to declare his impossible love for me — which did feel, at one point, like a missed life opportunity — I did unknowingly manifest these women’s lives, in the professional sense, at least.

I did an English Literature with Creative Writing degree, the sort of choice which raises eyebrows, typically from men who aspire to earn high salaries with even higher bonuses, who have dreams of four bedroom houses with big gardens in the countryside, the mortgages of which would be paid off long before the age of fifty. These men call my cute little English degree a waste of time.

No part of me regrets my degree, but it is true that, in most cases, a creative degree does not guarantee a simple next step. This isn’t medicine or dentistry, which come with a more neatly paved path, whether you choose to take it or not. When I graduated, I had no idea what was next. Only now do I realise I shaped my own, slightly crooked path by following what I’d inherited from my teenage rom-com diet.

I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew the kind of woman I wanted to be: Andie Anderson, Andy Sachs, and Samantha Jones were my muses, so I did what I could to keep the fantasy alive.

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After what we’ll call the dreaded job hunt of 2020 — the uncertainty of pandemic-era hiring coupled with my very limited work experience proved challenging — I landed my first big girl job as a Publicity Assistant at an entertainment PR company with an office in Central London. On the first day, I forgot my salary woes — any money is better than no money — and treated myself to a £4.50 flat white from the cafe on the corner because I’d made it, hadn’t I?

It felt, at the time, like everything I’d been working towards. This was my Andy Sachs moment, my foot in a door that I’d spent months trying to bang down. And while my boss was no Miranda Priestly, I felt no less intimidated walking into a high-ceilinged office of people who knew what they were talking about, who wouldn’t just pick up the phone when it rang but initiate phone calls themselves. The expectations were clear.

I spent almost three years at the agency, where I quickly progressed from assistant to publicist, constantly on the clock, writing pitches and schmoozing journalists and accompanying clients to red carpet events, praying that someone had remembered to add my name to a list as a +1, so I wouldn’t be faced with the embarrassment of being turned away at the door, leaving my client to fend for themselves as I ordered a taxi to a back alley, where I belonged. Luckily, this never did happen, and I was let into rooms where, by virtue of profession and proximity, I was deemed worthy of being in. I skipped Emily Charlton and dove headfirst into Samantha Jones territory, spinning stories and protecting the reputations of the rich and famous, all the while trying to piece together my own.

In 2023, I left the periphery of showbiz and made the move to Vancouver, Canada. There was a private level of smugness to the decision, as I’d convinced myself that PR would become a thing of my past, that I’d settle into a low stakes, hopefully part time job that would pay for the rent, bills, drinks, dinners, adventures, and memories. It doesn’t take a genius to guess what happened next.

After months of fumbling through low paid jobs that looked nothing like the rom-coms of my youth, communications was calling once again. A year managing comms at a TV production company and then back to a PR agency, this time to work with restaurants and brands across food, beverage, lifestyle, and fashion. Though a strange place to call home, the feeling was similar. It was everything I’d known, what I understood success to look and feel like, the depiction of the working woman in the films of my childhood. Soon enough, I was promoted from Account Manager to Senior Manager, proud of the title change.

As you progress, the type of work progresses alongside you. There is some truth to the idea that things become easier, as you spend less time running around coffee shops and memorising car details and more time throwing around words like ‘scope’ and ‘strategy’, on email threads with people who make triple your salary and are funding their children’s horse riding lessons. But, with each promotion, you go from being someone who can hide behind the fact they have no idea what they’re doing to someone who has no choice but to do it. Fake it til you make it, and all that jazz.

To be clear, I’m not building towards a big breakdown here, though these do happen. Burnout is real and it’s ugly; on more than one occasion, I’ve hugged colleagues as they cry in bathrooms and on balconies, unable to face another day. People who wake up in the morning to the thought that even their best will never be good enough, who go to sleep feeling progressively smaller and smaller, sometimes until their body makes the choice to stop for them.

What happened in my case is a much subtler shift in mindset, a flick of the wrist and the TV remote to land on a new genre category, filled with the sorts of films I once loved but haven’t watched in years.

There were times, lots of them, usually after hours and with an alcoholic drink in hand, in which I would get it. The gossip and comraderie of being with work colleagues outside of the office, sipping gin tonics from big balloon glasses and swapping stories about that week’s client nightmares, one upping each other’s outlandish requests. Once, after a few too many drinks on a weeknight, I treated myself and two of my colleagues to a McDonald’s on the company card. We were the only three people on Oxford Street that night, or so it felt. Disclaimer: I don’t recommend doing this and, if you want to follow my lead, the next day I owned up, apologised and paid the money back, but the memory is a happy one. I read work emails in the dark, dingy bathrooms of dark, dingy bars, outwardly rolling my eyes but, inwardly, privately, feeling good about being a person worthy of emailing. People had questions and, somewhere along the way, I had become a person with answers.

