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:

Uncle Julio's House

"In my ideal world work becomes a matter of the expression of our gifts, motivated by passion, called for by the needs and not coerced by money."
- Charles Eisenstein

We had to take an alternative route because a landslide had brought down part of the road.

"Can you see it? Down there?" My dad was pointing down the steep hill. Nestled amongst fruit trees and thick vegetation we could just make out a small house. It was difficult to distinguish from the backdrop of dark, green mountains.

"That is where I was born."

Camino de Santiago in Photos: Part 4: the long, flat road to Leon (well almost)

After leaving Ollie and Selina, Anthony and I head on alone for the first time. We leave without breakfast as the town we stayed in has no shops and no restuarants that are open.  We head for the next town, San Bol, which is 7km away. 

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.

The Other Way

"Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom." 

-Marilyn Ferguson

So, we are running out of money. This is a fact that, just a week ago, had us feeling upset and anxious. It can be a scary thing, running out of money, especially when to a large degree you have been planning much of what you do around money. 

A Small Deposit

For so many of us, when we travel, we fear one thing above all else. We fear the coffee that costs the same as it does in England, or the only dorm room left in town which is, really, only $2 more than all of the others. We fear the taxi over the bus and the ticking tock of the quickening clock. We fear the same thing that we did back home, the same thing that our mothers and friends do: we fear our money running out.