We announced recently that we’re looking for a new blogger to replace Antonia Malchik and that those who applied would get a spot to do a guest post. Next up is Sarah Menkedick, a freelance writer and editor currently living in Oaxaca, Mexico. She is a contributing editor at the Matador Network and a contributing writer at Change.org. Check out her blog of creative nonfiction inspired by travel at Posatigres.com.

The first thing I noticed when we came crunching to a stop in Mazunte, Mexico were the dogs. Packs of street dogs roving casually, lazy beach dogs idling on the sandy walkways leading to bungalows.

I had visions of exposed fangs and shouts and blood. My dog Stella had been attacked a few months prior by a viscous Shepherd-Husky mix. Since then, I had been paranoid around dogs and Stella had been downright panicked. I obsessively devoured dog training manuals and websites about how to recover from an attack in an aim to cure us both. None worked.

I wanted to give up on Mazunte then and there, hop back in the bed of my friend’s truck and trek it six hours through the mountains back to Oaxaca.

My friends, however, were having none of it. They marched right up to a house at the end of a path and asked about rooms while I waited with a pacing Stella below. Lurking on the house’s porch was a Rottweiler mix a huge, flat snout. He spread his bulk between the hammocks, with a view over the tiny street below and the vast beach in the distance.

“Perfect!” I heard my friend Eleutario say. “We’ll take it.” He came trotting back down the driveway and announced that the deal was sealed.

Confrontation and Control

“Eleutario,” I said, “I don’t think…I mean, the dog…” Eleutario sighed. He found the gringo obsession with training a dog, buying it plush little beds and obsessing about its mental state vaguely amusing. His dog, a pit bull named Pirata who’d suffered eleven gunshot wounds in his pueblo and emerged unfazed, had never had a day of training and was the calmest beast I’d met in Mexico. Eleutario was constantly admonishing me to give up the elaborate routines I worked on with Stella, the stays and the comes and the conditioning, and just let her off the leash already. I tirelessly resisted. The only thing that could help my dog, I insisted, was control.

Eleutario stood over me, waiting. Everyone else was lugging bags into the rooms. I had no choice but to sidle up to the house with Stella. The Rottweiler mix stood up and started strolling over. “Vamos!” I shouted, “Vamos!”

A woman, lithe with a buzz cut and a sarong, emerged from one of the small rooms upstairs.

“That’s Milo,” she said sleepily, an Italian lilt to her accent, “he won’t do anything to you.”

“But my dog was attacked,” I replied nervously, “she probably makes him anxious.”

“No, no,” she said with a slow wave of the hand, “he’s fine. Stop holding onto your dog so tightly. He won’t do anything.”

Eleutario looked back at me. “Sueltala,” he said. Let her loose. “Va, va,” he urged. I reached down, my heart beating in my throat, and let her off the lead. She charged Milo and barked at him full force. He sat down and panted as if to say, “Dang, woman, chill out.” Eleutario laughed. I stood frozen. The dogs circled one another, Stella occasionally barking and jumping and Milo chilling, sniffing. Finally, they reached some sort of equilibrium and smelled one another.

Letting Go

That was the first encounter of many in the next few days. Deep breath, release, repeat. I let Stella roam the beach. She met emaciated dogs with desperate eyes, perky well-fed dogs adopted by the Italian families that owned pizzerias on Mazunte’s dusty streets, visiting dogs who threw themselves at the waves. Again and again, Eleutario repeated “Sueltala.” Let her go. The books I’d read, the notes I’d made, the techniques I’d put into play dissolved in the hazy yellow-green air of Mazunte. We ate thin-crusted pizzas the Italians made and watched their cherubic children race in circles in the sand, played soccer with the tattered hippies, who camp in this scrappy town ignored by mainstream tourists in search of piña coladas and pools, drank micheladas on the beach (nearly empty in February) and began to sink into Mexican beach time (an octave below that of normal Mexican time in slowness). Most importantly, I let go of a little bit of control.

My Mexican friends understood why I’d be so eager to protect Stella, but didn’t get the extent to which I wanted to control the situation. For them, it was a matter of letting go of the past rather than obsessively organizing the present. For the locals, containing anything on a leash with 110% control and paranoia was simply anathema to their way of living and being. It was, I could see, a massive cultural difference that extended beyond dog training.

Being in Mazunte, a place where people come precisely to escape the go-go-go vice grip of everyday life elsewhere, further etched out this difference between control and letting go. Americans want control so badly, want to have a grip on everything so we can keep making tangible measured progress. But sometimes, it leads only to a narrow myopic unhealthiness, driving us in circles. Such was the case with Stella, who I’d tried and failed for so long to control, making us both neurotic in the process.

What she really needed, I discovered, was less obsessive control and more room.  And what I needed was a little time in Mazunte and my Mexican friends nudging me, saying, “Sueltala, Sarita.”  Let her go, let her go.

- Sarah Menkedick

The sun is shining, the coffee is hot, and the computer screen is lit up with the latest edition of Perceptive Travel webzine. Could life be any better?                                                       

With a click of the mouse, head off to Bali to experience a pig roasting with Zora O’Neill  (warning: this one’s not for the faint of heart). In her essay, Eating a Personal Pig, Zora vividly addresses the ambivalence that many of us have to eating meat.

Then it’s on to Morroco with  Jim Johnston. In his essay, Morocco: Give Me the Simple Life, Jim takes us to Tannant, a small Moroccan village where his 85 year old mother works as a Peace Corp volunteer.

Back in the States, Bruce Northam writes about the annual Madri Gras….in Burlington, Vermont. That’s right. Believe it or not, Vermont also has a Madri Gras. It‘s no where near as rowdy and not so exposed, but it’s a colorful Madri Gras all the same.