There were other times, of course, and lots of those too. Times in which I didn’t think I could do it, that the life of being the person at someone else’s beck and call, seven days a week, was not made for me. That there’s a reason Andy Sachs snapped and Andie Jones quit (albeit to pursue more serious work in the same general field).

Six years later, I have allowed myself to realise that a person can have more than one dream. That Sandra Bullock’s Margaret Tate can simultaneously want her big city job and the charming, quaint Alaskan life of her assistant-turned-enemy-turned-fiancée. That Miranda Priestly, though she can claim that everybody wants her life can recognise, deep down, why a person might choose to walk away in favour of another version of success.

I have recently quit my job to go on a long backpacking trip around South America, so I can confidently say that my days of strutting through city streets in heeled boots, phone to my ear, coffee cup in hand, sorting the first of the morning’s crises are on pause. And, while I haven’t reached the level of dropping my work phone in a fountain in Paris, I do think I’ve outgrown the Communications It Girl fantasy of my favourite rom-coms. For now, at least. It appears even Andy Sachs found her way back to journalism; though, as a mega fan of the first film (in case it wasn’t obvious), I’m keeping my expectations low for the second.

With her 2023 novel, Tom Lake, Patchett does it again. Tom Lake is wonderful. There are countless other adjectives I could use — rich, hopeful, meditative, quietly heartbreaking — but I choose wonderful because this book, like others in my all-time favourites list, reminds me of the wonder of storytelling, this listening and shaping and telling and retelling of stories which feels innately, importantly, inescapably human.

Tom Lake is about middle-aged mother, Lara, who is so delighted to have her three adult daughters home with her — home being a cherry orchard in Northern Michigan — that she spares little thought for the impact of the global pandemic, the sole reason for their family reunion. While picking cherries, the three women beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared a stage and a romance in her early twenties.

And so she does, launching into a captivating tale of her summer of 1988, complete with late nights and lake swims and hot, heavy crushes, all as her daughers listen on, jaws dropped, in disbelief that their mother could be capable of such vibrancy, that type of adventure.

The book is about all types of love: young love, married love, familial love. It’s about the nostalgia of summers in early adulthood, free of burdens or real responsibilities, but busy with plans and dreams and relationships that feel all-consuming because they are.

It’s also a book about the power of stories and storytelling; Tom Lake is a story within a story, with protagonist Lara reminsicing on a summer decades past, relaying events and characters and plotlines to her daughters. Some moments she shares in great detail; others, she keeps private, buried in the depths of her memory.

‘I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires do not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.’

As a reader, you feel acutely aware that we are dealing with story here — the word itself is mentioned 80 times throughout the book, a fact I know because of the nifty Kindle search function — and everything that a story, by its very nature, entails: emotional embellishment, the blurred lines between fact and fiction, the hue and distortion of memory. In Lara’s case, love goggles coupled with the passing of time and wisdom of hindsight.

As a writer myself, I have a thing for books which simultaneously tell stories and reflect on the power and importance of storytelling as an act. Another of my all-time favourite books — one which I actually did reread earlier this year, see TikTok — is The Things They Carried by American writer Tim O’Brien. This is a memoir about O’Brien’s time as a solder in the Vietnam War. Although technically true in parts, the book reads as a tight knit collection of short stories, with some through lines and characters who remain constant. O’Brien spends much of the time meditating on the criteria of a story: what makes a good one? Must a story be true to make an impact? Or can the feelings outweigh the facts?

‘A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.’

In other words, the truth of the story is of less importance than the story itself.

What really earns The Things They Carried its place on my all-time favourites list is its last sentence. I first read the book in 2016 and it is no exagerration to say its closing line has stayed with me for a decade. In the final vignette, adult Tim O’Brien reflects on storytelling as a form of resurrection, a way of keeping those he knew and loved alive.

‘I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.’

That one can stay on the favourites list; it passes the test.

In the second half of Tom Lake, protagonist Lara says:

‘The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story. Peter Duke is dead and I’m telling them my small corner of what happened.’

In 1988, Lara lived it, all rage and love and the sort of passion that comes with meeting a character like Peter Duke in your early twenties. In 2020, with over three decades’ worth of emotional and physical distance, what’s left is for Lara to tell it, her small but not insignificant corner of the story, now free of rage and love but full of wisdom and reflection and hindsight.

The book also examines, in this way, how a story can change depending on when and where and to whom you tell it, how one same narrative can evolve in so many different, opposing ways over the years, to the point that you start to exagerrate certain elements over others, making space for secondary characters to have a seat at the main table, understanding, with time, a person’s motivations, considering why things happened in the way that they did.

