A New Era

Nydia and I are about to begin a New Era in our lives. That may sound overly dramatic; I could simply say that we are starting a new chapter in our story. I like to think of my personal history as divided into chapters, with the cities where I have lived marking distinct stages, each with its own character. From that perspective, I could say that what begins today is a new chapter, but between the two of us we have come to call it the “New Era.” Nydia started using the term, and the name stuck.

The idea behind the New Era is to live while traveling: to remain in different countries for several months, sometimes in one city and sometimes in several, and simply make that our life for a while. How long? We do not know. It might be a year or two; it might be more or less. One of the great advantages of the lifestyle we want to adopt is the freedom to change the plan whenever it suits us—to live in a way that allows us to adapt to different circumstances and scenarios. But let us start at the beginning, with where all of this came from.

We love to travel. I know, almost everyone likes traveling, but in our case it is nearly an obsession. For years we explored many parts of Mexico, and roughly a decade ago we began taking our first international trips together. What started as a simple pleasure grew into something more—almost, I would say, a personal mission. Discovering other places and cultures and hearing other languages increasingly captured our attention. A few years ago, we started traveling more intensely, and I began to feel that no matter how many neighborhoods and attractions we visited during four or five days in a city, it was never enough to see everything or understand what living there was like. Whenever we talked about travel, I would often tell Nydia that later in life we should plan a different kind of trip: journeys lasting months that would let us absorb much more of each place. “Later in life” because several obstacles stood in our way. The first was our two dogs, for whom traveling like that would have been uncomfortable and generally complicated. The second was the prospect of paying two rents at once: the already expensive rent on our apartment in Mexico City and the rent wherever we happened to be staying—as spending months in a hotel would naturally be prohibitively expensive, making an apartment the more sensible option. Finally, what would we do about work? We are not in a position to stop working for months; in fact, the nature of our work makes that impossible, since we have clients to whom we must continually provide various services. So it remained a dream to fulfill someday. One of our dogs died in 2022 and the other in 2024. With the dark sense of humor we share, we would sometimes say that at least we were now free to pursue that dream of traveling for months.

It was in January of this year, 2025, during one of our walks, that we devised the plan for this “New Era.” I say we devised it because we worked out certain details and made some adjustments, but in truth I could say that Nydia was its author. She has always been the architect of our major plans, as she was when we moved from Guadalajara to Mexico City. You might say I am the visionary: broad ideas occur to me, but Nydia is the one who solves the puzzle of how to make them happen. Moving to Mexico City, for example, was my idea, but Nydia found the way to do it, planning everything from the best dates for the change to how to carry out the move, find somewhere to live and so on. During that conversation in January, Nydia explained the plan she had been quietly developing each time I spoke—half jokingly, half in self-pity—about the months-long journey it seemed we would not be able to undertake until old age.

The basic logic of her plan was as follows. Paying two rents makes no sense. What does make sense is leaving our Mexico City apartment—which we intended to leave in 2026 anyway—and paying only one rent, wherever we are living during the journey. And there would be little point in doing this for only a few months, since we would no longer have a required return date or an apartment waiting for us in Mexico. So why not travel indefinitely? We love Europe, but it presents a problem: in the Schengen Area, tourists are allowed to stay for only three months within any six-month period. In other words, you can enter the Schengen Area once or several times, but your total stay cannot exceed 90 days in a 180-day period. For what we want to do, that would mean spending three months in Europe and remaining outside it for another three before returning, making it thoroughly impractical. This led Nydia to the idea of traveling through South America. We could remain in each country for the 90 days permitted to tourists and simply move between countries within the same region, using the busiest air routes to keep flights less expensive. We could rent apartments through Airbnb, where good discounts are often available for four-week stays (28 days). We could therefore spend one, two or three months in each city, as we chose, allowing us to stay in one, two or three cities in each country. We could move between countries to discover new ones, periodically return to whichever ones we wanted, revisit cities we already loved or explore new places. And yes, eventually we could spend a few months at a time in Europe, spacing those stays out to comply with the tourist restrictions. We have already visited several cities in four South American countries and enjoyed them all, so using the continent as the plan’s base suits us very well. South America offers the same cultural and historical wealth we have in Mexico: art, architecture, music, nightlife, entertainment, and so on. Another part of the plan was to sell most of our possessions and keep only a few in a storage unit in Mexico City: our mementos, my library, some clothes and a handful of miscellaneous items. The plan’s essential idea was to view this not merely as a journey of indefinite duration, but as the experience of living in several cities and countries in order to absorb as much of each one’s essence as possible. As for work, all of ours has been remote for years, so we could continue working normally from wherever we happened to be. We would live our ordinary lives, only in different cities and countries.

