What is THE answer?

There is a credit crunch - banks are bouncing. The car industry is crashing, the finance so-called "industry" has bottomed out, people are losing their jobs and their homes. So why exactly are we giving up perfectly good jobs to go to South America, about which we know so little and when Spanish is still so imperfectly understood by us?

If you have any ideas, please let us know, so we can adopt the best ones as THE answer to this troubling question...Amongst the responses I usually give (not untrue, but quite possibly not the whole of the answer), are:

• To learn Spanish (Great, but Spain's nearer... )
• To learn about Latin America (You can read, can't you?...)
• To be somewhere they still have revolutions (Hmmm, so speaks the woman who is scared of ladders...)
• To challenge my first world, topdog, western european mindset (Lord, you're beginning to sound like a missionary in reverse...)
• OK, OK, so I just want to get away from Boris for a while (Now we're getting somewhere. Unfortunately, us Londoners can never get away from our inner Boris completely...)

I suppose physical journeys always involve internal ones. It'll be interesting to find out whether my mind travels to Latin America with me (or whether it gets stuck somewhere within the brackets of self-doubt)...