When I arrived in Bangkok, I was determined not to stay at the Khao San Road. The Khao San Road is what Piccadilly Circus was to soldiers in the Great War: sooner or later, if you survive, you’ll meet everybody there. During the day, dazed and jetlagged foreigners dodge the tuk-tuks and the taxis, bumping backpacks. Newbies are tempted by the tailor shops which advertise two suits and five shirts for two hundred dollars—hand-tailored, sir. The windows are plastered with photos of lumpy, sunburned tourists in their poorly-fitting purchases, which belie the testimonials in Danish, German, Dutch, and English.

At night the area is closed to traffic and hucksters bark their pirated DVDs, marijuana t-shirts, chopstick sets, orange juice and knock-off Diesel gear. On Sri Ram Bhuttri, vans set up mobile Red Bull cocktail shops beside the blaring CD stands. There are fried-spider sellers catering to those who need a quick dose of exotica to dine out on back in Lewisham. Young locals arrive to gawp at the falangs, though many of the clubs and bars have a no-Thais policy.

It’s a freakshow. Some timid visitors pick through pad-thai-with-egg before burrowing back into the nearest internet café, but elsewhere every possible variant and combination of tattoo, piercing, sun damage, hairstyle, strange clothing and bared skin parades the street. Ancient hippies with waist-length hair trawl near English skinheads. New Age mamas are serene as their toddlers play with the bongs, but they scoop them up when the Chrish-tian missionaries appear with their white smiles. American frat boys can’t believe their luck with all the fake ID and international press cards for sale. Sometimes glum young monks show up, waiting out the end of their retreat like military service. It’s on the Khao San Road that the international phenomenon of Bad Israeli Pants reaches its height.

It’s a horror. It’s irresistible. If you want to travel in Southeast Asia, and Nine Days of Splendour and Elephants is neither your style nor your budget, you will wash up on the Khao San Road at some point. The bucket-shop travel agents are rude and efficient. A girl who has never had the money to leave Bangkok for a holiday can get you a visa for any of the surrounding countries in two days, or book your “trekking” in Chiang Mai. There are ATMs, money-changers, tourist police, cheap airport minibuses, even a branch of Boots that heavily promotes its morning-after pill and STD tests.

Of course, I was too good for the Khao San Road. I have the sort of notions of being a Traveler, not a tourist, that irritate me so in other people, mainly because it’s central to the pose that everybody else is just a tourist. (And self-styled Travelers are so damn annoying. I want to shout “Get a job, hippie,” at every rugged, misty-eyed one of them, including myself.) But it’s ingrained, this unattractive smirk at those who order sausage and chips instead of som tum with fermented crab, this condescension towards those who think Koh Samui counts. Sometimes I want to smack myself for being a snotty cow.

So it served me right that my decision to stay in Bangkok’s Chinatown rather than the Khao San Road scared the daylights out of me.

The push factors for my trip were far stronger than any great pull to travel. My husband and I had separated. Since it was my decision and my fault, I didn’t think I deserved sympathy, so I didn’t talk to anyone about it. It didn’t help that I was his employee, and dependent on that job for immigration status in the US. We bore it as well as we could for six long months, but when we couldn’t stand it any more, I had to leave the company. My six-year visa allowance was running out; no one would hire me, I thought, with just fifteen months left. So I cooked up the plan of traveling for a year, as cheaply as possible, so that I could reset that allowance to the beginning. I would go back to New York as soon as I could, I thought. Now that looks both less likely and less appealing.

I have never felt more alone than I did the night I arrived in Bangkok with a year to fill. I had insulated myself from reality in New York, but it was hard to ignore it here. I knew no one. I couldn’t read the street signs. There wasn’t a westerner in sight. I couldn’t cross the street; the traffic ploughed right through the pedestrian crossings. I didn’t know how or where to get food, so I ate the Kit-Kats I’d brought from London. Stray dogs growled and snapped whenever I went out. I started to count how much I had left and lost.

