As I began to pack up my life in Cochabamba, I found myself needing to jettison some already-read and no longer needed books. So I paid a visit to the Spitting Llama, Cochabamba’s second hand bookstore.

While it was (briefly) tempting to trade the Albert Camus I had just read for another of his books (“who travels with Camus?” my friend exclaimed, before she found out what I’d been reading), I eventually traded one Camus and one travel book for a bundle of short stories and… a Spanish-English dictionary.

This may be a profoundly boring choice, but it signifies something important for me. I have graduated from phrase books to dictionaries.

Admittedly, I still have my phrase book (Lonely Planet’s Costa Rica phrasebook, first edition, published 2000 and written by Thomas Kohnstamm, whom I’ve already diatribed against but who writes a great phrase book), but the crucial difference is that now my vocabulary is not limited to the 60 pages of English-Spanish conversion in the back of this book. Now I have 450 pages of English to Spanish, and almost 350 pages of Spanish to English.

Where before I was skimming over the surface of Latin America, spewing barely understood, pre-assembled phrases, now I’m sinking down, or perhaps squirming my way into the depths of one country, stammering and conjugating my way into its language. It is surely a good thing. This is exactly what I’ve been yearning to do since I first skipped across the Americas three years ago.

And now I can tell you that the Spanish word for frippery is chorradas, that the word for gazumper is tramposo, and that the expression for wodge is buen trozo or porción grande. So in fact I’m expanding my vocabulary in two languages. Clearly not all 800 pages of dictionary will be absolutely useful, but that’s hardly the point. The point is that I’m a dictionary kind of traveller now.