Dangdut: Traveling with Parents

So I realize that I only posted once on the blog last year and that means I probably only have to post once this year to keep the habit going. And my dad keeps asking me to write stories I tell him for the blog, and he’s also asked me to send him the photos I took in Guatemala (which I have not yet done), because that is where we went to celebrate him arriving at his 70 year of life. We were supposed to go to Malta, but his wife, my mother, decided that she has spent to many hours of her life on trans-Atlantic flights and too many wakeful jet lagged nights. So she plotted against us and convinced Dad that Guatemala would scratch his wanderlust itch and fulfill a life long dream while achieving her goal of joining in on the fun without changing time zones. She did an impressive amount of work (one conversation) to convince him and then he spent a lot of time on the internet planning the trip. So in the end, Mom and I went on the trip having mostly no idea where we would be visiting, but trusting to Dad and the youtube videos that he found interesting. My contribution was teaching them how to use airbnb and Uber, using my international sim card, and my transaction-fee-less atm card. I also bought a couple of interesting books on Mayan civilization, which Dad and I read while we were wandering their old empire.

I will not write about each place that we visited, but Dad planned a great trip and I think you should definitely visit Flores, Tikal, Antigua, and Panajachel if you go to Guatemala, which you should absolutely do during your lifetime.

My favorite place we visited was probably Tikal because I have long loved the ancient civilizations and the mystery of the end of the Mayan Empire always piques my interest. Seeing their 4 tallest buildings poking up over the top of the jungle canopy was fascinating, as was remembering that these buildings were hidden for years and almost completely forgotten—it’s hard to believe when you’re down on the ground looking up at them, but when you climb up to the top of the buildings and see the other 3 well over the tree tops but nothing else except trees for miles, you can kind of get it.

Anyway, this is not a travel blog encouraging you to go visit other places. If it were, it is failing. None of you have ventured out to visit me in my various homes around the world, always in peak tourist destinations like South Sudan and Chad. This is a blog to make fun of my parents trying to speak Spanish to Guatemalans and ending up speaking in Indonesian instead…just kidding, it’s not. I already made fun of them to my sisters who can appreciate it because they also speak Indonesian and enough Spanish to know which is which. My parents spoke excellent Spanish back in the day. They studied in Costa Rica, but unfortunately left just before I could be born there and get a Costa Rican passport, which would have been really cool to have. My mom thinks it wouldn’t have been fun to have a baby in San Jose in the 80’s, but she would have been fine. And now who is suffering? Me. With only 1 passport. (Maybe if I had two passports, I could have had a travel blog…)

Guatemalan bajaj

Back to the language mixing, it is not usually something I do, so I tended to be the one explaining to them that it will not help to yell louder over the boat engine, the driver did not understand you when you asked him what is over there in Indonesian. I will admit however, to pronouncing Spanish words starting out with a French accent on the first syllable but a Spanish one at the end because you actually have to pronounce all the letters at the end of a word in Spanish, which you do not have to do in French. Also, I am fully prepared to admit that my parents speak much better Spanish than I do. However, I was gratified when the driver asked to speak with me on the phone, presumably because he decided that while my dad understood him better, he understood me better with my limited Spanish vocabulary that was not interspersed with Indonesian words. I was possibly slightly less gratified when he spoke to me on the phone like this “Voy…a…hablar…mas…despacio….” I mean, it was helpful though…

But the good thing is that my travel habits have been developed over the years out of my own parents’ travel habits so we travel well together. We do not want a guide to tell us every single detail he has memorized about every inch of every building we are visiting. We are fine oohing and ahhing in our own ignorance and looking up things that we are curious about later. We like to try new foods and are not afraid of a good street food option. We like to walk and explore. We are all cheapskates but as we get older and realize we can’t take it with us, we spend a little more than we would have back in the day. Dad said, “It’s just a little less for your inheritance later,” which I’m fine with because I would probably have spent it traveling around somewhere interesting anyway. But sorry to the sisters who are also getting less now…

I would also like to shout out to my Mom who is a tiny bit older than my Dad and easily walked over 20,000 steps in a day. All her friends were amazed. She would also ask me questions sometimes like “is ‘apa ini’ Spanish?” (It is not.) I told my sisters because it reminded us of when our grandmother visited Indonesia back in the day and before going in a toilet, she wanted to make sure she was going in the right room, and in her genteel Tennessee southern accent called over to my dad, “Does ‘pria’ mean ‘ladies’?” and he said, “Try it and see!” (It does not mean ‘ladies.’)

Anyway, I’m back in Africa now and the parents are back in the US. We are back to normal life, which means dog walks and church stuff and grandkids (plus all the other volunteer activities they are doing at schools and charities) for them and visa issues, airplane-acquired colds, and emails for me. I did have a fun trip with Ethiopians to Kenya for a conference on fluoride, which might be fun to write about if I can motivate myself to write about it someday. This blog is for my dad, out of guilt for not sending him all the Guatemala photos he has asked for yet. Hopefully this will appease him for a few more months.

In June 2026, they will have been married for 50 years, so I took some romantic photos...