But somehow it seems pointless to stay miserable without people to mirror it. My cautious exploration radius grew bigger every day. I ticked off all the attractions and faced every Bangkok scam listed in my Rough Guide. When I made it all the way up to the Khao San Road, I was joyful. It was a freakshow, but it was familiar. I wallowed in the second-hand bookstores and cappuccino houses and spent hours on email. It felt like cheating. I told myself, my bossy, condescending capital-T Traveler self, to just shut up.

On Friday I went to Montreal to sit a five-hour French exam for my Canadian immigration application. The TEF is a tedious business indeed, especially when you haven’t used French in thirteen years. Once upon a time I spoke good French, thanks to painful stints as an exchange student and jeune fille au pair while my friends were whooping it up as Gaeilge at Irish college. A country of the chic and the golden-limbed is no place for a gawky fourteen-year-old from the armpit of Ireland, and for her part, Anne, my evil penpal, made it clear that Limerick was not worthy of her argyll cardigans and natty little scarves.

It was worth the torture to learn how the French summer en famille. Her family owned a farmhouse on an island off the Vendée, and twenty or thirty aunts and cousins filled it for the month of August. It’s true: French mealtimes, at least for that sacred month, are an event, not a snatched, mindless scoff. We Irish and British had no food culture to be proud of back then, but here was a country that did not run its day on fifteen cups of tea, two Kit Kats, and a plate of chips. I was still a fussy eater, and was fascinated by the attention they gave every salad, each piece of fish.

While evil Anne took windsurfing classes I tagged along with her aunts to the market every morning and tried to follow the vivid discussions on ripeness and freshness. At dinner I swallowed the escargots and the jugged hare without chewing, trying to hold my face still. On one outing I shot a pheasant and almost fainted; I’ve never eaten pheasant since. I fell deeply in love with Benoît, Anne’s 22-year-old cousin on a break from his military service, and pined for him over the crêpes. He and his brother Laurent headed out to les discothèques with a jeepful of gorgeous women every night. Stuck at the children’s table, I scratched my oozing bites and seethed.

French concerns, as expressed in Friday’s test, don’t seem to have changed since then. There were several questions involving labour strikes at the railway station. A long comprehension test on the sad decline of les vacances in France. I sorted recipe steps into the correct order. I wrote a suitably aggrieved letter to an imaginary newspaper protesting in fractured French that English was not the only language worth knowing in the modern world. (It was that or debate “Should access to culture—books, cinema, and theatre—be free?”) There was a painful piece on mondialisation, or globalisation. I waited for the multiple-choice rant on American pig-dogs and the absence of weapons in Iraq, but they denied me the joy.

My oral exam was severely compromised by the discovery just beforehand that Hugo the receptionist was Ecuadorian. We had bonded by telephone the week before as I persuaded him to register me for the test a fortnight after the closing date, and he was now thrilled to learn that I knew his country fairly well. Before I could stop him he replaced every French word in my head with a stream of excited Spanish. For the thirty-minute test I had to rent an imaginary flat and persuade a friend to try a new home-concierge service, and throughout I sounded like a Madrileña with severe lead poisoning.

The reward for having every ounce of French extracted over a five-hour period was getting to spend the rest of the day in Montreal. The last time I was there was a daytrip eight years ago, before I’d learned how to travel. All I did was eat an obligatory crêpe in the tourist district and head back down to New England. But ooh, Montreal is fab! I didn’t realise until I got there how much I’d missed a big-city fix. (Oat-uh-waw, bless its paisley brocade vests, doesn’t count.) Over a Moroccan lunch at a street café I ogled the parade of babes and imagined myself back in Brooklyn.

Montreal’s bagels and smoked meats are better than New York’s, not that New York will believe me. In the old Jewish quarter the bakeries are still owned by old-timers, but the bagels are made by Cambodians—and they get it. Mordechai Richler would be proud. On Friday evening they were still dropping them out of the ovens while groups of Hasidim strolled to synagogue.

The junkshops and pawnshops are full of deals and finds. Their Central Park has a hilltop view of the city. Bikers weave between the buses and the skateboarders with the right level of anarchy. The two-dollar chocolate tarts would draw tears of joy from a parsimonious gourmet. And Montrealers make smoking look really cool.

