A Random Traveler

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Introduction

Most travel experiences and vacation stories being recounted by your friends at work can be exaggerated for one of two reasons. Either they spent so much money on their trip they can’t justify criticizing anything they saw, or they work all the time, hardly ever taking their vacation days, and the one time they do force themselves to take a few days off and go somewhere, they’re too proud to admit to one second of boredom during that hard-fought-for freedom. Between the in-denial travelers, the travel books trying to sell books, the Facebook posts and pics whose sole purpose is to make you think their life is better than yours, it’s hard to get an honest account of what a trip is actually like. On the subject of honesty…

I’m on a plane embarking on a three-month adventure. I’m starting in Dubai, with a brief stop in Qatar. Soon I’ll be on a group trip with a travel group called Contiki, one of six trips I took with them. You’ll find a daily journal experience of one of those trips later in the book. Here, the tour I signed up with starts in Thailand, but I decide to stop by Malaysia before then, only because I am wondering if the word Asia is derived from Malaysia or vice versa. It’s kind of a chicken and egg analysis, and I hope to get some answers. Then it’s on to Thailand, to begin a tour that includes stays in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. I’ll then head to Australia for what will most likely be, by then, some much-needed Western Culture fun. I plan to see the entire Gold Coast of surf-and-sun Australia, then most of New Zealand. The entire trip spans three continents, involving planes, trains, and automobiles.

On the flight to Dubai for my first stop, I’m sitting next to two Iranian girls. I always find ways to entertain myself on long flights, so I’ve become adept at making friends with the flight attendants and any other victim unlucky enough to sit next to me. I call them victims because they become victims of my deception. I practice my storytelling skills by making up stories about what I do and where I’m going, and am limited only by my imagination. Yes, this is exploiting the average person’s gullibility, innocence, and naiveté, but this is as much a gift for them as it is for me. It gives me the respect and adoration I would’ve gotten had I chosen another life path, becoming a doctor for instance, without the long, arduous process of getting there, while giving a random passenger a great story to go home with and reinforcing their belief that they must travel or they’ll never get to meet any interesting people. Making up these stories is a victimless crime, one that does my travel mate a service, as well as the economy and mankind for that matter.

This is a sixteen-hour flight and I’ve already attained the admiration of the flight attendants by explaining I’m on a secret mission, and so far, have adeptly fended off their curiosity about the nature of my assignment. Soon after I’ve enthralled the attendants with my air of mystery, I’m talking to the two married Iranian women when one of them asks me, How many countries have you been to?

The answer is the truth: I’ve been to eighty-two countries so far. When I tell this to people their reactions can be diverse. They vary from, I didn’t know there were that many countries! to Is this for fun or for work? and the inevitable, What do you do for a living that allows you that much freedom? I can sense the inquirer’s immediate guilt, as if traveling is an obligation and responsibility they’ve shirked, and my extensive traveling highlights their shortcomings, and if they can just pinpoint the loophole that allowed me this freedom, they can assuage their feelings by highlighting the item that made me so lucky, whether it’s a dream job or a trust fund, and console themselves in the knowledge that if they just had that, they would also be halfway around the world at that moment.

Interestingly, no one ever questions the number or thinks I exaggerated by so much as even one country. It’s because it’s a precise number, eighty-two, and not a round number; or perhaps it’s presumed I went through the difficult task of saying it aloud, so I couldn’t be lying. Had I said seventy or eighty, it would be assumed I must be rounding up or down, arousing immediate doubt. Worldwide exploration equals instant credibility, yet had I stated, I can do one hundred pushups, I would be as credible as a vegan butcher followed by the inevitable prove it.

Back to the Iranians.

My answer is easily accepted, as I knew it would be, but there’s a bit of awkwardness when the women leave and then return from using the bathroom. In their time away, they’d talked to the flight attendants with whom I was already friendly. The two Iranian women are under the impression I’m a fortuneteller, mostly because that’s what I told them. The flight attendants are under the impression I am a special interrogator for the Justice Department, trained in identifying deception in terrorist suspects. (The irony was not lost on me.) I’d told them, I can identify most of the thousand muscles in a person’s face that make up emotion, and am flying to Dubai on a secret mission involving the rendition of suspects from South Africa, specifically Angola. But please, keep this quiet.

The Iranians were eager to show off my psychic abilities to the flight attendants, engaging them in what they thought was juicy gossip on the way to the bathroom, which leads to my current dilemma and standoff.

To resolve these contradictory stories—and to save myself from what would have been a very awkward sixteen-hour flight—I explain that reading fortunes is part of basic training. I also explain that psychology, psychic ability, and lying have been overlapping and going hand in hand for thousands of years.

The Iranians are extremely excited when they find out during my complimentary read of their futures that they will have children this year, become fabulously rich, and run into a person who will change their lives within the next fifteen days. The women are so happy to meet me, this wonderful bearer of great news, and love me so much, they insist I meet their entire family and come to lunch with them during my stay, which I happily oblige.