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The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is an epistolary novel, with the story told almost exclusively through letters written by and to our protagonist, Sybil Van Antwerp. We read through the odd email exchange, but it is her ritual of handwritten correspondence, timed for around ten or half past every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, accompanied by a mug of freshly brewed Irish breakfast tea, which most distinctly characterises our protagonist, seventy three years old at the novel’s opening.

As someone who finds epistolary novels a little dry, I couldn’t believe how hooked I was on this. I’m a tad embarrassed to admit I read the last thirty or so pages while incline walking on a treadmill at a public gym — that’s not even the embarrassing part — and had to wipe physical tears, using my jumper to pretend it was the remnants of a sweaty workout.

Sybil, our opinionated, stubborn, sometimes cranky and often witty protagonist, writes to an extraordinary collection of people in her life. She writes to her brother, Felix, who lives with his partner in France and to her best-friend-turned-sister-in-law, Rosalie, a ritual the pair have maintained since Sybil’s stint at a childhood summer camp. She writes to her neighbour, Theodore, a loyal man with a complicated, traumatic past who never fails to hand deliver roses for every one of Sybil’s birthdays. She writes to authors, from Ann Patchett to Joan Didion and Kazuo Ishiguro, sharing the profound impact of their characters on her life.

Although not packed with action, this is not a plotless novel by any means. The letters are dated over a series of ten years, from 2012 until 2022, a decade in which Sybil experiences great loss, tries her hardest to mend a strained relationship with her adult daughter, and is courted by not one, but two men, amongst a million other happenings, some gasp-worthy and some totally mundane.

The Correspondent is the letters that make up Sybil Van Antwerp’s life. A life that, when measured in this way, is full not of extravagant adventure or abundant travel or continual goal setting and achieving and setting again, but quieter, more meaningful moments, loving memories and significant relationships and lifelong insecurities, a woman’s hopes and struggles and regrets with a capital R.

The novel got me thinking about the infinite ways in which to measure a person’s life; for some, it’s the twists and turns of their climb up the career ladder; for others it’s their individual accomplishments compounded with those of their children, and their children’s children, the stamp of legacy on future generations. For a lot people, it’s the number of memories made with their loved ones, at summer barbecues and on Christmas mornings and round hospital beds, because it’s the entire spectrum of emotion — the good, the bad, and the ugly — that matters in the grand scheme of a person’s life.

Sybil’s life, even in its most mundane moments, hinges on her ongoing communication with the people who matter to her (friends, loved ones, customer service representatives who help guide her through a world she knows nothing about). There is something so special, so intimate about the act of writing a letter to a loved one. Of sitting down at a desk with a mug of tea, of picking up a favourite pen and being intentional about communicating one’s thoughts, carefully choosing which questions to ask and which opinions to share. It is put beautifully in the novel’s preface:

‘On Monday around ten or half past Sybil Van Antwerp sits down at her desk again. It is the correspondence that is her manner of living.’

I can quite confidently say that Sybil would have little interest in being called a role model, but I found myself thinking about the importance of my own relationships while reading about hers. I, like most people, I imagine, couldn’t tell you the last time I handwrote a letter, beyond the gushy messages I pen in cards for birthdays and Christmases and anniversaries.

My preferred method of communication is via voicenote, which tends to offend a particular subset of people, those who’d be horrified to receive three minutes worth of unfinished sentences and distracted musings, all spoken into a microphone deeply affected by wind or traffic or the sounds of screaming children. Not me, though. I have a handful of friends in various time zones, friends whose lives I keep up with on a flexible schedule. I send voicenotes about my weekend plans, my work wins and frustrations, my favourite reads and my opinions on the latest in pop culture. It’s an ongoing conversation, an endless ‘talk to you later, fill me in, keep me posted.’

The voicenotes, like Sybil’s letters, are without pressure; I send them off and expect no immediate response. By the time they come back — sometimes within a couple of days, and sometimes a few weeks later — I am excited to listen to a friend’s reactions and updates, their answers to my questions, their travel plans and relationship dilemmas. Sometimes we catch each other on a good day, other times we are full of angst and frustration, wrapped up in often petty dramas that feel lighter when put into perspective.

As Sybil writes:

‘Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives…’

Since reading The Correspondent, my WhatsApp voicenote ritual, although not as romantic as Sybil’s letter writing and a practice which takes up a hell of a lot of phone storage, no longer feels so trivial. I realise, when reading Sybil’s story, that this correspondence with people — those I love, those I miss, those I haven’t properly gotten to know yet — is, when done with thought and intention, a manner of living.

It is these voicenotes, amongst long phone calls and coffee dates and dinners with friends, the sum of this interpersonal communication that adds up year after year, decade after decade, to equal a life full of meaning and knowledge and perspective. Or, at the very least, this is how I’ll continue to justify long, rambling voicenotes debriefing everything from the monumental to the trivial — trips to the dentist and the weather on the weekend and the best red carpet looks during awards season. The moments, big and small, which make a life worthy of measurement.