There’s a glorious mix of languages on the street: French and English drowned out by Farsi, Spanish, and Urdu. In the stores there’s a little handshake protocol with the staff as our language modems figure out whether to offer French or English. I’m a Nowhereian, and I like to be surrounded by other outsiders. The friction of cultures rubbing together heats up a city, and that energy can’t be faked. I was still high on it when I canoed back to the Kedey Island cabin under a full moon, listening to the beavers and the wild geese.

The day I left Lake Superior it snowed out of a clear blue sky. Great clouds of steam rose off the lake. A falcon devoured a crow, scattering feathers. A fine russet fox trotted down the trail ahead of me. Ten feet from my cabin, a bear answered a burning question with a large pile of scat, sprinkled with mountain ash berries like a Christmas dessert. The snowshoe hares wore new dots of white on their foreheads. For the first time ever, I cried leaving a place, not people.

The park staff welcome 30,000 tourists a year, most of whom arrive with plenty of gear. That’s why I got nervous when Ranger Tim’s overloaded trailer was enough of an attraction to draw hoots and snapshots from the remaining staff. I’d spent two days helping to pack it, but I’m slow to diagnose eccentricity unless others point it out, and it was now too late to back out of this freak-show jalopy. Tim guided the photographers around the special features: the outboard engine roped and clamped to the side, the ten-speed tied to the back, the jonboat ingeniously nesting inside the 14-footer, the stove ingeniously nesting inside the jonboat…

Eventually we said fond goodbyes and I wedged myself into the passenger seat among boxes of CDs, pillows, laptops, snacks, and extra clothes, grateful it wasn’t snowing inside. We waved at the lake while Tim drove around the turning circle, revving for a climb up the gravel hill. There was Beth waving halfway up; we stopped to say goodbye. Bad idea. The wheels spun and spat gravel but could not persuade the trailer uphill without momentum. Sheepishly, we enlisted the little crowd to push.

I named the trailer Juanita, after the patient but unpredictable brown mule that walked the length of Peru with travel writer Dervla Murphy. Our Juanita had an alarming tendency to swing like a pendulum when a roadbump or a gust caught her: unchecked, the waves would oscillate larger and larger and threaten to flip the car into the ditch. The first time it happened, we wobbled first into the middle lane and then right over to the side. For lack of a better idea, I shut my eyes and pretended it wasn’t happening. The second time the tires screeched and I thought, quite seriously, that at least my last summer was a good one. Tim soon learned to control the wobbles by driving very slowly and not braking, but it was already four o’clock in the afternoon and he didn’t feel like wrangling Juanita on little sleep. We begged shelter for the night at Ranger Rick’s place in Sault Sainte Marie, just an hour and a half down the road. Ocean’s Eleven and rye seemed the better part of valour.

This just in: Canada is very large and very empty. (Though not yet very cold, praise be.) We drove for twelve hours the next day and didn’t even touch either end of Ontario. To compare, it takes eight hours to drive the length of France. Tiny Ireland is three hours left to right and five top to bottom, and it might take half that if the country had a decent road. We drove through hundreds of miles of fall-bright hardwoods, punctuated by Tim Horton’s donut shops. We drove through small, resonant towns: Blind River, the “town in North Ontario” that Neil Young warbles about in “Helpless”. Deep River, the hometown of Naomi Watts’s character in Mulholland Drive . Petawawa, the military base of the two Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan that day.

I refuelled on truck-stop poutine (fries with cheese curds and gravy), a Québec special. 400 grams of fat can’t help tasting good. Poutine, it turns out, is very close to the Cheese Chip that Friar Tuck’s used to serve up in Limerick while we watched the Saturday night fights on the steps of the Redemptorist Fathers.

Juanita behaved, mostly. I learned to let go of the passenger door and enjoy the ride. After a while, we even got used to her shimmies.
“Hey, Juanita likes Texas boogie. She’s shaking her booty.”
It was late when we got to her last stop, Fitzroy Harbour on the Ottawa River. Tim has a cottage on an island in the river, and Juanita was to rest at the government dock overnight before being unloaded by canoe the next day. But he couldn’t get the towbar off the trailer hitch; the ball was too tight to lever off under the weight of the load. So he unclipped the trailer hitch altogether. Juanita was delighted with her new freedom and rolled steadily downhill towards the river. Tim scrambled, but she was far too heavy to haul to a stop, and seemingly determined to have a swim. Two feet from the bank, our pride was saved when a small upturned boat checked her ambition.

