Who could have guessed back in 2013, when I was flying from Madrid to Cancun with the now long deceased flight company Pullmanturair for around
70€ round-trip, that in 2019 a world Pandemic would take over the world and force everyone to isolate and stay home.
I mean, let's be real, people like me - I hope some reader can relate - lit our passports in flames with hardcore cheap traveling around the globe for many years until this weird thing happened. For people like my parents though, born in the 60's, crossing the ocean on an airplane at a young age was far more inaccessible. If they ever did, they definitely don't even remember where and how they bought their plane tickets, although most likely they just showed up at the airport with some cash in their pockets and paid in person. Not being able to compare much between airfares or shop around for deals on weird dates when no one travels.
In my days though, born in the late 80's and becoming a real person in the 2010's, buying a plane ticket was like opening a Tinder account and swiping across destination possibilities. And on top of that, if you were the hustler Artist traveler type, you would come up with the craziest deals obviously assuming you would forfeit the return ticket to stay in paradise hustling hand-painted postcards and living on avocados (that's just my example!). I'm not saying this didn't happen before my time, but as far as I know plane tickets weren't as available and accessible. For instance, and this is a pretty extreme example, Pullmanturair.es only offered flights from Madrid to Cancun and vice-versa, and most part of the year the tickets had regular common prices, like around 500€ or 600€ for a round-trip. Now here was the stunning surprise for the type of people constantly on a one-man-fight against 9 to 5 life. On a few specific dates through out the year, I vaguely remember it being on the 3 last days of the month of January and February, those tickets where anywhere from 200€ all the way down to 70€!
Those days were dope! I'm so proud I got all that traveling out of my system when it was okay to do so.
I took advantage of the glitches in the system, like flying on a 27th of February to Mexico and just staying there. Then catching a bus through Central America stopping in two Festivals on the way, eventually deciding Bocas del Toro in Panama was a good place to "settle down" for a month, "muraling" a Hostel in exchange for a free bed. Good old days!
But then now? What's happened now? Suddenly we blinked our eyes and that world disappeared on us. Mandatory QR codes to go buy a bag of rice, curfew war-like lock-downs , social distancing... and traveling either banned or highly non-recommended. But, to top all this up, now they want us to get jabbed with a brand-new vaccine they just invented -swearing it's safe- so that we can go anywhere, not only to cross the oceans, but also to go to a concert or a gym.
I find pretty funny that my whole life I've been told to be careful with recreational psychoactive drugs, mainly because we don't know their possible long-term side effects as they've only been around for a while.
MDMA was first developed in 1912 and first used to enhance psychotherapy beginning in the 1970s and became popular as a street drug in the 1980s. The Covid-19 jab was literally born yesterday and the whole media and world governments are united to say it's safe. Certainly confusing, at least. Isn't it?
Either way, this post wasn't about Covid-19 and the vaccine, but rather about being nostalgic on those Skyscanner days, crossing the world on a budget with a creative hustle, to live cheap and simple lives away from the mainstream. I really hope these younger people I meet these days and say to me "I just want to travel the world" get to experience, in one way or another, something similar to what we enjoyed.
Write a comment