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was afraid of terrorists and bandits and being alone. I was planning to eat nothing but thoroughly cooked rice and beans all the way through South America, and to do a lot of hand-washing. Beyond that, we had our ketchup.
    “Let’s not,” I said.
    *
    Here’s a lesson we learned quickly: Your guidebook—especially when it is five years old—is at some point going to fail you. While the world’s Hiltons and Sheratons, with their breakfast buffets and Friday-night poolside mariachi bands, will probably be there for eternity, places like the Hostel Hermano and the Posada Guamanchi, in the strata where rooms rent for eight dollars a night, come and go. The doña who once fixed morning churros with sliced mango and hot coffee for guests leaves for an indefinite visit with her grandchildren. The elderly man who runs an “immaculate and friendly” guesthouse near the bus station hands it off to his son, who worries less about the spiders and roaches and the creeping shower mold and focuses on making late-night passes at all the tanned lady backpackers who, without an update in the guidebook, have yet to be directed elsewhere.
    In our first weeks in Venezuela, Jamie and I walked miles, strapped sweatily into our backpacks, looking for low-interest money changers and two-star posadas that had morphed abruptly into massage parlors or motorcycle repair shops. We waited at a roadside bus stop in the withering heat only to learn hours later, bickering and thoroughly sunburned, that the Tuesday-afternoon bus to Caripe was now a Friday-morning bus.
    After a time, we figured out that the most accurate informationcould be milked from our fellow travelers, the Brits and Germans and Danes with their own tuberous luggage and varying tales of inconvenience and whimsy, which they were happy to narrate over rounds of cold beer. We swatted mosquitoes and traded bits of highly subjective data. Ana from Portugal knew a good place to get laundry done. An Aussie named Brad had just come back from a mind-blowing trip to Angel Falls and said that everyone should hire his guide.
    Worrying became too much effort. When the bus didn’t come or the ceiling fan didn’t work, or when a Swedish girl talked us into joining her and nine other backpackers as they hitchhiked a nighttime ride with a sea captain bound for Trinidad and we ended up seasick and miserable on his treacherously seesawing boat deck, I realized, in the end, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Travel was good for my anxious soul. Which is not to say that I relaxed completely. When we made land in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the deep black of early morning, spattered in vomit and haunted by the ocean’s violence, the port authorities handcuffed our boat captain right on the dock and marched the rest of us off to a detention center for not having visas. I did, in that moment, start to sob.
    But being in motion made me easygoing in a way I hadn’t felt before. I relaxed my stance on fruit-eating, for starters. The offerings were too rich and could be found on practically every corner. We ate meaty bananas and sweet green guavas. We pushed the Swiss Army knife into the thick rinds of fresh melon and used it to scoop the candylike pulp out of yellow soursop fruit, landing it directly in our mouths. We’d also started to shed bulk and weight from our packs. We handed off our Tupperware to villagers, left Grandma Jean’s jug of hand sanitizer in a filthy hostel, and gave away a pile of clothes.
    Jamie’s dark hair grew coppery and sun-streaked, his skin brown and sleek from days spent outside. I, too, felt tanned and lithe, as if I’d been born for warm air. The sun brought back the freckles I’d had as a kid. Jamie and I picked out the most captivating postcards we could find and sent them home with messages trumpeting the general magnificence of everything. On Margarita Island, off the north coast of Venezuela, we found wide, soft beaches and leggy palm trees thatswished in the