What I was sure of was that I was not going to let Linda’s estimation of me define how I felt about myself or what I might do. I was going to prove her wrong! This, too, was a surprise. Not because I had the guts to ask Justine out, but that I would ask her out at all. That was a decidedly non-nomad thing to do. You don’t go on dates when you’re backpacking around the globe, staying in hostels. You hang out and hook up. Dates were something you did when you were sticking around awhile. This was expat behavior.
Later that week, I ran into Justine at a networking event and asked her to dinner. She accepted. I made a reservation at one of the nicer Thai restaurants in the city. I forget what I wore, but I’ll never forget the black dress and red lipstick she showed up in. She looked beautiful. Over dinner, we got lost in conversation. About everything. Linda was right, Justine did exude an air of sophistication. She was smart, educated, fiercely opinionated, and she shared many of my interests.
As the night ended, we kissed and she got in a cab.
“Call me,” she said as she disappeared into the night.
This was where the adult life I had imagined existed. The excitement, the people, the hive of activity, the singular romantic connection. This is what I wanted.
Justine was my gateway into life in Thailand that I wouldn’t have found as a backpacker—art openings, fancy restaurants, and regional foods, little hole-in-the-wall bars and clubs that go unnoticed. She taught me about the real Thailand and became my partner in crime.
However, as 2007 came to an end, work began to slow down. My company had expanded and there were too many teachers for too little work. Slowly, my hours kept shrinking and my feet began to itch accordingly. My original plan to stay a month had, in the blink of an eye, become eight. Without a good source of income anchoring me to the rhythms of daily Bangkok life, my mind once again began to wander to the road. According to my original plans, which I had almost entirely scuttled by this point, I was supposed to go to Australia right before Christmas. That was still three or four weeks away, but it was almost summer there anyway, so now seemed like as good a time as any to head south.
One night at a party, I broke the news to Justine: I was leaving for Australia three weeks earlier than planned. She did not take it well. She felt that I had made this decision without consulting her (there was truth to that) and exploded at me in our first—and only—fight. I think the fact that my trip was now a reality and not “something in the future” finally hit her. She had been discussing a future between us that ignored the fact I had told her about my travel plans from day one. I had just sped up the confrontation.
This is the eternal tension between the comfort and connection of the expat life and the restless, adventurous spirit of a nomad, of the perpetual traveler. They’re like tectonic plates in a subduction zone. They can coexist quietly with each other for some length of time, but eventually the pressure they exert against each other will cause them to slip and one will get crushed under by the other, creating real damage at that epicenter of the break.
The traveler in me had come back and it was time to move forward. These two tensions couldn’t coexist anymore. I knew this day was going to come. I had kept myself from getting too invested in my relationship for that very reason. I was taking things one day at a time. For Justine, a permanent resident of the city who was looking for something permanent, my natural nomadic sensibility blew up our relationship, because even she knew that there is no changing nature.
I was a nomad, and eventually, all nomads need to move on.
* * *
I HAD MIXED FEELINGS LEAVING BANGKOK.
When I first visited in 2005, I hated the city. As a tourist city, I still think it’s terrible. There’s not much to do or see. It’s hard to get around. It’s polluted. It doesn’t have the endless activities for travelers that Paris or New York City offer.
As a tourist, I held my limited view of the city as gospel. There couldn’t be any more to the place than what I saw. I had walked, I had seen the sights, and I had met the people. I had seen the city. If it was a bad tourist city, it must have just been a bad city.
This is something travelers do often. We pass through places, superficially making observations and generalizations as though we are experts and learned scholars.
We make sweeping judgments based on the limited interactions we have with locals, the weather, or some little mishap we are forced to endure. We see a snapshot of life and create a complete history from that one image.
On the road, you often hear people say things like, “The French are rude” or “I was in that city. It’s boring there’s nothing to do.” But could an entire people be rude? Maybe there was something they did, as tourists, that got a rude response? Maybe they are boring and don’t really know the city? Maybe they just missed something?
There are a million factors that can make or break a place. I hated Los Angeles until I really got to know it. To me, as a tourist, it was difficult to get around and I felt like there wasn’t very much to do. But the more I visited, the more I realized there was a lot to do. That there isn’t one Los Angeles, there are seven Los Angeleses, each with their own unique character. The problem was just that there wasn’t a lot of tourist stuff to do.
Living in Bangkok taught me a similar set of lessons. I had made sweeping judgments based on limited experience. I painted a picture of the entire city from what I could see through the tiny peephole of my personal perspective. I hated a city that I really knew nothing about.
Needless to say now, but a handful of days in a city doesn’t tell you much about the people or the place.
Bangkok might be the world’s worst tourist city, but it was an incredible place to live in. The city I hated was now one I was going to miss tremendously. I had fallen in love with it.
Living around the world—first in Amsterdam, then in Bangkok, as well as Taipei and later Stockholm—taught me that if you slow down, you see more. It is only then that a place reveals its secrets to you. Slower travel also teaches you about yourself.