Danny at the North Gate restaurant/gas station was selling a trailer. Maybe.

The trailer was a baby-blue Howitzer down on its luck. Danny had built it himself: a tall 4 × 6 box with rounded Fifties fenders and a metal rack above. The lid was mostly rotten and there was a hole in the base. Wires trailed where the lights should have been and the paint scurfed off. Danny used it for beer runs to the Soo, but he was thinking about building a larger, legal one. So Rick said.

Ranger Tim needed a trailer to bring his gear south at the end of the season, so we headed up to investigate as an excuse for my second driving lesson. While I tried and failed to line the car up to the petrol pump, Danny scratched his chin and said he didn’t know yet if he wanted to sell the trailer, but if he did he’d want three to four hundred for it. It’d need a bit of work. This seemed a daft amount of money for a vehicle that needed to be pulled, but I stayed quiet. Tim decided to investigate more trailers.

We chatted with Danny’s three-year-old grandson, the best worker in Northern Ontario. Brandon directs operations on his father’s garbage run in the park, and even has his own work-gloves with his name across the knuckles. He is fiercely proud to heft the smaller bags into the truck. “Child labour laws don’t apply to family businesses,” his Dad says, clearly used to explaining away his son’s zeal. He is the happiest kid I’ve seen since the ragged firewood collectives in Asia and Latin America.

Tim and Rick scoured Sault Star classifieds all through August. Every trailer was either too big for the car or already gone. None of John’s leads turned up anything. Canadian Tire (a name of modest scope for a homegrown Wal-Mart) sold an assemble-your-own kit for $950 plus that whopping Canadian sales tax; no lid and no rack, either. A local dealer had a lovely little trailer, so well-balanced you could bounce it on a finger, but when he finally confessed to all the hidden charges, it came to $1400. On trips to town I learned to spot trailers from my peripheral vision as I had once spotted Prada shoes (and more recently, Peregrine falcons). There was nothing decent for sale.

So Tim drove back out to the North Gate to offer Danny two hundred bucks. Danny was busy with the lunch rush and said he’d think about it. Two weeks later, with Tim’s park contract running out, he hadn’t made a decision. He promised to stop by the ranger headquarters in the afternoon when he went to fix a downed park tractor, and Tim posted co-workers to nab him for an answer. Danny caved in the face of this campaign, and eventually agreed to sell it for two fifty, partly counted out in loonies and toonies. Then Brandon helped them unload the trailer.
    “I can do that one!” he yelled crossly when Tim poached a small box. Then he trotted back to the trailer with it and proudly carried it back the shed.

The trailer looked unpromising, but Tim had faith. I offered to help with restoration, and so on Saturday we scoured the park dumps for discarded wood. We found several old wooden road signs, an old jonboat with a hole in it, aluminium strips for patching the jonboat, and sheets of old rubber that might be useful for something. We drove to Wawa, a real frontier town, to buy a light kit. Then he backed the trailer into one of the work bays to get started.

I was the Brandon of the operation: enthusiastic in my borrowed boiler suit, but not especially useful. I insisted on playing the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” at full volume; the Broadway chorus puts me in the mood for a road-trip. Tim retaliated briefly with the Beastie Boys. I can’t stand the Beastie Boys. Every song sounds like “Mo-om, I can’t find my college application essay!” But after these musical interludes the work was peaceable. Tim wired in lights, dismantled the lid, and sawed out the rotten wood. While he rebuilt the lid he stuck me in charge of surfaces, where I belong.

I’d been taken with Rick’s suggestion to stick large yellow daisies on the faded, peeling baby blue, but since Tim might need to rely on neighbours for winter storage, he didn’t want to push their kindness with an eyesore. So I sanded. And sanded. And slopped on Park Brown to cover the baby blue. Meanwhile Tim sawed and soldered and hammered and wired, and eventually fitted a new patchwork lid back onto the base. One end, patched with a road sign, now has a large yellow arrow. We sanded the lid right over the fresh paint, speckling it blue and immortalizing our footprints on the wet fenders. The whole thing took two days.

