Camino De Santiago in Photos: Part 5: New Friends and Gift Economies on the Way

The day after my ankle gave in, I went outside to give it a test run round the block. It didn't feel any better, I had developed a strange lump and I was worried. I spoke to Timo and his friends, some German pilgrams we had met the night before who were outside. They said that they had all started getting this type of pain coupled with a strange lump in different places on there legs. 

They said it was due to the weight of the bags.

We want to hear from you! Plus some updates to the site and a big thank you.

As we begin scaling back the use of money in our lives there are many (big and scary and little and scary) questions that present themselves. We have started addressing these questions ourselves and you can expect to read our thoughts and answers soon.  But we also want to hear from you. We want you to ask us questions and tell us what you think.

The process, we reckon, will be good and grounding for us; it will allow us to address some issues that perhaps we have overlooked whilst laying things out a little more clearly for you.

We would love for this blog to become more interactive, and it's more fun for us, too, if we hear from you.

You can ask a question directly in the comments section of this blog, via Twitter or Facebook, or by sending a pigeon.

Thoughts About the Future: Our plans and those who have inspired us

Up on the roof of the house in Bogota you can almost always see an electrical storm a way off. We gaze in fascination, gasping and swearing each time the mountains are back-lit, never tiring of that far-off event. The cumulonimbus clouds hover above the landscape like an armada of giant cerebral cortices. In a flash, something over there has been pointed out. Maybe that's where we'll go.

We have a few things on the cards which we can't quite talk about yet that will keep us tied up for the next two or three months, but after that we shall begin the next phase of our adventures.

Theory into Practice: Paying into a Gift Economy

A few hours later we found ourselves eating fluorescent soup in a luminescent library in la Candelaria, Bogota. We weaved our way between students, stacks of boxes and books and glow-in-the-dark meat hanging from the ceiling before stopping for a break to drink some fluorescent fruit juice.

Our guides were Jorge and Diana, who have become our first friends in Bogota. They came to us randomly one day, living up to the legendary loveliness of Colombians:

The Moneyless Man

"Money has come to replace community as a primary source of security."
-Mark Boyle

There are an increasing number of people on our planet who are living without money. Though we are not living without money (for the time being), these people are proving a great source of inspiration to us, and we want to share that inspiration with you.