Joshua Berman is onboard with this month’s travel book reviews and Tim Leffel has, as usual, has an eclectic selection of world music reviews.

Plus there’s the the monthly giveaway…

…Frommer’s travel blanket and pillow combo from Lug. Available in four snuggly colors and with a pocket for your music player, this will allow you to say “Screw you!” when an airline tries to charge you for a blanket or pillow.

All Perceptive Travel newsletter subscriber are in with a chance.

Not yet a subscriber? Then simply click here and you soon will be.

This past Saturday was Montreal’s Nuit Blanche, an all-night long festival which included, among its many attractions, light installations, musical performances, nude figure drawing classes, fireworks, movies, ice slides, fashion shows.

Museums and art galleries were open all night or near to it, as was the Metro, and there were hundreds of thousands of people out and about that night, or at least that how it seemed to me when I set out into it at about 10 p.m.

The underground tunnels that are Montreal’s underground city were transformed into art galleries, but there were so many people pressed into the subterranean space that I started to feel somewhat panicked. (I was bundled up in my North Face extra-warm coat which I’ve dubbed the “pet coat” because I feel like I’m zipping myself into an animal suit when I wear it –  this didn’t help my feelings of claustrophobia.)

I emerged through the Contemporary Art Museum, and once outside, into the blessedly chilly air at the Place des Artes. It was lit with cone-like fabric sculptures glowing red, and a giant illuminated dome, an “ambiosphere” branded by L’Oreal. There was a free light show inside, evidently, but the line was long and I was still feeling antsy around crowds. I decided to head for Old Montreal to visit the DHC Gallery.

As I walked, the crowd thinned out, first to small groups, then a few couples, and then I realized I was all alone.

I was not far from the gallery, but I stopped beneath Ye Olde Streetlight to consult the map.  I could hear the sounds of Nuit Blanche continuing all around me – there was the sound of music from several places and the barest hint of the crowds that I knew were not far away, but there was not a soul within eye shot. Within the few moments it took to get my bearings,  a taxi drove by and soon a few people walked past.

But I realized that my fundamental solitude hadn’t changed. I was traveling alone,  I knew my husband had already fallen asleep back home, and wasn’t expecting a phone call, in fact, no one was expecting me anywhere at all until the next day. I could go anywhere, and do anything, anything at all that night.

Freedom versus Fatigue

So what did I do? First, I took my time enjoying the DHC – the first North American exhibit by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahitla. Then, standing on the street outside the gallery, I hesitated for just a moment before deciding to call it a night.  In the battle between fatigue and freedom, fatigue emerged victorious.

As I walked back to the Hotel le St. James, I passed by a small group of revelers, in about their mid-twenties  — or I should say, they passed me, they were practically dancing as they raced to wherever they were going next. I smiled at their excitement. And with a somewhat quieter happiness, looked forward to my comfy four-poster bed.

Your Custom Constraints

I thought about my Nuit Blanche this morning when I read Uncornered Market’s excellent post on whether blogging about travel influences the way you travel.  Do bloggers structure their  itineraries around destinations or activities that they think their readers will respond to, rather than making plans solely on their own proclivities and inclinations? It’s a familiar question for travel writers, and indeed, all writers who must try to match their interests with that of their audiences.

But it’s also an increasingly relevant question for all travelers: with Facebook, Twitter et. al., we all seem to have our little audience that we’re performing for, the group we’ve gathered to watch the reality show starring us, as we watch the reality show starring them.  How much of your travel agenda happens simply because you’re anticipating sharing it on social media? How much does that influence you, how does it shape your plans? Does it push you to stay out later, to squeeze in another experience that night? These questions carry some heavy freight, since they touch on issues of integrity: how much do you follow your own path; how much do you allow others to influence you? They also light on issues of ego, and resilience: do you consider of the needs of your audience at the expense of your own?

I believe that these are really questions about a traveler’s freedom. We have an enduring ideal of the completely unattached and unbound traveler, whose path is forged by whim and fancy. But travel is never completely free – we are all bound by a custom assortment of holds, straps and fetters. It could be a budget, or a travel companion. Or it could be the people back home with whom you want or need to communicate.  Or it could be the host of conflicting internal imperatives we all grapple with, like the urge to the gym, or take a nap, or the overwhelming desire to sit and stare at a blank wall for a while. For writers, whether professional, quasi-professional or amateur, our audience and its desires (both real and imagined) are simply another constraint to take into account. Even for the most dedicated  of travel writers, I’m not at all sure it’s the most important one.

Having read a survey that ‘claimed the ordinary Kiwi bloke was about to turn up the toes of his gumboots…’ and move to the city, Polly Evans decided to take a motorbike trip around New Zealand to find out for herself if this was true. Her quest – to find out if the ordinary Kiwi bloke had all but disappeared ?

So it was with great interested that I started reading Kiwis Might Fly.

What evolves is a laid back, laugh out loud road trip through the cities and countryside of New Zealand as Polly invites us to join her as she learns to master the beast (the motorcycle) and search out the nearly extinct Kiwi bloke.

Polly, it turns out, is quite adventurous.

How many of us, after all, would attempt to ride a powerful (650 cc) motorcycle around an unfamiliar country after only a few lessons at home on a much smaller (125 cc) motorcycle?

Not me!

As I had visited most of the places Polly stopped off at, it was interesting to see it from her perspective. She had done her research well, with the book covering not only the scenery but also the historic, cultural and social history of New Zealand’s towns and countryside.

Along the way, from Auckland to Stewart island, we meet a cast of characters engaged in traditional New Zealand activities – shearing, milking, woodcarving. And Polly wasn‘t afraid to get in and give it a go. But at the end of the trip, Polly had not found anyone who could display all the characteristics of the traditional Kiwi bloke. Still, it was fun looking.