This is one of many experiences during my travels where my wits and imagination untangle me from what might have been a knotty situation. And while not every untangling results in an invitation to lunch, it at least leads to a good story, and what is life if not a collection of stories? You don’t get to be a doctor, lawyer, or secret agent by sitting at home, and traveling is as much an adventure as it is a responsibility. It’s irresponsible to think the world ends at the edges of your backyard, and it’s ignorant to think the world ends at the borders of your country. Yes, some cost and sacrifice is involved, but an adventure awaits just a small distance outside one’s comfort zone. Travel opens opportunities as much as it opens one’s eyes to the possibilities the world offers.

This book is a result of a blog I kept that started as a way to document my travels, keep up with family and friends, and give me something to do. More and more people started reading the blog, and I was approached by a publisher to compile the entries into a book. I then edited and rewrote some things for the book.

Actually the reason for the blog was twofold. I have a terrible memory, and found that my experiences weren’t turning into memories I could easily retrieve with the passage of time. As much as I love creating new experiences, it’s frustrating not being able to recall old ones. If I kept records, my reasoning told me, I would always have an asset of sorts out of my experiences. Cataloguing my memories led to blogging, which led to writing about my travels. Then I started writing my thoughts. Thoughts are just flashes in your brain that pass silently through your consciousness and disappear forever in an instant. The only way to prevent a thought from being a fleeting flash of neurons is to write it down. Only then does that thought attain existence, and the more people read your thoughts and the greater the audience, the more they exist. I am my thoughts; ergo, the more people who read what I write, the more I exist. So by reading this book, in essence, you are contributing to my existence, and I thank you. In return, I hope you’ll be mildly entertained, and maybe, just maybe, if you are one of the sixty-five percent of Americans who don’t own a passport, are shackled by fear and responsibility, or are frozen by indecision and doubt, you’ll be motivated to overcome your fears, your excuses, your dependence and reliance on predictability, and hopefully will go out there and travel the world.

Prologue

The journey I mentioned above involved three separate trips with a tour group called Contiki. The tour was for eighteen- to thirty-five-year-olds. Since I had one fun trip with them, I was trying to take as many of their tours as I could before I hit the age limit. Traveling with a group is a different experience, and a different trip and different travel category. So before reading this book and to demonstrate what a group trip is like, I’ll preview one of them via a journal of a random trip I’ve taken, so you can see the events unfold in real time, unrevised and uncensored. The journal will give perspective on some of the other chapters in the book, and you will notice subtle differences in the trips: the ones where I was alone, versus the ones I went on with a group, or even the ones I went on with a friend. The journal also gives a little insight into how I see things. You can skip the journal format and start reading the chapters on different countries, or you can read the journal to give you reference points for some of the other stories in the book.

A Random Traveler’s 26-day Odyssey

First, some background on the tour chronicled in this chapter.

I’ve taken many trips with a group called Contiki. It’s a travel group for eighteen- to thirty-five-year-olds, an affordable way to travel and a great way to do many things in short amounts of time. You’re part of a group, and become much like a family while on the tour. Planning, transportation, activities, itinerary, games, and schedule are taken care of, and all you have to do is show up. You’re paired with another traveler to cut the cost of everything in half, or you can pay a premium and get your own room, which I always do.

Contiki has over fifty years’ experience in the locations they service; they know the best places to go and see, and have preexisting relationships and priority with every destination. Like all travel, so much is dependent on who you’re with and who you meet, but with up to fifty people in a group, odds are good you’ll make friends. Travelers in general are more adventurous and fun than other people, so you’ll likely end up with a great tour group, but of course you can also end up with an okay group. There are many of these travel groups all over the world. With Contiki, they design tours as a long, continuous, cross-country trip, with the ability to buy the whole thing, or meet up in different countries and take smaller portions of the entire tour. The group is constantly growing and shrinking as the tour progresses, but if you sign up for the entire trip, the core group becomes really close, having shared experiences the newcomers don’t get to have so they might feel left out at times. Some criticism of these travel groups is that the groups are self-involved and cliquish, only talking to and hanging with other members of the group. This prevents you from meeting the locals and fully immersing yourself in the culture and area. The other criticism is that you move so fast through the tour, you don’t get a chance to experience a location. It’s interesting that every critic I encounter of this type of travel has never actually been on any of these types of trips. They’re the same people who criticize cruises, saying a cruise becomes claustrophobic and it’s not their idea of travel; usually they’ve never been on a serious cruise. I have yet to meet anyone who went on one of their trips who didn’t rave about it, so the criticisms might be true to some degree but like everything else, it’s up to the individual to make the trip whatever he or she wants it to be.

Beginning in Ecuador, this is an unedited version of my daily blogging while traveling through Latin America—a peek into my process, so to speak. Keeping a journal also helped make sure I kept writing every day. By reading from day to day, you’ll see that some days’ entries are quick reads and shorter entries (and for one date, a one-line entry). Some entries, conversely, are quite long—when a day’s events left me inspired to expound at length, or add thoughts or general perceptions to the basic I did this or that today. Hopefully this format will also give you a sense of the sweeping scope and ever-changing settings and vistas for each day of this unforgettable trek.

Night 1

First night, landed in Quito on a 26-day adventure. Was surprised to find out the local currency is US dollars. Oddly, the language is everything but English. Nobody here speaks English, although there is a KFC, Subway, or almost every other American fast-food chain on every block.

