Unos cambios

So last year didn't really pan out as I'd envisaged. The feckless (advanced) diver/drinker that awoke on a dock in Utila on New Year's Day 2011 has somehow morphed into a Zurich-based FIFA official who will be married in 2012. I had been vaguely thinking that I might have made my way through Colombia, Venezuela, the Guyanas, up the Amazon to Ecuador and down to Peru by New Year 2012, then ready for an entire year more of travel - with Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile and the Antarctic to come. As it turns out, plans were meaningless.

Explaining the difference has proved difficult to some Europeans but in the end I spent very little time in South America and really have only seen a few towns in Colombia (plus the month or so around Argentina in an earlier trip). Central America is now somewhere that I know better than the UK and which will also be important to me as I will be marrying a certain Central American. Whilst the idea of backpacking for so many years eventually made little sense to me, having met someone I wanted to stay with and realising that my job prospects would be extremely limited, there's still a lot of the world that I want to see. I was very excited about the Guyanese jungle, Machu Pichu and above all, Easter Island, but these places will now have to wait for future 'holidays' rather than 'trips'.

Even the job that I took on at the FIFA U-20 World Cup Colombia 2011 didn't have the impact on my career that I had expected. When I initially thought about working at such an event I thought it might bring me some South American media contacts that would be useful later in my travels. Yet, what it brought was a very relevant experience and demonstrable language skills that have helped me end up in the cold comfort of Zurich. I'd long realised that travelling for a long period (in your late twenties) can be career suicide if you don't have a clearly defined speciality or you aren't exceptionally gifted. Lacking either of these traits I came to understand that I was never going to get ahead in South America without a clear idea of what I should be writing in the 'Profession' box on immigration forms. Historian/Communicator/Diplomat were all nice-sounding options but none of them were correct and none really interested me for the future.

So two weeks after the last game in Cartagena I left South America and flew (yes, that travel rule went out the window a long time ago) back to Central America and back to the charming city of Managua, a place somehow overlooked by many backpackers despite the attractions of crime, no street names and a series of anonymous malls. Perhaps it's easier to overlook a town's flaws if you're in love with someone that lives there. There I would spend two and a half months doing countless job applications and getting to know the family of my future wife. Stupidly I began putting my address as Managua for the numerous positions in Europe that I was applying for, none of which met with any sort of response until I put London as my home address - at which I almost immediately received a call from FIFA HR (who are currently my favourite people in the world). At which point I had to make a very swift exit - within two days I was on a bus to Costa Rica and then flying back to London via Santo Domingo and Frankfurt (the obvious route).

In the meantime, most importantly, I had managed to convince Karen to accept a ring from me and had endured asking for her hand from her parents in Spanish (a set-piece never covered in any of my Spanish classes). So I will certainly be returning to Central America in December for a wedding in the Cathedral in Granada, Nicaragua. Despite me being the ultimate heathen it appears that my fiancée's impeccable Catholic credentials allow us to be married in such a holy place (first founded in 1525 in the oldest city on the American mainland).

But as of the 2nd December I'm in a curiously cold place, where white stuff has been falling from the sky and I can no longer roam around in my favoured ripped shorts, sweat-stained t-shirt and stinking espadrilles. I actually have to wrap up warmly, play close attention to personal grooming and try to understand a language that doesn't have Latin roots. At least I have the forgotten pleasure of putting toilet paper in the toilet and enjoying warm water from a tap, but I don't know if these compensate for the lack of gallo pinto in my diet.