Professor Esther Alonso has an epiphany while touring South America

It can be a dangerous world for women traveling alone.

Esther Alonso travels anyway.

Alonso, a Southwestern College Spanish professor, heard all the objections during her eight sabbatical months in South America.

None changed her mind.

“I have no excuse not to do it and I’ve been wanting to go since I was a child,” she said.

Alonso is a native of Mexico City. When she was seven, her parents took her to Disneyland. They did not realize they had triggered the traveler inside of her.

Alonso and her sister, Professor of Spanish Deana Alonso-Post, have traveled throughout Europe and the Americas. They have journeyed together, with friends and individually, but neither had ever traveled alone for such a long period of time.

“We could be wearing old clothes, but we need to travel,” Deana said. “We have our priorities.”

Deana said the reason her sister did not run into trouble was partly luck and partly because their parents taught them to be cautious travelers. This trip, she said, was important to her sister.

“We have always felt that you need to visit those countries so we know what we’re talking about (when we teach),” she said. “It is different to read about them than to be there in the middle of the island with the big moais and to learn about the people and to sit and eat with the people.”

Both sisters dedicate sabbaticals to learning about Spanish-speaking countries. This trip focused on UNESCO sites.

“I didn’t have anything prearranged, except for the three first weeks in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and my ticket back the following year,” she said. “You can’t make plans five months in advance. It has to be one month or month and a half batches of time and that is exactly what I would do.”

After arriving in Argentina, Alonso jetted off to visit glaciers in Ushuaia, at the southernmost tip of South America. She traveled by plane, bus, boat, taxi, rental cars and horseback.

“When you travel, you meet people from all over the place with similar interests because if you are there in a bus from nowhere to nowhere for 12 hours, it’s because this person, more or less, thinks like you do,” she said.

For two months she traveled along the Argentina-Chile border by bus, stopping in little pueblos along the way.

“I had an idea that it would be very much like traveling throughout Mexico, with all of the contrast in poverty and the things you don’t like to see,” said Alonso. “But I also knew that people were nice, kind, curious and warm. As soon as I got there it was just like home. Different because of different cities, different people, different accents, different foods, but home nevertheless.”

Alonso said she found an underlying pattern in Latin America.

“Despite our differences in culture among the Spanish-speaking countries, we have so much more in common,” she said. “We should be more united. We have the same social issues, the same economic issues, the same class issues and we should look at each other to see how some of these countries have solved these issues.”

Alonso said Latin America’s shared history could lead its nations to a shared future.

“We should be like the European Union in Latin American countries,” she said. “I felt at home everywhere, just speaking the language and knowing where they came from and knowing that history of colonization of Spain. You see the same results. You see the same beauty that came out of that because it was not only atrocities.”

Alonso said she loved meeting new people on the road and may have forged enough friendly relations to give national governments a proper example of diplomacy.

“I spent Christmas by myself in Patagonia,” she said. “I bought a very good bottle of wine to toast Christmas, even if I did it by myself.”

Unfortunately, Alonso said, she forgot her wine on a bus. The next day she got a call that the bus driver was waiting for her at the café where she had been dropped off.

“There is the driver of the bus with the bottle and he says, ‘Now you have to share it with me.’ I sat there with the owner of the café and the bus driver by myself and we drank the wine right there before Christmas.”

After so many months alone on a different continent, something was bound to go wrong. Something did.

“I had one bad experience and it was of my own doing,” she said. “I lost my wallet. I left it in a taxi.”

With a pair of $100 bills and no international shipping on credit cards, Alonso waited for her sister to bring her new credit cards. Luckily, Semana Santa was coming around and a sister reunion was already part of the plan. Deana visited Esther in Santiago, Chile, during winter break and in Bogota, Colombia during spring break. Then Esther was back out on her own.

“I did miss that easy way of talking with people, of making friendships, of (meeting) perfect strangers and you end up having dinner and sharing things about your personal lives,” she said. “That is harder to do here.”

Traveling alone does teach you about yourself, she said, and on returning to the States—safe and sound—she said she noticed it more.

“I was by myself down there, so it was in my best interest to be open and friendly and outgoing,” she said. “Maybe here, in my daily life, I am less so.”