How well do you deal with noise? If you are about to go backpacking around the world, you had better get good at tuning out cacophony. Or you had better pack a monster bag of earplugs. Get ready to hear night noise like you have never heard before.
I am reminded of this fact as I hang out for a month in the otherwise lovely city of Guanajuato in Mexico. Here there are about five barking dogs on every block and since this city is rimmed by hills, I hear most all of them at some point during the night. If there is also a soccer/football match going on and the bars are hopping, the noise won’t die down until the wee hours. But hey, that’s why they build in siesta time.
In Asia, you will find people falling asleep on the subway, on the bus, on benches, and on delivery carts. No wonder: you can’t really sleep at night with all the roosters crowing and everyone getting up hours before the crack of dawn to get their business moving before the heat kicks in. You haven’t really experienced the backpacker life until you’ve slept through a cat in heat, two competing roosters, and a woman who starts cleaning the stairs outside your bamboo hut at 5 a.m.
In the Middle East, the call of prayer is ever-present five times a day, at least one of them when no sane person should be awake for any reason. If you’re lucky enough to be in one of these countries during Ramadan, you’ll also experience the fun of a person parading through the streets waking everyone up by banging on a drum so the faithful can eat before sunrise. (And you’re even supposed to tip this guy for the service at the end.)
And on it goes with church bells, gas vendors, firecracker strings, and drunks singing in the streets. In countries where people live close together and have developed a “live and let live” attitude as a result, you don’t complain, you suck it up and deal.
If you are in a swanky hotel, you can mostly avoid all this. I don’t recall hearing even one barking dog when I was cloistered in the Villa Maria Christina hotel in Guanajuato while on a writing assignment. The Four Seasons in Mexico City will make you think there’s not really any traffic on that big thoroughfare in front of the hotel and the Oberoi in Calcutta deserves the word “oasis” if any hotel ever did. Money is a great insulator.
Stay at the $4 Salvation Army hostel a few blocks away, however, and it’s a different story. That guesthouse “right by the mosque” in Morocco may be easy to find, but Friday morning prayers will drive you to burying your head in a pillow. If you’re on a shoestring budget (or renting an apartment like a typical resident’s), you lose the insulation.
My solution is to forget fighting it and embrace the idea of napping. In most of these noisy places, you’ll see that’s what the locals do as well. Otherwise, you may need some chemical enhancements. If you have a noise coping tip of your own, leave it in the comments.
[flickr photo by ***karen]
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