Tales from the Road: Congo, Iraq, Mongolia, El Salvador

🌍 The First Night in Goma: Where My Tales from the Road Began

I sat on a cracked concrete step outside a guesthouse in Goma, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, rain drumming on the corrugated roof above me, the air thick with sulfur from Nyiragongo’s distant glow and the scent of grilled tilapia skewers sizzling over charcoal. My backpack—stuffed with malaria prophylaxis, a laminated copy of the DRC entry requirements, and two spare SIM cards—felt heavier than it had in Nairobi. This was the first stop in my year-long journey tracing four geographically and politically disparate routes: tales-from-the-road-congo-iraq-mongolia-el-salvador. Not as a dare or a stunt, but as a quiet commitment to move beyond abstraction—to see how people live where headlines flatten complexity. I’d spent months planning visas, health protocols, and transport alternatives. But no briefing prepared me for the warmth of Madame Kabeya handing me a cup of sweet, milky tea at midnight, saying only, ‘You are here now. That is enough.’ That moment—exhausted, uncertain, held—anchored everything that followed.

✈️ The Setup: Why These Four Places—and Why Alone?

I left Lisbon in late March 2022 with a one-way ticket and a deliberately sparse itinerary. Not because I romanticized uncertainty—but because I’d spent ten years editing travel guides that treated risk as a footnote and resilience as background color. I wanted to understand how ordinary logistics—boarding a bus, changing money, finding shelter—unfold where infrastructure is thin, bureaucracy opaque, or perception out of step with daily reality. Congo, Iraq, Mongolia, and El Salvador weren’t chosen for contrast alone. Each represented a distinct tension: post-conflict governance (DRC), reconstruction amid geopolitical scrutiny (Iraq), nomadic continuity in climate-vulnerable terrain (Mongolia), and community-led recovery after systemic violence (El Salvador). I traveled solo not for independence, but to remove the buffer of companionship—and see more clearly what strangers offered, withheld, or negotiated.

🗺️ The Turning Point: When the Map Stopped Working

The rupture came three weeks in, crossing from Goma into Rwanda—then backtracking, unexpectedly, into eastern DRC again. My original plan relied on a shared 4x4 service to Bukavu. It didn’t run that day. No notice. No online schedule. Just a man in a faded UNHCR cap leaning against a dented Land Cruiser, shrugging: ‘Demain, peut-être.’ I waited six hours. Then walked 7 km along a red-dirt road flanked by banana groves and armed patrols, my water running low, GPS signal flickering in and out. That afternoon taught me my first hard lesson: in places where digital infrastructure lags, time isn’t linear—it’s relational. A ‘tomorrow’ isn’t a calendar date; it’s a promise contingent on fuel, tire pressure, and whether the local administrator has signed off on the route. I abandoned rigid scheduling. Instead, I learned to ask: ‘Who knows when the next vehicle leaves?’ not ‘What time does it leave?’ The answer was rarely a clock—but a name, a shop, a shared meal.

📸 The Discovery: What People Taught Me Without Words

In Sulaymaniyah, northern Iraq, I stayed with a Kurdish family whose home overlooked the ruins of Qalat Diza. One evening, Ahmed—the father—pulled out an old leather-bound notebook filled with hand-drawn maps of villages displaced during the 1988 Anfal campaign. He didn’t narrate history. He traced roads with his finger, paused at a river crossing, then pointed to his daughter drawing beside us. ‘She draws the same bridges,’ he said. ‘But hers have lights.’ That silence between past and present wasn’t emptiness—it was careful stewardship.

In the Gobi Desert, near Dalanzadgad, I joined a herder family for three days. No English. No translation app reliable enough for wind-scoured steppe. We communicated through gesture: pouring tea, adjusting saddle straps, pointing at cloud shapes. One morning, as frost feathered the grass, the grandmother pressed a small, warm stone into my palm—‘Khövsgöl’, she said, tapping her temple. Later, I learned it meant ‘memory lake’. She wasn’t naming a place. She was naming how memory holds water—even in drought.

In San Salvador, I volunteered at a community kitchen in Mejicanos. The coordinator, Lourdes, wore surgical gloves while dicing onions, her forearms tattooed with names of siblings lost to gang violence. She never spoke of trauma. Instead, she taught me how to fold pupusas so the filling stayed centered—a precise, repetitive motion that required full attention. ‘If your hands are busy making food,’ she told me, ‘your mind can’t rehearse fear.’