I moved to Bangkok not knowing anyone and I spent the first weeks alone on my computer. Yet, thanks to luck and Zrs, I made friends, got a job, learned the language, found a girlfriend, and created a social network. I navigated banking systems, rent, bills, and a culture I didn’t understand.
Bangkok showed me that I could be self-reliant and independent. It taught me that I could shed the shy, nervous, and insecure kid I used to be. In Bangkok, I lived the life I had imagined in my head because for once I wasn’t living out of the backpack into which I had smuggled all my baggage from home. I had settled in. I didn’t let the past hold me down. I just became who I wanted. I discovered that I could love a place as a local, even if I didn’t love it as a tourist. I could thrive in its out-of-the-way haunts and secret spots, the places a tourist wouldn’t even think to look. I could feel at home on the other side of the world.
Bangkok taught me to slow down—a lesson I tell other travelers. You don’t need to live in a place to learn something meaningful about it. But you do need more than a few alcohol-fueled days. It taught me that every place deserves a second chance, and that first impressions aren’t always accurate.
And, most importantly, my experiences showed me that if I could start a life in Bangkok, I could start a life anywhere.
8
Love on the Road
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
—PICO IYER
I WAS READY TO LEAVE BANGKOK, even at the cost of losing my budding relationship with Justine, because, when push came to shove, I was committed more than anything to my nomadism. Put
ting down roots was fine for a while, but I had no desire to put them down permanently.
It was a pattern that would repeat itself for years to come.
* * *
IN EARLY 2011, I was in Panama City and sharing a dorm room with a Finnish girl named Heidi. She was twenty-six, with typical Scandinavian features, and a carefree attitude toward the world. She waited tables during the summer and traveled in the winter. She was smart, extremely sarcastic, and knew how to playfully push my buttons.
She was also my opposite—opposed to technology, didn’t have a camera or Facebook account, and only checked email once a week—so naturally we hit it off right away.
“Technology just weighs you down. I want to explore the way people used to communicate. With my undivided attention. I don’t want to spend my entire trip behind a screen. That’s not how one should travel,” she explained, challenging everything I had turned into over the previous three years.
We began talking about going to Colombia. Heidi had found a couple to take her there on their boat by way of the San Blas Islands and she invited me to join them (but mostly her). The islands were supposed to be beautiful, remote, and unspoiled. A tropical paradise with white sand beaches, palm trees, and crystal blue water. I liked the idea of sailing to Colombia with Heidi. It was like a romantic fairytale. Here we were, two travelers meeting in a random country about to take a last-minute sailing trip through a tropical paradise.
Staring into a pair of blue eyes that could read me far better than I could read them, I went with my gut.
“Okay, I’ll do it!”
We took the bus down to the port town of Portobelo where Heidi’s friends were getting ready to set sail from. Beyond a few shops, a town square, and an old fort, there wasn’t anything to do in Portobelo except launch boats out into the Caribbean Sea. To the west was the rest of Central America, immediately to the east was Colombia. If you found yourself in Portobelo, chances were you were going to one of those two places.
But, the day before we were set to sail, I got cold feet. It wasn’t sailing, it wasn’t Heidi, it wasn’t Colombia. It was being afraid of going offline.
Because, unlike Heidi, I couldn’t just walk away from technology and the internet.
In my years on the road, I’d learned quite a bit about the art of budget travel and met no end of people who shared my interests. I also knew there were thousands (maybe millions?) of people out there who wanted to do what I was doing but hadn’t figured out how to pull it off.
When I came back home in 2008, I wanted to figure out the best way to use my travel experience to become a travel writer. I could see it all. I would discover unknown lands and report on them back home. I would offer insights from my firsthand experience with hostels, local culture, tourist traps, train, bus, and air travel. I would be a travel writer. A job that would keep me traveling. While I didn’t know the first thing about being a writer, it seemed like a dreamy, adventurous job that would allow me to live out all those Indiana Jones fantasies from my youth.
Travel the world and get paid for it.
That would be the dream.
In 2008, that meant doing one thing: starting a blog. At first I thought of my website as more of an online résumé. I wanted my website to be a place where editors could see my writing and go, “Yeah, we want to hire that guy!”—and then send me places around the world.
Ironically, the path for this dream to become a reality would have to begin in the one place I was desperately trying not to come back to: home.
When I left Bangkok, my hop down to Australia was only a pit stop. Two months removed from my expat life in Thailand, I was ensconced in what now felt like an even more foreign place—my childhood home—ready to begin my career as a travel writer. I registered NomadicMatt.com, sat down to build a website, and then realized I had no idea what I was doing.
The first several weeks were an absolute struggle. It was only with the help of a couple I met in Vietnam who were web designers, that I was able to learn html, the ins and outs of servers, web design, and how to interact effectively with people online. Sometimes even the simplest thing, like posting an image gallery to my site, could feel like hacking into an NSA database.