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The below aren’t all firm recommendations, but each stayed with me long enough that I felt compelled to write about them, which is perhaps the biggest surprise of all, considering Brooklyn Beckham’s bombshell statement consumed the majority of last week’s waking thoughts.

Starting with books…

I finished two books over the last week. The first, All Adults Here by Emma Straub, is a warm, funny, and hopeful story of one family (and close family friends) who all, in one way or another, are connected to grandmother, Astrid Strick. Our protagonist realises that life is fragile after witnessing a school bus accident in the centre of her small East Coast town. From Astrid, we learn that we live with a hundred percent of the choices we make and avoid, either out of fear or embarassment. I’m not hugely interested in generic rating systems, but I did enjoy my time with the Strick family. This is a relatively easy read which tackles some big themes, bouncing between character perspectives to deliver the heartening message that all we can do — as children, as adults — is try our very best.

The second book I finished was Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie. As a premise, I loved this. It’s the story of a male theatre critic who writes a vicious one-star review of a one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, before he proceeds to have a one-night stand with that same woman. And that’s only the first chapter. What follows is a sharp, satirical, and often uncomfortable exploration of cancel culture, as the critic is torn down publically and, as a result, professionally. Runcie explores the responsibility of reviewing culture, the worthiness of certain opinions over others, and the blurred line between reality and performance, all themes which, on paper, I’m fascinated by. A quick read — I finished it over a single weekend — but I left this one wishing that it had gone just that little bit deeper. Curious to hear other opinions on this!

Onto screens big & small…

Like nine million others around the world, a lot of my week was consumed with The Traitors UK, both because I was watching the last three episodes and frantically avoiding spoilers for them, which is easier said than done in a society which insists on sharing everything the moment it happens. If there was ever going to be a season to successfully follow the UK’s first celebrity version, it was this. We watched along as unqualified, nervous, red-faced Traitors dodged bullet after bullet, often unable to fathom their own luck. The finale was tense, offering a moral dilemma for viewers to debate at home. Personally, I can’t see how I’d ever be in Stephen’s position; I’m more convinced than ever that the Traitors is not for me.

A friend of mine audibly sighed when I told her I was watching Netflix’s His & Hers. The show made her so angry, she said, that she couldn’t make it through more than an episode, but she still had to Google the ending, which I think sums this series up nicely. We follow two estranged spouses — one a detective and the other a news reporter — as they both try to solve a murder in which each believes the other is a prime suspect. The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan called this glossy thriller ‘ideal new year TV’ and I’m inclined to agree. By the first episode, I was hooked. By the second, I was convinced I’d solved the mystery. By the fourth, I was getting a little restless and picking up my phone for a second screen scroll, but by the final episode, they’d hooked me back in with a different, even more ridiculous, ending to the one I’d anticipated. Listen, it’s the 400th day of January, the evenings are still long and dark, and the creepy chemistry between the two leads was a perfectly suitable distraction.

I read Hamnet a couple of years ago and, despite loving Maggie O’Farrell, this wasn’t a book I was waiting to see translated to screen. Now that I’ve seen the film, I’ve come to the same conclusion as most, which is that it was tragically, desperately, almost unbearably sad and Jessie Buckley gave the performance of a lifetime. Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet was also a total delight; that boy is made for the screen. I once heard two podcasters speak about Paul Mescal better suiting quieter, more thoughtful roles — think Connell in Normal People and Harry in All of Us Strangers, my personal favourites of Mescal’s — and I’m yet to hear a truer analysis. He was fine as Shakespeare, but I was acutely aware that I was watching Paul Mescal, an Irish actor, play the part of the greatest playwright of the time (I call out the Irish for nothing other than the accent, which at times seemed desperate to be let loose). Meanwhile, Jessie Buckley completely transformed into Agnes, a so-called forest witch with an almost supernatural connection to the natural world, and a mother with an undying love for her three children.

Listening-wise, I’ve spent most of the month catching up with podcast episodes that I neglected throughout December. A special shout out to Shameless, a culture podcast hosted by Melbourne writers, Michelle Andrews and Zara McDonald, which has been a late and lovely discovery for me. There are multiple shows under the Shameless Media umbrella, though my favourite is their titular show: Shameless, the podcast for smart people who love dumb stuff. I’ve caught up with their recent Monday, Thursday and now Friday episodes, but am keen to make it through their Summer Scandal series, particularly this on the many iterations of Ariana Grande and when Hugh Grant got caught.

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All in all, a good week for culture. If you’ve read, watched, or listened to any of the above and have an opinion to share or a recommendation to make, I’d love to hear it. For now, I’m back to filling my weeknights with a rewatch of Friday Night Lights because, as ever, clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.