Happiness Is...

(With deference to the late, great Charles M. Schultz, this is my long-term travel version.)

Happiness is a good night’s sleep.

Since I’ve been travelling, ‘a good night’s sleep’ is now defined as any night when I’m out cold for more than a five-hour stretch. If I get more than seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, I’m ecstatic.

Hostel living isn’t exactly conducive to good sleep. There are environmental factors inherent with hostel dorms that can conspire to keep one awake. It might be too hot; it might be too cold; and then there’s just the plain fact that one is trying to sleep in an unfamiliar bed.

Hostels are also, by and large, noisy. Unless one is travelling as part of a large group – a group that can take over an entire dorm – it is inevitable that ones dorm-mates will be on different schedules. Somebody might be waking up at 5:00am to catch an early morning bus or flight. Another might be coming in from a night out at 6:00am. Sometimes, it’s trying to sleep in a room near the reception and common areas, where late-night beer-fueled bull sessions or card games are going on until 2:00am. I’m not complaining; at one time or another, I’ve been all of those guys.

And then, there was the time I shared a room, for four nights, with Godzilla. I’ve spent a few nights in dorms with snorers. I’ve spent a few nights in rooms with sleep-talkers. But, in Buenos Aires, I had to share a dorm with a weird, little, older Japanese gentleman that snored louder than anybody I’ve ever heard; and who moaned, screamed and roared in his sleep. Sleeping with my earplugs didn’t work. Sleeping with my iPod in didn’t work either. He managed to wake me up every hour or so regardless of what I tried to stuff in my ears. I haven't been angrier at anytime during my travels than I was when I finally got out of bed after my first night listening to that guy.

The rest of us in that room were convinced he was abused as a child and was reliving those beatings every night. There's just no other reasonable explanation.

Happiness is a good shower.

Frequent showers were essential in Northern Brazil, where they served as welcome relief for the oppressive heat and humidity. When I couldn’t shower at least two or three times a day, I got very cranky.

If my first shower after emerging from the Amazon jungle wasn’t the best thirty minutes of my trip, it has to rank up there. It’s certainly the best shower I’ve had thus far. Second and third on my list of fantastic showers would have to be a toss-up between two I had in Belém.

The first of those showers (chronologically, at least) came after I’d spent thirty-three hours on a crammed, convencional-class bus from Salvador) – a bus ride where, during the last twelve hours, the air-conditioning broke down. On top of that, I had to run around, in the Belém heat, for an hour, trying to find a place to stay after the Hostel Amazônas screwed up my reservation. The second came after an eight-hour blackout shut down all running water in my hotel, right in the middle of the heat of the day – eight hours during which I would have ordinarily taken two showers.

Like 'good sleep', I now have a new definition for ‘good shower’. I don’t need hot water. I don't need exceptional water pressure. I don’t even need a shower-head, or that the water be 100% clean. The pipe that gushed out lukewarm, brownish water from the top of my washroom aboard the N/M Santerém definitely qualified as a good shower.

Happiness is a real towel.

I’m travelling with a Adventure Towel. It’s light-weight, quick drying, and can be rolled up into a sack that’s just a little larger than a 500mL Nalgene bottle. Those qualities are a godsend to somebody who is counting every gram of weight and trying to keep his pack as small as possible.

The problem is that the Adventure Towel is not really all that great at drying me off. After a shower, it takes at least two passes over each body part to get all the water off, while still leaving me with a damp, clammy feeling on my skin.

Whenever I get to a hostel that provides me with a real towel, or offers towel rental for less than a dollar or so, I’m all over that like a fat kid on fried chicken.

Happiness is fresh, professionally-done laundry.

I’ve do a lot of laundry in sinks. I’m barely carrying enough clothes to constitute a full load, so it’s often just easier, and cheaper, to wash a few items at a time, and then hanging them up to dry wherever and whenever I can. However, one can’t quite scrub things down properly in a bathroom, while sloshing clothes around in a sink full of water and Campsuds. Washing things this way gets rid of sweat and/or other funky smells, but it never quite cleans off all the dirt, the inadvertent pen marks, or that crusted food I spilled down my sleeve the other day.

Every two or three washes, I need to get out to a laundromat, or send my laundry out for cleaning using a hostel laundry service. This also usually happens when I’m down to my last change of clean clothes, and wearing my Havaianas everywhere during a chilly Buenos Aires day because I have no more clean socks. And that’s when I look most forward to getting back a bag of clean, laundered, folded and fresh-smelling clothing.

Heck, happiness is also the five minutes I spend rolling up that clean laundry and packing it away into my 'clean clothes' stuff sack.

Happiness is cold weather.

Notice a pattern emerging? Except for the whole sleep thing, it’s all about keeping and/or feeling clean.

It should come as little surprise to most of you that, for me:

Hot = disgusting; cold = clean.

In the heat, I sweat. I need to shower more. I need to change clothes more. I need to do laundry more. All of this adds up to some pretty uncomfortable living. (And it certainly reflects my glowing attitude towards Brazil that I gladly spent much more time there than I’d originally planned, despite the heat.)

But, as much as I enjoyed Brazil, the last two weeks in the cool, Argentine springtime have been glorious. And it’s just gotten colder as I moved further into Southern Patagonia. Even when I do start sweating from any hard physical exertion, I unzip my fleece, or remove a layer, and I’m good. When I start really trekking on glaciers and amongst the Patagonian peaks, I’ll be totally, completely, in my element.

It's currently 5°C here in El Calafate, and I'm loving it.