As the weeks turned into months, however, I got more comfortable with the technical aspects of running a website and spent more and more time writing stories about previous trips, giving advice on how to travel, and opining on matters of politics and travel. It was a lot of tedious, unrewarding work at first. But, gradually, as friends shared links to my blog and I found new topics to write about, I found that I was building a real audience that consisted more than just my parents refreshing the page in attempt to learn new things about me.
More than that, building my website gave my time away from the road a sense of purpose. I hadn’t quit on my dream by coming home. By becoming a writer I was merely hitting the pause button to give myself the time and space I needed to make the most ideal version of my dream a reality—a life of traveling the world forever.
It took a while, to be sure, but by the end of 2009 things were trending in the right direction. While I was in New Zealand I caught a break. I saw a tweet from the writer of the New York Times Frugal Traveler column on budget travel, asking if there were any bloggers out there who wanted to talk about how they made money.
“I do! I’d be happy to talk,” I tweeted back. We exchanged messages. He agreed to interview me. In the middle of a small town in New Zealand as my tour group ate lunch, I walked outside and took a phone call that would change the course of my blog forever.
A few weeks later, I woke up to text messages and emails letting me know my website was down. Groggy and confused, I tried to load my website. It wouldn’t work. While I was asleep, the New York Times had finally published the profile on me and sent so much traffic to my website it crashed. Repeatedly. For the entire day.
But my website was on the map now. I became a regular on radio and in print, giving interviews on the industry and budget travel. I spoke at conferences. I wrote articles and did interviews on other, much larger websites and blogs. My parents finally had something to point to—see our son isn’t an itinerant loser, he’s famous! He’s employed.
Having a job quickly changed how I traveled. Sure, it removed the anxiety of not knowing how I would pay for the next leg of any trip, but it replaced that uncertainty with a different kind of anxiety. The kind that comes from responsibility. Before, I was a carefree traveler with no obligations and complete freedom. I could do what I wanted. Now, I had blogs to write, emails to answer, content to post, images to edit, and interviews to do. I loved my work and the ability to work anywhere, but it still came with deadlines and responsibilities.
I was no longer just in search of sandy beaches and fun bars, but also reliable WiFi and outlets with USB ports. Soon enough, my travels slowed to match the pace at which my workload increased. Day and night, I found myself preoccupied with the blog, with sustaining the readership I needed to feel like a success. I found myself falling more and more out of the moment. I couldn’t just travel on a whim anymore. I was the guy in the back of the hostel in front of his computer while everyone else was sharing stories and making new friends. I was that guy even when I was out seeing the sights I’d come so far to see. Now, it wasn’t, “What an amazing temple! Look at the detail on that sculpture! And these noodles are the best ever!” Now, it was, “This temple will make a great blog post. I better get a photo of that sculpture for my readers while the lighting is still good. I’d better remember how these noodles taste so I can write about them later.” I was becoming a real travel writer, but at the expense of the nomadic life.
I had somehow managed to work myself into a real job.
But a job was the last thing I wanted. That was the whole reason I left Bangkok. And yet, here I was. Every hostel bunk became a cubicle. Every dinner was a fact-finding mission. Worse still, these works habits were starting to cost me relationships that I valued.
> And, while I had struggled with the balance between working overseas and being a traveler true to his roots, Heidi was the one who forced me to choose between those two tensions—and showed me that they couldn’t equally coexist.
As I thought about my trip, my mind raced through worst-case scenarios. What if something happened? We’d be out on the ocean and I wouldn’t be able to fix anything. What if I missed an interview? An ad deal? A reader had a problem reaching out to me? What if, what if, what if!
Going offline when I ran an online business was more than I was comfortable doing. Don’t get me wrong, I deeply wanted to travel with Heidi. That was the reason for running my blog in the first place: so I could travel; so I could see new things and make deep connections.
Yet this job that was supposed to give me freedom and flexibility had somehow managed to chain me to a virtual desk and made me afraid of the uncertainty that might come if I unchained myself from it. I just wasn’t ready, or able really, to say “fuck it,” which probably bothered me more than it bothered Heidi, but it was close.
“This is why I don’t carry electronics or work when I travel. Travel is about letting go,” Heidi said to me when I broke the news.
“I know but I’ve never done this before. I’ve never left my website for more than a day.”
“Yes, but what do you think will happen?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “What if it goes offline?”
“Who cares? It will go back up. How can you write about things if you don’t experience them?”
“I experience stuff. We’ve done a lot.”
“I didn’t mean literally,” she said giving me a piercing look. “What I am saying is that when you started traveling, you were there 100 percent body and soul, right? When you are behind your computer working, you aren’t. When you are always connected on Facebook, you aren’t. When you spend twenty minutes trying to get a photo of that perfect sunset, you aren’t. Seems like such a waste.”
Ten Years a Nomad Page 10