🚂 The Journey Continues: Moving Between Realities

Traveling between these places demanded recalibration—not just of gear, but of expectation. From Baghdad to Ulaanbaatar, I flew via Istanbul, carrying two printed copies of every visa document (one sealed in plastic, one taped inside my passport cover), plus a laminated list of emergency contacts verified with local embassies before departure. In Iraq, I relied on sherwan—shared taxis booked via WhatsApp groups coordinated by local fixers. In Mongolia, I boarded the Ulaanbaatar–Sükhbaatar train with a thermos of mare’s milk and a phrasebook where pronunciation mattered more than grammar. In El Salvador, I used the official TransMiCable cable car system in San Miguel—its bright blue cars climbing volcanic slopes where buses couldn’t go. Each transition reminded me: infrastructure isn’t neutral. It reflects decades of investment, neglect, or deliberate design. A working bus route signals stability. A functioning mobile network enables coordination. A clean public restroom signals civic care. I began noting these quietly—not as metrics of ‘development’, but as visible seams in the social fabric.

🌄 Reflection: What These Tales Taught Me About Travel—and Myself

I used to think resilience was about enduring hardship. These four journeys dismantled that. Resilience wasn’t pushing forward despite exhaustion—it was pausing to accept help from someone who’d walked farther with less. It wasn’t mastering local language—it was letting miscommunication become its own kind of intimacy. In Erbil, a university student named Dlshad walked me 45 minutes out of his way to ensure I reached my guesthouse before curfew—not because I asked, but because he’d seen me hesitate at a junction. In Ulaanbaatar, a hostel owner lent me her grandmother’s deel (traditional robe) when mine tore, saying, ‘Clothes hold stories. Let yours borrow one.’ In San Miguel, a street vendor gave me extra plantains with my coffee after noticing I’d missed lunch—no words exchanged, just a nod and a smile.

What surprised me most wasn’t danger—I encountered none—but the sheer, unremarkable normalcy of life unfolding under complex conditions. Children did homework beneath solar lamps in Goma. Teenagers filmed TikTok dances outside a Baghdad internet café. Herders debated livestock prices via satellite phone in the Gobi. Farmers in Morazán repaired irrigation canals with donated tools and ancestral knowledge. None of this appeared in headlines. Yet it was the ground truth—the daily work of living well, even when systems strain.

📝 Practical Takeaways Woven Into the Journey

These weren’t theoretical insights—they were forged in real-time problem-solving:

• 💡Visa timing isn’t about speed—it’s about sequencing. I applied for my Iraqi visa in Amman (not online), submitted Mongolian paperwork in Ulaanbaatar (not remotely), and processed my Salvadoran tourist card at the airport upon arrival—because processing windows, required documents, and officer discretion varied by location, not country. What worked in one city failed in another. I kept a physical log: ‘Baghdad Embassy: open Mon–Thu, 9–12; requires letter from host + hotel booking; cash only.’
• 🚌Shared transport requires cultural literacy—not just route knowledge. In the DRC, boarding a taxi-brousse meant waiting until the driver declared ‘complet’—but that wasn’t about passenger count. It meant the cargo space held enough sacks of cassava, the roof rack carried sufficient firewood, and the front seat accommodated the village elder’s walking stick. Rushing the process invited silence—not hostility, but withdrawal.
• ☕Hospitality isn’t transactional—it’s contextual. In Iraq, refusing tea once offered could read as distrust. In Mongolia, accepting a second bowl signaled respect. In El Salvador, sharing food meant you’d been welcomed as temporary kin. I carried small, locally appropriate gifts: Rwandan coffee beans for Congolese hosts, Kurdish honey for Iraqi families, dried apricots for Mongolian herders, Salvadoran coffee for kitchen volunteers. Not as payment—but as acknowledgment of reciprocity already given.
• 🌧️Weather isn’t just climate—it’s operational intelligence. In Goma, heavy rain meant roads became impassable within hours—not due to flooding, but because volcanic soil turned slick and deep. In the Gobi, clear skies hid sub-zero wind chill; I learned to check the ‘feels-like’ temperature from local weather stations, not apps. In San Salvador, afternoon thunderstorms disrupted power grids—so I charged devices midday and kept a battery pack topped up.

⭐ Conclusion: How These Tales Changed My Compass

Before this trip, I measured travel value in sights ticked off, borders crossed, photos posted. After, I measure it in silences shared, gestures understood, and moments when my assumptions dissolved—not dramatically, but gently, like salt in warm tea. Tales from the road—Congo, Iraq, Mongolia, El Salvador weren’t about proving anything. They were about paying attention: to how a mother in Baghdad hummed while kneading dough, to the exact shade of blue in a Mongolian sky at 4 a.m., to the weight of a Salvadoran child’s hand slipping into mine as we crossed a street. Travel didn’t broaden my perspective. It narrowed my focus—to what’s human, immediate, and shared. And that, I’ve learned, is the only compass that never needs recalibrating.