Ten Years a Nomad

by Matthew Kepnes

Looking around as he dropped us off, I noticed that something was different. This wasn’t the same plaza as before. There was a big field behind us now. And lots of buildings. Then it clicked.

  The reason we couldn’t find the entrance earlier was because we’d been at the back of the palace. Had we walked around, we would have found that it was open. Our driver was smart enough to know that—and smart enough to take us down a side street to keep us from seeing the entrance.

  That tricky sonuvabitch.

  In my childhood days of family road trips and theme park visits, scams like these were spoken of in tones of horror—a scam was the worst thing that could happen to the upstanding tourist.

  Yet I had been scammed—twice—on my first day.

  With time, one comes to realize that if you don’t occasionally get scammed on your travels, you aren’t pushing yourself enough. Scams happen to confused people in unfamiliar places, people who don’t take preapproved tours and deviate from their guidebooks. Going to unfamiliar places and getting a bit lost was exactly the elsewhere I was looking for, even if that meant taking on some risks. Of course, I’d never recommend letting your guard drop completely and putting yourself in a situation of real danger. But most scam artists are like the guy on the tuk-tuk—someone trying to wring a few bucks out of a tourist to feed his family. A bit dishonest, but basically harmless. If you don’t occasionally run into someone like that, you’re traveling in a bubble. Or you’re not even traveling at all—you’re vacationing.

  Scams, in a way, keep you growing. They help you suss out the intentions of those around, make you learn from your mistakes—and remind you to stop making the same ones.

  My real goal—and I wasn’t nearly there yet—was to get beyond the stage where scams were around every corner and to put myself into off-the-guidebook situations while still keeping my wits about me. It was, to say the least, a work in progress.

  I had started the day a pro but, by the end, I was reminded I was still an amateur with a lot to learn. The world has a funny way of always keeping you in your place.

  * * *

  BANGKOK WAS, in its way, another new experience for me—the experience of disappointed expectations. When it came time to head north for Chiang Mai, we were more than happy to leave those dashed expectations behind us. Bangkok felt polluted and crowded, full of touts and smog and scams. We hoped the rest of Thailand would be better. After all, there must be a reason why millions visited the country every year. We were looking forward to smaller cities, jungle tours, and days lounging on the beach.

  On our second day in Chiang Mai, I read about a temple located outside the city called Wat Phra Doi Suthep. It was Chiang Mai’s most famous. The pagoda in its center supposedly contains relics of the Buddha himself, there are sweeping views of the surrounding countryside, monks lead public chanting, and there is an intricately carved 309-step staircase leading up to it.

  Scott didn’t want to go, so, not wanting to pass up possible adventure, I went on my own.

  And, as I got into the bus to the temple—a converted pickup truck with wooden benches and a roof added to keep out the rain—the course of my life changed. Looking back, I can say that this was when the seed that was planted in Costa Rica came into full bloom. This was the moment when my life pivoted.

  Inside the bus were five people: three Canadians, a couple and a third wheel who they met and developed a rapport with on the Thai island of Ko Chang (a paradise, I was told many times over); and a Belgian couple who were simply taking a month off work to escape the Brussels winter. We struck up a conversation.

  Where are you from? How long are you traveling? Where have you been? What do you do?

  These are all the typical questions travelers ask each other to form the foundation of a conversation and of commonality. We bond over the one thing we know we have in common: travel.

  They were bewildered that I only got two weeks’ vacation a year.

  “So what will you do the rest of the year? You’re just going to stay home?” they asked.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it.” I shrugged. “I just wanted to get away now. I mean I get sick leave I could use for a trip but this is probably my only vacation for the year. I don’t think I could afford another.”

  “Americans have the worst vacation policy,” the solo Canadian traveler said in loathing.

  “Well, I can save as much vacation time as I want, and could take longer if I got permission, but I doubt it’d be longer than three weeks and it could still only be about once a year. But that’s assuming I don’t get sick and have to use that time, too.”

  “I couldn’t imagine only one holiday per year,” said the male half of the Belgian couple. “We get two months in Belgium and most people also take August off. You shouldn’t live to work. There’s too much to see in the world. You must live your life.”

  As my new friends and I continued discussing travel, time off, and doing what you loved, I realized how uniquely American this phenomenon was.

  These travelers talked about how no one else around the world did what we do. How no one else made, or would even think of making, that bargain. And they were right.

  Americans trade time for money and, although we all complain about it, it’s an arrangement we’ve kept in place for decades. Even as traveling and career breaks have become more mainstream, this fundamental arrangement has not changed. Taking extended time off is simply not part of our cultural norms—and I don’t think it ever will be.

  In my years on the road, I’ve met people from around the world, and none of their cultures make this tradeoff. Even the notoriously overworked Japanese have a more flexible holiday schedule than American workers. Even they travel in larger numbers than we do. Recent reports1 state that close to half of Americans don’t take vacation time! HALF!

  So even when we are allowed to go, we don’t.