We spent Monday boarding up the Laughing Brook cottage for the winter; cursing at heavy screens, too-short screws, and sandy bolts. I chickened out of paddling in the freezing stream to recover the water pipes for the gravity feed.

The next task, the fun part, was packing in the snow. Tim has seven boats: a fourteen-footer, the salvaged jonboat, large red canoe, a smaller plastic kayak, and three inflatable kayaks. Far too many paddles. Then add a bicycle or two, a large cedar chest, several boxes of books, a hundred-gallon water heater, camping gear, fishing tackle, tools, three computers, a large monitor, a printer, a full stereo system, a Koolatron fridge, a few lamps, and kitchen sundries. Plus me and my rucksack. All of this was to fit in a Honda Accord estate and a 4 × 6 trailer. I knew it could be done, but only because I’ve seen Burmese country buses. I was hoping to pay my passage with the Tetris skills I picked up in the early 90s.

Moving keeps you busy to stop you feeling sad. Early tomorrow I have to board up the Pilot House cabin, and stuff my sleeping gear into the car while Tim greases the trailer axles. A quick walk on the beach to say goodbye to the lake, then a ten-hour drive to Ottawa’s Glebe. I’m looking forward to lowering the tone of my sister’s posh neighbourhood with this shuddering hillbilly wagon, built with such love.

Lake Superior has been the first real home I’ve had in eighteen months. I’m a domestic creature (a domestic goddess, you might say) despite—or because of—all my wanderings. Here, I was happy to wake in the same terrible taco-bed every morning. I developed daily routines, ordinary but deliciously exotic after too long on the road—Red River Cereal at 8, coffee at 10. At Beaver Rock I got the kind of Huck Finn summer that everyone should have when they’re ten years old. I think I’ve grown four inches.

But the Monarchs and the geese are heading south, the obsessive and compulsive squirrels are hiding caches of nuts under the porch, and the bears are getting hungry. Those are my cues to get out before snow starts swirling through the chinks in my unheated blog cabin. It is not sensible to live in a country where “winterize” is a normal, everyday word. I am not winterized. I have no home, no job, and no residency permit, and so it’s time for this grasshopper to pack up again and give Canada a kiss goodbye. Or rather, a passionate get-a-room-for-god’s-sake snog goodbye, since I’ve come to love the place in spite of the GST.

Ottawa next, to play with the power-dressing MBA chick my lovely sister has become in her latest incarnation, and to play with the step-niblets, who call me “Durbla”. I will go armed with an extensive movie wishlist, and perhaps even make it to a few museums this time.

Then New York in early October to catch up with some old friends and maybe meet some new ones in a more fleshly world than this. A wedding near Toronto at the end of October. November onwards belongs to Ireland and London. I will try very hard to curb my feral ways and not pee on the sidewalks.

I’m nervous. I’m hoping for friendly faces as I start yet another new life. I think they’ll be there.

Caitríona, my best friend, is the most intrepid woman I know. While I flit around the world in flip-flops, she plonks herself down in the most unsavoury spots and tries to help. She was on the team that collected forensic evidence at the mass graves in Srebrenica, and she gave evidence at The Hague. Now she volunteers helping victims of Iraqi chemical attacks in northern Iran. (Seventeen years later, the women and children of this area are still mostly uncared for, maligned and discriminated against). Today she makes her journalistic debut for Irish radio, and I’m hoping that her reporting will carry at least some of the flavor of the wild and fascinating stories of Tehran she sends when limited internet access allows.

Her husband Dan covers Iran for the UK Guardian. Here’s his latest, horrifying story.

