For as long as I can remember, a cousin of mine named Sara, who studied medicine, has spent her life living in and traveling to different countries.

One day she told me how this inspiration first took hold of her, because I believe it was through her stories and shared experiences over all these years with us, as family, that my son caught the bug, too, that desire to build a life full of change and new countries.

Sara tells it this way: as a young woman, she was one day browsing books in a bookshop when she met a man with an interesting look about him, who asked her what she wanted to do with her life. Travel, she told him. And the man said: "Well, all it takes is a first step."

While she was studying medicine at the UNAM, a trip was raffled off, and a classmate sold her a ticket she couldn't fully pay for, not having much money to spare. The friend let it go and when the raffle was drawn, he came running to Sara to tell her she'd won the trip, though she still owed him for the ticket.

That trip was somewhere in Central America, and it lit up with real passion what had already been a budding interest in travel. So when she returned, she decided she would go to Europe to do a master's degree.

She sent her CV across Europe and was accepted in Basel, Switzerland, to study a master's in tropical diseases. Which is, of course, deeply ironic, given that Mexico is where the bulk of those diseases actually exist, and where there would certainly be no shortage of material to study. But what she wanted was a change of air, a reason to move. Because over the years she has confessed to us that she never had any real interest in practicing medicine, even though she did work for the pharmaceutical industry, and we have always considered her someone who shines wherever she lands.

She spent a few years in Basel, and when she finished her degree she asked around for work and found it right there. She analyzed Pap smears at a clinic, and in those years there were quite a few wealthy Mexican women who would travel to Switzerland specifically for that kind of testing. Which, again, is almost too ironic: whenever the lab discovered that a patient having the test done was Mexican, they would pass the file to my cousin on the logic of, "she's your countrywoman, you do it."

After trips that came and went during her holidays, and a steady effort to see as many corners of Europe as she could, the travel itch grew sharper. She also began looking beyond the Western world, which today feels so familiar to us Mexicans but which then still seemed far away.

It was some time later, on a cruise, that she met a Greek man, and she married him here in Mexico. Sadly, fate had no intention of tying her down to anything or anyone, and she was widowed just a few months later.

It seems to me that in all her wanderings she has come to believe this is her last life. And I, with my considerably fewer wanderings, supplemented by a good deal of reading, tend to agree.

To heal from the grief, she decided to leave any notion of work behind and travel through Europe for a year on her savings. She is not a wealthy woman, but she knows how to live in ways many wealthy people, surrounded by excess, simply wouldn't. She returned just in time for my wedding, struck up a friendship with my husband, and our relationship has grown ever since. We have even shared a few trips together.

That was 32 years ago, and she has not stopped living and traveling to nearly every corner of this planet.

We, who were already living a somewhat different life than most, still managed to fall into all the usual stereotypes and attachments, and so for a long time we took mostly ordinary trips, and always, of course, on vacation. But she traveled (as very few Mexicans did, forty years ago) with nothing but a small backpack.

Never typical hotels, never in the typical way, because in her there was always this desire to understand, to share, to live a place fully, through its traditions and its people.

Never criticizing or comparing places, always observing with a very particular eye that fascinated us, and fascinated our son even more.

We enjoy her visits enormously when, between one trip and the next (even now, at seventy), she comes to spend a few months in Mexico.

She also lived for a few years in Australia and at various points managed a guest house, sometimes for long stretches, sometimes shorter ones.

That experience, too, she shared with us, and it was a fascinating one.

Many of the tips and ways of seeing things differently, along with travel recommendations that were always genuinely good, came from her.

With all of this in mind, I want to formally invite her, in person, to contribute one or several travel stories that I know will captivate the readers this simple blog of two Mexicans in Asia has gathered along the way.

I hope to have the first story up very soon, so you can see for yourselves what I've described here.

Sanuk