All About Opting Out

One of the important motivations for me heading off on this "hair-brained" trip was that I was feeling very tired of my existence in Vancouver and was going to go and look for somewhere with the potential for me to settle down and relax without the stresses of my previous life (at least part time)...
While I haven´t finished my thinking on this subject yet, several things are definitely clearer to me now than they were when I set out:

2)Alternate Climates and Cultures to Live In
For the last couple of years, I have found that the summers in Vancouver are great but that fall, winter and spring are very dull and damp affairs. I was getting really tired of the grey weather and really started to miss the blue skies and white beaches of Australia (not bad since it took me 10 years of living in Vancouver to miss Australia). I also felt that exposure to a different culture may be a good idea (at least for a while or part time).
 So now I have covered a good deal of country from the beautiful deserts of Utah and Arizona to the Pacific coast of Mexico and now the beautiful tropical alpine area around Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.
I have to say that these places are all very nice and the climate (at least in this season) is in general very agreeable to me. On the flip side though, along with the climate come a whole bunch of other aspects...
Culture isn´t really a problem. The people I have met along the way have almost universally been very nice and there is a lot to be said for the more relaxed pace of things South of the USA. However, some of the behaviours of other peoples are harder to deal with:

USA - Sad to say but the "gun culture" in America is a problem for me. Everyone I met there was great but they live in fear of their fellow Americans with guns - so they generally have guns too. And with so many guns about there are always a few "hot heads" (usually young males) who do stupid things (the bullet scarred Saguaro cactus´ around Phoenix can attest to that) and that is a real bummer!
I don't like the feel of this "fear culture".

Mexico and Guatemala - Well, there are several issues here that I find hard to deal with. The garbage everywhere is a definite detracting feature but also the fact that every single building has very solid bars and locks on every ground floor window and door and barbed wire or glass on top of every wall and fence. This leads me to believe that property crime is a very real issue here. I'm also regularly informed that you cant buy property here unless you spend most of your time on it or pay someone else to instead - They say that anything that is not absolutely bolted down will disappear (including all your plumbing and wiring). The related issue of the oversupply of dogs (generally used as a home alarm system by everyone) that wander the streets in packs is another issue too. Needless to say this is not something I find attractive.
Then there is the constant smell of raw sewerage in almost any village. - For several reasons, the default sewerage solution is just to dump it into the nearest water body (ocean, lake, river, creek, gutter). This has very definite hygiene consequences and this can be easily seen in the infant mortality rates of the central American countries. Yes I can deal with my own water supply but swimming in rivers lakes and beaches takes on a very different "flavour" so to speak.

So, there seem to be two approaches to these problems that expats use - One option is to merge with the local culture and get used to it, but I think I would have a hard time with some aspects of this solution in many otherwise very pleasant locations. The other option is to try to eliminate or minimize these issues by "fencing" the issues out (individual properties or at the community level). The problem I have with this is that it alienates the locals whom you ultimately have to live with, as well as just leaves you in a community of expats who dislike and fear the local people and culture - So what´s the point of leaving home in the first place?


3) Nice Places are full of Tourists
Its mostly true. Most of the really nice places have been known about for years and there is already a large community of expats living there as well as a sizable tourist population in transit. There is of course also always a sizable local population - No surprise that the locals want to live in nice places too!
In the few cases that I have found where there is a very minimally populated "nice place", it means that the services are not there at all (which I don´t see as a problem) but also that the access to the area is very difficult. From my perspective this is a bit problematic but on the flip side the area is effectively protected from "development" and lets face it I am just an intruding developer as far as these places are concerned.

Thats my thoughts so far.... Back to thinking :)