I took the path up the mountain directly behind Banos. At the lookout point halfway up, a little girl and her brother played outside the restaurant. They had shoved a white plastic tub under a small brindled bitch. The boy cupped the dog’s chin—he was about two—and the girl pulled rhythmically on its stubby teats. The dog’s eyes were closed, its head back in pleasure.
   ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘what are your names?’
   ‘Sheer-lay. My brother is Darwin. I am nearly four.’ She didn’t pause with her task.
Shirley. Ecuadorians delight in exotic names, and the harder they are to pronounce in Spanish, the more they like them.
   ‘And what are you doing, Shirley?’
   ‘I’m milking the dog,’ she said, as if I were a perfect fool. Why, milking the dog, of course.
   ‘Are you getting any milk?’
   ‘Yes, of course. The milk is going into the bucket here, and then we’re going to take it to the dairy on the mule, and then we’re going to make butter. Look, here’s the milk.’ She made squirting sounds. The bucket was dry. The little bitch rumbled with pleasure.
   ‘Milk! Milk! Milk! Dog milk!’ said Darwin, and danced.

On my way back down, I passed them again, this time with their parents. Shirley was swinging her bucket.
   ‘Hi Shirley, how’s the little milkmaid?’ Her parents looked startled.

On the road, I pick cafés based on the size of their rack. Der Spiegel and crumbly old Newsweeks won’t win a Nescafe order from me, but I can manage French Vogue at a pinch. It doesn’t matter how old they are: glossy time-travel is fun. And a 1999 Esquire is more of a curiosity than a 1992 Time that drones about war and the economy.

Flipping through a 1999 Vanity Fair, I found an ad for Banana Republic. It was as powerful as a scent memory, this slick, bland spread pushing a pre-fab lifestyle. There were six pages of Dot-Com-Exec Chic, and I could almost feel the slightly scratchy texture of those gray stretch wool pants. I remembered the frazzled excitement when Jason wore that exact dark red shirt to investor pitches, and how the collar faded when it was dry-cleaned. The square-toed shiny black shoes. The little fringe-flip all the boys wore then. I had the skirt and the turtleneck, and maybe even those shoes.

At Vindigo, we used to tease the founders, Jason and Dave, about their matchy-matchy style, neat as Audrey Hepburn. David bought everything from the blue and beige Banana Republic palette, Jason (or more usually his proxy, me) scooped up the black and red stuff into their pale-blue carrier bags. Very occasionally, they showed up in the same v-necked sweater.

It was expected then, though they’re both more adventurous now. Investors would have been spooked by the nervousness betrayed by a suit and tie. And, in New York at least, they would have questioned the judgment of a saggy t-shirt. Banana shirts, preferably deep blue and not home-pressed, whispered a soothing compromise, and so collectively the dot-com biz-dev babies looked duller than than any IBM suit. In 1999, year of Regis Philbin, colors were as solid as the Dow, and pants were only made in khaki. (I can never remember: is it in American or British English that ‘pants’ really means underpants? Which of you says ‘trousers’? Please advise.)

I was a mis-cast yuppie at the time, and owned a Banana Republic platinum card. Christ. They sent it to me after I’d burned through six months on the regular black card, a star customer who nipped down two blocks to the Fifth Avenue store every fortnight to relieve the stress and loneliness of a start-up in a rack of comfortingly predictable clothing. They kept sending thank-you vouchers in the mail, the amounts carefully calculated by some marketing analyst to stimulate another little spree. I even bought Banana Republic candles, for God’s sake.

I don’t know where all those clothes are now. I used to shrink them by accidentally sending them to the laundromat, and I was usually covered in food-stains by lunchtime anyway, no matter how blandly elegant I started the day. The sleeves were always too short. I was flattered by their shameless dress-size deflation, which by 2000 had me buying size 2 trousers and wondering what the hell Calista Flockheart was left with.

These days, I frequent a different kind of banana republic. I’m the only person I know who gains weight on a year-long diet of third-world streetfood and tap water, but it hardly matters in my worn-out sweatpants. I’ve worn Timberland boots or stinky trainers every day for months, and occasionally flip-flops with a skirt if I’m desperate for novelty and willing to display scratched and blackfly-scarred legs.

But in Cuenca, where every unmarried adult lives at home to save money for clothes, I broke down and bought a two-dollar lipstick and pair of proper shoes. They’re shiny and high-heeled, with a neat ankle-strap like a flamenco dancer, and they’re not terribly practical for the Inca Trail. I wear them with the same old black trousers, of course, and one of my two shirts, both now covered in indelible dog hair. But still, I feel like RuPaul, a strutting glamazon again. It is amazing what twenty two bucks and a cocktail will do for a girl.