  Trundling up to this serene Buddhist temple on a rough wooden bench that was much less comfortable than the sofa I paid good money for back home in Boston, I began to see this tradeoff between time and money for what it truly was—a devil’s bargain—and how unhappy it made me.

  Had I really just used my entire year’s vacation? What would I do the rest of the year? And how are these guys taking a year off? What would they do for money and work? What was their secret? Were they rich? Their lifestyle seemed as foreign as the country we were riding through together, but I couldn’t help be anything but envious of their freedom.

  I wanted to be out living life and experiencing the world, not sitting behind a desk. To me, life felt like it happened when you traveled. There you were an active participant. It was on the road that I felt most at ease, most alive, and, most importantly, happy.

  As I toured the temple and went to bed that night, their words and ideas hung over me like a cloud.

  The next day, Scott and I took a cooking class—and found the three Canadians in it. As if the universe was trying to tell me something. Fate had brought us together again and now was my chance to get all my questions answered. There, in the kitchen of a little restaurant as we (poorly) made Pad Thai and spicy curry, I peppered them with the questions about their lifestyle that had played over and over again in my head the night before.

  How did you save money?

  We worked and used our savings to fund our trip. We might work on the road and take odd jobs to extend it. There’s actually a lot of ways to earn money when you travel, but since Southeast Asia is so cheap, we don’t need to do that right now.

  What about your parents? What did they think?

  Our parents only get upset if we forget to call every couple weeks.

  Yeah, but is this safe?

  You have to worry about being ripped off and scammed, but I haven’t felt physically unsafe. People are generally good people. You Americans tend to view the world as this fundamentally dangerous place, but it’s not.

  What about planning? I mean, how do you plan for this?!

  You just
learn to go with the flow. We planned a lot in the beginning but then you keep changing plans. You like a place and stay longer, or hate a place and leave. We usually decide a few days before we want to go somewhere that we’ll be there.

  Do you speak the local languages? Is it hard to get around?

  Nope. But people speak enough English where you can get by. Pointing helps.

  How do you stay on budget? Do you plan everything?

  Traveling isn’t really that expensive. You eat local food, stay in cheap guesthouses, take local transportation. I’m barely spending any money here. Beer is my biggest expense, especially when compared to Canada. I mean, a meal is less than a dollar.

  What happens if you get sick? What about your future? What about work?

  Dude, doctors exist all over the world. This isn’t 1700. You can buy medicine anywhere you need. Okay, maybe not in the jungles of Africa, but definitely here in Thailand. And the future? Who knows? Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. We’ll worry when we move back to Canada.

  I listened, wide-eyed, to their answers as they became my heroes.

  They seemed to have unlocked a secret to travel I didn’t know existed. The more they told me about their lifestyle—meeting people around the world, living in bungalows on the beach, eating delicious and cheap food, taking local transportation, and endless sightseeing—the more envious I became. They were living my dream, while I was just on a temporary break from the time-honored American tradition of working to live. They were masters of their domain while I was just using up my vacation days.

  I wanted to experiment with that life for myself—to try it and see if I could really make it mine. So after Chiang Mai, I made Scott stay one night on Bangkok’s Khoa San Road. It is ground zero for the backpacker scene in Southeast Asia. I wanted to test out what being a backpacker was like. I wanted to play the part and see if it fit. To fake it and see if I could make it.

  At a bar that night, I imagined myself as Backpacker Matt—someone who lived out of his backpack, someone who was brave and adventurous and always on the road, someone who had no problems striking up conversations with strangers. I walked up to a girl I’d never met before and invited her over to our table for drinks—something I’d never in a million years have done at home.

  I could really do this, I thought the next day as Scott and I left Bangkok again. I could stay in run-down hostels, eat cheap street food, talk to strangers, and have the adventure of my life. Or more simply, just have a life.

  * * *

  IT’S OFTEN SAID THAT the point of travel isn’t merely to see new places, but to see your old place in a new way. I was seeing Thailand, just as I’d seen Costa Rica, but more importantly, I was coming to see what my own home looked like as a foreign country. From Thailand, and in the company of my new heroes, my life looked much smaller than I had imagined. I had grown up with the notion that America was the best place on earth. The biggest, the richest, the freest, the most important—the “shining city on a hill.” Things happened outside our borders, but everyone outside those borders looked longingly to America. We were the model for everything and everyone else.

  And, within that American bubble, there was another bubble, the one in which I lived my $30,000 annual salary life. It was, we told ourselves, the best way of life in the best country on earth: the path from school to job to home ownership to retirement, with a couple of weeks of travel (to Disneyworld, most likely) sprinkled in each year. That was life. It was the life all other lives were aspiring to. The American Dream.

  But here, in Thailand, were people who didn’t want to live that life at all. People who were happy to be from somewhere other than America. People who believed, and acted as if, life was for living—not planning, saving, and climbing up to the next rung. It wasn’t about working until you retired so you could then start your life.

  It was about living it right now.

  The most remarkable thing, though, was how normal these people seemed. These were not cult members or drugged-out hippies. They were fundamentally ordinary people making the best of the time they were given. They were doing fine.

