Words from the dusty road 10

Final part of the Morocco miniseries: Words from the dusty road

“Did you notice that?”

“Yeah, we were surrounded by hot chicks.” ~Random dialog between me and Mark

I remember starting an initiative with Jeff in university. That we’d initiate contact and talk to a random stranger everyday. The initiative never took flight because I was too scared of approaching a total stranger and too self conscious of making a fool of myself. But I decided to give it a try on this trip. This trip of no regrets.

At the beginning, I put a lot of thought on how to approach and what to talk about before I even start. Then as time goes by and as the novelty wore off, I started to get in front of people’s face and blurt out whatever that comes to my mind at that moment. To my amazement, many good conversation started like that.

Near the end of our trip, this turned into something even more amazing. I have no explanation what so ever until we scratched our heads together to try to come out with a theory. We coined it the traveller’s aura which is later confirmed by other backpackers who’ve experienced it as well. Everywhere we go, people would initiate conversations with us. More often than not, they turn out to be hot chicks in the range of 7~9s. Something that never happened in my sorry little life.. This is especially true in Spain where a dishelvelled Asian with a white dude stands out like a sore thumb. We noticed it while waiting for buses, we noticed it while chatting at the hostel and we noticed it while sitting in a pub listening to local flamenco. No efforts, no working up the courage to approach that hot chick, no mind numbing shock at trying to think about what to say, they just invade us.

“I mean, you are on vacation, you are happy with no worry about boredom and you are definitely not grumpy because you are not stuck doing the same thing for a year. You are backpacking so that means your life is completely in your own hand and that shows through your confidence. It shows through your interaction with people. It tells them that even though you cannot speak their language, you chose to be there and you chose to stutter through the few simple words in your vocabulary to get what you want. To them, THAT is sexy.” ~Fellow backpacker