Kayaking left me with an ear infection that felt as if someone had stuck a hot pencil in my ear and from time to time was whacking it with a ping-pong bat. In Cuenca, I gave in and went to the hospital. It was a two-for-one bargain, since I was treated by a kind middle-aged obstetrician and her seventy-five-year-old chest surgeon father. Most of the examination consisted of Papa interviewing me on why there was a war in Ireland and establishing whether we were part of England or not. Explaining the connection between these questions in Spanish while getting prodded in the ear took concentration. Then they prescribed enough antibiotics to run a dairy farm, and solemnly warned me to take plenty of sugar in my tea to combat my low blood pressure.

My hot ear reduced my interest in camping in huge, flood-prone caves inhabited by vampire bats. But I couldn’t reach my Guaranda friend, Carlos Alberto, by telephone in order to cancel the trip we’d planned, and so I took a ten-hour bus ride back to Ba’os to tell him in person. At nine in the morning I was sitting in the posh and gloomy Hotel Sangay, but there was no Carlos Alberto. Unlike me, he was too sensible to spend a day on a bus without a phone confirmation. I was relieved but cranky to be back in Ba’os’in the middle of the country’instead of continuing sedately south to Peru, like a sensible tourist. Some day I will learn to move through a country from top to bottom, instead of zig-zagging around like a pinball.

(A short, slightly whiny entry to indicate that I’m still alive despite silence since Quito; thanks to those who asked. Suitably rapturous entries will follow—despite complaints below I’m taking to roughing it in Ecuador surprisingly well. A tent is not that much smaller than a Manhattan apartment.)

I have a new fear to add to my already long list. I am afraid of falling arse over tip off the Andes while still strapped to my large backpack. Unlike most of my other worries, which are mental chewing gum to keep me from accomplishing anything useful, this one has some basis in reality. On the ‘Moderately Difficult’ Quilotoa trail from my Hiking Ecuador guidebook, my backpack skidded down a near-vertical scree slope and bounced gently to the riverbank a thousand feet below. I was not strapped to it at the time. Nothing broke. Still, it’s clear the thing is incompetent, and shouldn’t be on the mountains.

Hiking Ecuador keeps quoting an Antonio Machado poem: “Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace el camino al andar.” (Traveler, there is no path. You make the path by walking.) This is not uplifting in a trekking handbook, especially a copy whose pages are now soggy with sleet. Twenty minutes after I retrieved the backpack, I was trying to follow a ‘very faint trail’ up another near-vertical slope. Though I couldn’t see a trail at all, I was optimistic that sheep footholds and the odd flattened tussock counted, and reluctant to waste my investment in the dreadful scree slope. So I inched straight up on my hands and knees, clutching at razor grass and wondering why in the name of God I was carrying lipstick and mascara—not to mention a tin of smoked mussels and a Carl Jung collection—on my back in the Andes. I knew that if I lifted any part of my body more than six inches off the ground I would tumble backwards into space. So I didn’t look around until the very top, when I saw the so-called ‘very faint trail’ zig-zagging clearly up the next slope over. The scree and the sheep meadow, which had taken me more than two hours to climb, were not on the program at all.

I cried like a nasty supermarket three-year-old, snotting and swearing and blaming. The women tending sheep down by the real trail giggled as they watched me inch back down on my bum, no longer caring about ripping my sister’s Miss Sixty trousers.

I’ve lived all my life at sea-level. On the third and last day of my trek, gasping on the sandy caldera wall of the Quilotoa lake, I realized that I’d once sky-dived from a point lower than this. I would count ten steps and rest, and each step was a pitiful shuffle that sometimes ended with me sliding lower still in the volcanic ash. When I reached the rim of the crater, a hundred-mile-an-hour wind nearly knocked me straight onto my backside, pack and all. I would have welcomed the rest. I was filthy from three days of camping, and nearly insensible from the fatigue of actually carrying my own stuff for once, let alone to 3800 meters.

Ah, but a sight like this has to be earned. A bus window is the wrong lens.