That was the initial proposal we discussed on our walk. When would we begin? The original thought was perhaps sometime in 2026; everything was still very vague. As the weeks passed and we considered it further, we tentatively moved the date to late 2025. We kept bringing it forward until we decided on early July 2025, which at that point gave us just over three months to prepare everything. Our first major step was selling the car. There was no point leaving it in storage, and by then we practically never used it anyway because we prefer to walk, cycle or take public transportation. The next important task was selling our furniture and appliances. I came up with an idea: I told our landlord we would leave the apartment in early July and persuaded him to buy our furniture and appliances so that he could keep it furnished and rent it through Airbnb. Instead of paying me for those things, he would credit their value against the next three months’ rent—April, May and June. That way he did not need to pay out any cash, and we saved three months’ rent. Another major issue was replacing my iMac with a MacBook Pro, since I obviously needed a portable computer while moving from place to place. Nydia already had a MacBook Pro, so hers did not need replacing. In addition to all that, we spent the following weeks packing everything we intended to keep. The aim was to pack it well enough to survive several years in the storage unit we would rent. My chief concern was my library, which, although it contains only around 400 volumes, includes books that are very rare, expensive or difficult to obtain. Humidity and insects worried me most, so we wrapped every single volume in plastic to protect it—a task requiring immense patience. We wrapped every ornament and memento against impacts, arranged the contents of each box to make efficient use of space and protect anything fragile, and reinforced the boxes with sheets of cardboard so that they could remain stacked for a long time. We carried out a major purge: many things were donated, some were given away and others were sold on Facebook Marketplace—a titanic undertaking that Nydia handled.

Before leaving, we had already bought our flights and rented apartments for the first few months of the New Era. The adventure will begin in São Paulo, where we will spend a month in the Consolação neighborhood, close to most of the city’s tourist and cultural attractions, green spaces and nightlife. We will then travel to Rio de Janeiro. For the first month, we have rented an apartment in Copacabana, two blocks from Ipanema Beach; for the second, we will stay in Santa Teresa, a picturesque neighborhood on a hill, very close to parks and beaches and well connected to the city center. Before leaving Brazil, we will visit Curitiba for a few days. It is the country’s third most important city and offers an interesting range of museums and parks. We will stay in Batel, one of the city’s best neighborhoods and close to several attractions. The adventure will then take us to Asunción, Paraguay, a relatively small, beautiful and tranquil city. We will live for a month in Villa Morra, an area known for its modernity, its residential and commercial offerings, and its shopping centers, restaurants, cafés and bars. Before leaving the country, we will spend a couple of days in San Bernardino, a town near Asunción with a beautiful lake where people commonly spend weekends and holidays. Then we will go for three months to a city we adore, one of our favorites in the world: Buenos Aires. There, we have rented an apartment in Recoleta, our favorite area—the part people mean when they compare Buenos Aires with European cities, with its beautiful architecture, enormous parks, museums and galleries, shops and nightlife. That is as far as the firmly mapped portion of the plan extends. Although we already have all the following year’s destinations in mind, we remain free to change course because we have not bought the flights or rented the apartments.

I am excited by the idea of getting to know South America more deeply. Ever since my youth, it has possessed a magical aura in my imagination, mainly because of literature. I know that romanticizing places is at best naive and at worst ignorant; nevertheless, the visits I have already made to several countries in the region have not disappointed me. Sometimes I envy foreigners who visit Mexico because they have the chance to discover Mexico. For Mexicans, South America offers that same opportunity: to discover a place of magical realism, cultural and social contrasts, artistic, natural and human riches, modernity and tradition, syncretism and mestizaje. I am writing this in a lounge at Mexico City airport, trembling with anticipation for the places we are about to visit.

The lifestyle we want to adopt for a while means more than simply traveling. For us, it is a way to leave our comfort zone, become more adaptable, learn to live with fewer possessions and manage our spending more efficiently so that we can explore without excessively increasing our costs. It is also a way to remain more open to opportunities and changing circumstances, without knowing where we will be in a few months. In some sense, we want the experience to feel like an adventure. Ridding oneself of so much junk—things and things and more things that one buys and keeps—living out of two suitcases, entering a supermarket without recognizing the products, walking down a street one has never walked before, constantly trying something new, interrupting habits and abandoning customs: to me, that is a liberating ritual.

I am generally risk-averse, yet I have taken several significant risks in my life. That is because I believe there are two kinds of risk: intelligent risks and stupid risks. Intelligent risks represent an asymmetric bet, meaning that the potential reward is vastly greater than the potential loss. Stupid risks are those in which the potential loss is equal to or greater than the potential reward. The possible reward from the risk represented by this New Era is several orders of magnitude greater than the possible loss. The worst-case scenario is that we dislike or grow tired of living this way and, after a few months, simply decide to return to Mexico City. Even then, there is no real loss: we will have gained an experience, spent several months traveling and exploring, and will simply rent a new apartment—which we had already wanted to do—buy new furniture and belongings, which is always fun, and carry on with our lives.

The great question we ask ourselves is how long we will live this way. We have no idea. We know it would be reasonable for it to last at least a year, so that we can travel and see enough to make all that packing, purging and selling worthwhile. Beyond that, we do not know. And not knowing is part of the adventure.