The backpackers world is small. I remember that from travelling in Southeast Asia. I would see people that I met in my first week at a random bus stop in another country weeks later. That the backpacker world is small makes sense. Everyone does a similar loop, or at least everyone goes to the same backpacker places. On top of that many people are travelling for months at a time, so there is a lot of time to run into each other again.
I am currently travelling in South America and so I can give you a recent example. On a tour in the Cuyabeno Amazon jungle my friend and I were telling a story from some women that we met some days before. They showed us a photo of a tarantula they had in their room during their stay in the jungle. One of the members in our group of eight said he also had such a story from friends of his. So he asked where these women were from: Guernsey, a small island from the United Kingdom. We were definitely talking about the same women. We had met them on top of the Pinchincha Rocco and hiked with them for a bit until my friend and I turned back. Turns out the guy had also encountered these women there, which must have been right after we had parted from them. He in turn knew them from his time at the coast a couple of weeks earlier.
Another example is from a guy we met a little later in a hostel in Mindo. We found out he had been in the same hostel as us in Quito, the same lodge (of the 12 lodges that are there) in the Cuyabeno and he had had the same guide. Both of us had only been to these three places (Quito, Cuyabeno and Mindo) and we had been in the exact three accomodations, us just right after him until we were at the hostel in Mindo at the same time.
Like I said, that the backpacker world is small makes sense. But other than these two stories we have had more crazy coincidences. In the Cuyabeno jungle my friend met a Dutch couple that was also staying at our lodge but was in a different group. It turned out they were from the same city as where I live. So when I came out of the room and my friend told me this, I started talking with them. They asked if I was studying, I said ‘yes I study cultural anthropology’. ‘No way’ they said. It turned out their daughter studied the exact same and is even in my year. And there are really not that many anthropology students!
In Mindo we met another couple that asked us if we had any cash left, since in Mindo all the ATMs (carjeras) don’t work. We didn’t have any cash either but we were about to go to the next town with a taxi driver that was waiting for us, so they could join us and go to the ATM there. In the taxi we were talking. The two of them were also Dutch so we asked where they were from. Then I said where I lived and where I was from, which is where my friend still lives. ‘No way’ they said, they grew up in the town right next to it. Then we found out my friend and I had attended the same high school as the guy, only he went there years before. Moreover, my friend lives in the same street as where the high school was of the woman.
You meet people in the middle of the jungle whose daughter is in your exact study program and year, and a few days later you meet someone that attended the same high school and is from the same area. Similarly, 8 out of 10 Swiss people I met in the past years came from the same town (Lucerne), which is not even one of the five most populous cities. And in Hawai’i somehow a lot of Americans from my age that I met had a connection to Washington, either they lived there, studied there or were from there.
At these moments I wonder if coincidence exists. This seems more as if the universe or God or whatever only has a small amount of avatars. So they have to be reused in places around the world. And the only way to find out is to travel to the most faraway places to run into people you are somehow connected to. Or maybe there are actually 8 billion avatars/people in the world, but we move in clusters and so the people you connect with are mostly the people in your cluster. Anyway, for now I will just consider these moments coincidences that affirm that I am exactly where I am supposed to be. And either way, it makes for fun stories and good conversations.
I hope you too will find connections in the most unexpected places.
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