It was comical trying to order a chicken meal today, since I only like white-meat chicken and for some reason all my Rosetta Stone lessons escaped me; I couldn’t seem to explain how I only wanted white-meat chicken. I tried pointing to my skin, shaking my head as good, and then pointing to their dark skin and shaking my head for bad, before I realized that I was literally telling a roomful of Latinos, White is right. I tried grabbing my breasts and squeezing, hoping they would get the chicken breast reference, but for some reason they understood that as me wanting milk. Excited, they ran away and returned with milk, thinking they solved the puzzle. I don’t know why they thought my breasts were capable of breast-feeding, but I decided to instead point to the breasts of the girls working there while saying chicken breasts over and over. I was about to give up—they either thought I was trying to order a prostitute, or was insinuating I wanted to touch her breasts—until some guy in the line finally took pity and explained what I wanted.

Tonight I go to the tour’s meeting place and meet the first few members of the group. After a few awkward formalities, we decide to get a drink. It’s me and an Australian guy who’s close to seven feet tall but almost as wide as he is tall, like a giant. There’s also a black Canadian who, when he introduces himself, seems to have some speech impediment as he mumbles something about being Canadian. There are two other Australians, both young women; one is tall and pretty and the other with a good personality. We had actually connected on Facebook before the trip, so we had an earlier encounter before meeting the others the night before, and had drinks and got to know each other that way. The other girl, while not entirely unattractive, has what I like to call the Mona Lisa look, with a great face but it gets wider as your eyes travel downward. She’s a podiatrist, which is a profession that endures so much ridicule I almost don’t understand why someone would go into that profession. I wonder if podiatrists have foot fetishes and chose their profession for the same reason child molesters choose to be priests—so they can nobly indulge in their secret fetishes in plain sight and not just be looked at as weird, but respected in the process.

The tall, pretty one has just finished a nightmare of a relationship where the guy she dated on and off for only six months became so obsessed with her, he professed his love for her by tattooing her name on his hand. When that didn’t work he tried stalking her. She realized he was psycho during the relationship, so she stayed with him so she could keep an eye on him and see what he was doing, but he secretly recorded their sex life and put it on the Internet for everyone to see. She took it quite well; repeating the story, she looked at the bright side, on how that angle made her look skinny, and expressed how she wished she’d kept her place tidier that day. I made a note to track down this video later. His obsession turned into hate, and he created a Google Plus profile of her offering herself up as a prostitute. Now when you Google her, that’s what comes up. I wonder how she was able to have this effect on someone, but I learned later it’s the law of attraction; I have a knack for making people comfortable and foolishly sharing very personal details about themselves. She admitted to being bipolar, and I winked at her as I said, I hope you end up on the right pole.

I focus my attention on the black Canadian with a speech impediment. He has enough space between his front two teeth that if you speak too close to him you can hear your own voice echoing back at you through his mouth.

He tells me he’s from Winnipeg then pauses for a bit and adds, That’s in Canada.

Day 1

I meet the ragtag group of travelers today for a jaunt that includes a trip to a science museum. We’re all between eighteen and thirty-five years old, and I note what an unattractive group this is as I scan the room quickly, avoiding eye contact, and am relieved that the trip won’t be about trying to hook up. Maybe I can enjoy nature for a while. We play a game on the bus called BFF, where you have to sit next to someone and talk to them for ten minutes, then get up on the bus’s mike and tell everyone what you learned about your newest friend.

Just my luck, I’m seated next to the black Canadian I went to dinner with the night before. I’d already learned how uninteresting he is then, and now I have to learn that on top of all his great qualities, he has terrible body odor. So for ten minutes we ignore each other since it’s hard to talk while you’re holding your breath. He probably thinks I don’t like black people. Which is good, because I’d rather be thought of as racist than have to explain to him that he smells as if he’s decomposing.

Most times when you learn stuff, you instantly become a tiny bit smarter, but not after I find out that this country was named Ecuador because it’s at the equator, which is one of those facts so blatantly obvious it makes me feel dumber for not making the connection on my own. There is a red line that marks the planet’s actual equator, and we step on it and over it. It is a surreal feeling being equidistant from the North and South Poles and having half your body on either half of earth. We’re shown many science experiments that can only be done by standing on the equator line, because of the polar forces being opposite each other there. When you stand on one side the water drains clockwise; one foot north, the water drains straight. Other interesting experiments involve closing your fingers in a loop, and asking the strongest person to either maintain the loop or hold your hands together and prevent you from pushing up. Chances are he will be able to prevent you from moving, yet if you move two feet to the right, you can easily break his grip; this is a result of the equator’s magnetic force. Another experiment we do requires trying to walk a straight line at the center of the earth. Because of the opposite magnetic fields pulling you in different directions, you end up staggering to the right and left like a drunk.

We’re shown many interesting things about the culture of the ancient people of this area, who used to shrink their enemies’ heads. We see actual human skulls the size of my fist. I imagined the chief on his deathbed and as his last will and testament, he cheekily looked at his wife and winked as he asked for a little head. The wife