  Why wouldn’t I also be fine? I was an able-bodied adult.

  The earth has been host to nomadic cultures for as long as we have records—certainly for thousands of years, but likely much, much longer. Nomads have often butted heads with their “civilized” neighbors: civilizations build walls, while nomads travel with the changing seasons; civilizations keep livestock fenced in, while nomads follow herds across the plains or the steppe.

  But while I’ve tried to borrow a basic ethos from nomads across history—never stop moving—there’s an important way in which the modern nomad is a wholly different creature. True nomads travel for the sake of their livelihood, for subsistence and food.

  I wanted to travel to experience the world.

  I think that’s also the case for some of the most famous travelers in human history whose names we know. I think of people like the Muslim voyager Ibn Battuta, who journeyed from Morocco to China in the middle ages as a pilgrim, a trader, and an official. Or someone like Zheng He, the great admiral who explored the Pacific and Africa on behalf of the Chinese emperor in the 1400s.

  I’m inspired by them and the likes of Francesco Petrarca (better known as Petrarch), because he came up with a crazy idea: traveling for no reason at all. Petrarch was an Italian poet in the 1300s. The short encyclopedia entry on him is that he’s basically one of the reasons we had the Renaissance. One day in 1336, Petrarch, his brother, and two servants decided to climb a mountain—Mont Ventoux, in the south of France. That probably doesn’t sound like an especially big deal, but in the 1300s people didn’t climb mountains, they overcame them, to get somewhere else. Mountains were something in the way. They were steep, dangerous, cold, rocky. People even described them as “ugly.” And in a way, they were—they were obnoxious things that kept you from doing what you wanted to do, and getting where you wanted to go.

  And this is why Petrarch’s idea was so crazy: he wanted to climb a mountain just to see the view from the top. He didn’t have any business to do or money to make on the other side of the mountain, and there wasn’t a religious shrine or pilgrimage site on the way. He set out to climb a mountain for the hell of it. And he says (with some exaggeration, but probably not much) that he is the first one to even think of recreational mountain-climbing since ancient times.

  His ascent of Mont Ventoux is described in a letter, which is one of the most famous pieces of writing—travel writing, in fact—to come out of that time. Petrarch writes:

  To-day I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which is not improperly called Ventosum. My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer. I have had the expedition in mind for many years; for, as you know, I have lived in this region from infancy, having been cast here by that fate that determines the affairs of men. Consequently the mountain, which is visible from a great distance, was ever before my eyes, and I conceived the plan of some time doing what I have at last accomplished to-day.

  Now Petrarch is playing up the drama a bit here. If you’ve ever been to the south of France and seen it, Mont Ventoux is not that fearsome. It’s not even an Alp. Its top is about 6,000 feet above sea level (for comparison, the major peaks in the Rockies are at 14,000 feet), and you can get up and down in a day without any fancy mountaineering gear. The thing about Petrarch isn’t that he had the superhuman strength to climb a mountain before anyone invented crampons and oxygen tanks—it’s that he had the idea to climb a mountain. For the simple joy of it.

  Petrarch and his party made it to the peak. Finally at the top, he was rewarded with a glorious view—a view that no human being had seen for centuries.

  At first, owing to the unaccustomed quality of the air and the effect of the great sweep of view spread out before me, I stood like one dazed. I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos and Olympus seemed less incr
edible as I myself witnessed the same things from a mountain of less fame. I turned my eyes toward Italy, whither my heart most inclined. The Alps, rugged and snow-capped, seemed to rise close by, although they were really at a great distance.…

  Seven hundred years ago, it took a genius to imagine that travel was something you could do for no reason at all. You can just go see something because it exists. That’s what appealed to me. That’s the way I wanted to travel. The travelers I met showed me you don’t have to be rich to get on a budget airline and go. You just need the same desire that Petrarch experienced: the desire to take in the view, to see just how much this wide world has to offer.

  That’s what I mean by the modern nomadic path. Some people travel because they have places to go. Others travel because the journey is their true home. They want to see and experience and live as much as possible in their short time on this earth.

  In Thailand, I found that life was calling me. The idea that came into my head wasn’t as new as it was when it came into Petrarch’s, but it still felt like a discovery to me: you can—you should—travel for no reason at all.

  * * *

  ONE DAY, on the last stop of our trip, I left Scott to explore the island of Ko Samui, the island paradise with stunning beaches of white sand that have made Thailand so famous. I discovered a tiny sliver of sand with no resorts or restaurants called Lipe Noi beach. Local kids played in the sea. The soft pillowy clouds hung in the air over giant palm trees that shot out like claws to meet them. I could walk out seemingly forever in the water over flat, soft sand. I sat down in the water and gazed at the island behind me.

  Was I really going to leave this all behind in a few days? Was I really going to spend another year in an office without another break, not just working for the weekend, like Loverboy sung, but toiling for those two weeks when I could finally get the hell out of there again? I felt my stomach knot as I thought about going back.