Looking Back On a Year of Travel

Coming back home has been interesting process. A lot of people express jealousy about my travels and I think it's funny because the prerequisites for travel are having a little money, time, and perhaps most importantly, the willingness to make it happen. Doesn't seem that hard.

As my travels come to an end I have two main thoughts. 1) Everybody who dreams of quitting their job and traveling for awhile and seeing new things might not be wrong and 2) Traveling for an extended period of time is difficult. I think about the economic diminishing law of returns which suggests that the more you have of something the less good it is. Unfortunately, I did feel like I should have appreciated everything more than I did but after you've seen 5 great waterfalls the 6th isn't normally as good. Similarly, anyone who's visited Asia probably experiences "temple fatigue" and the parallel example of safari fatigue in Africa. Each non-cheetah or other rare animal, like a boring old zebra or baboon for example, became less interesting. Then there's the plain old tourism fatigue. While I enjoyed Thailand overall for example, certain parts of the "tourist" atmosphere also got me- always being around people with cameras, being attacked by hawkers with random trinkets, always trying to avoid being ripped off, avoiding big crowds, feeling like what you're seeing is not that unique, the list goes on.

Then there's just the general annoyance of moving around all the time and figuring out logistics for each country. For example, while Thailand hardly looked at my passport when I entered the country, China gave me a hard time about their new 72 hour transit free visa program (which even their own Embassy in London couldn't tell me about and their call help line had no way to get in a queue for). I also was held up at the airport in China when leaving for not having registered my presence at a local police station while I was there, that was scary that they figured it out. These type of travel annoyances though are really kind of silly when you think about the fact of how lucky you are to even be traveling internationally.

My first year at Equal Exchange I remember having 15 days off, and those few vacation days were precious -even if it just meant staying in Boston. Now I have months of international travel behind me and being in one place sounds kind of good. I know how much I will kill for even a weekend at a tropical beach somewhere in a few months time when I'm back sitting behind a desk. But honestly, two weeks in Thailand was nothing compared to the ridiculous number of backpackers I met traveling for 2-6 months or even longer. Of course hardly any of these people were American, poor America, we just don't take off our chains so easily.

I met probably three Dutch people for every American (a population of about 17 million compared to our roughly 317 million). But I also think if I was alone for that amount of time traveling like so many of these people are, I would go crazy. Sure you can meet people on your trips as I did in Thailand. This is of course an important part of travel but not the same as traveling with a girlfriend or best friend from home with whom you share a unique experience. Chris McCandless from Into the Wild in his last living hours writes in his journal "happiness only real when shared" and I couldn't agree more.

Looks like a different person in this photo

Washed out and ruined passport, there were no open spaces left anyways