Ten Years a Nomad

by Matthew Kepnes

  She was absolutely right. I had let work control me. She saw through all my excuses, all my fear. Afraid of losing her respect—and maybe even her, too—I told her I would clear some stuff away and I would meet her in Colombia. I still couldn’t give her everything she wanted, everything I’d originally committed to, but it felt like a decent compromise.

  “You get there in seven days, right? Email me when you arrive and I’ll hop on the next flight and meet you. This way,” I continued, “when I see you again, I’ll be disconnected from the web and we can enjoy Colombia the way it’s meant to be.”

  “Okay. Sure,” she said. I could sense the doubt in her voice.

  “I’ll see you in a week,” I said, kissing her good-bye.

  I never heard from her again. The week came and went. A friend who was also on the boat said they landed safely. I knew she had made it but my emails got no response. As I continued around Panama, I checked my email each day in hopes that eventually, one day, I would hear from her, but I never did.

  Heidi was gone.

  I understand why she ghosted. Here I was, a guy who chose work and technology over sailing to Colombia with a beautiful woman who liked him. We were fundamentally different people, I guess, and she probably wanted someone who was more carefree.

  I wish I could say it was a wake-up call, but it wasn’t. It was more like a self-inflicted kick in the nuts.

  I had set out on my travels because I wanted to live instead of work. But as my blog took off, I found that the same old work/life problems were rearing their head again. If I wasn’t sightseeing, I was working. Though it didn’t make my trips less fun, it did make them less carefree. There’d be no sudden sailing trips to Colombia or time living on an island in Thailand anymore.

  And because of my inability to unplug, I had missed an opportunity to spend time with a woman I really liked.

  Worst of all, I’d forgotten one of my most important lessons, one I’ve already written about in this book, and one that I tried to get through to my readers on my blog: you control your plans; don’t let your plans control you.

  I’d started the blog in order to support my travel—in order to stay on the road even longer than I’d hoped when I set out. But slowly, I forgot why I was blogging, and found that blogging had become an end in itself. Ironically, the blog I started to support my travel had cost me the kind of opportunity that travel was supposed to be all about.

  Because I couldn’t learn to go with the flow.

  Because I got tied to my plans.

  I’d learned long ago to let go and let travel take you where it wants. Now, travel presented me with a choice to do something great with someone great. But I resisted. And travel, once again, taught me a hard lesson.

  The lesson is that travel is all about seizing the opportunities in front of you—especially when they’re opportunities to throw away your plans. As I realized that Heidi wasn’t emailing back, I resolved to never forget why I began traveling in the first place. For the freedom and adventure. Heidi was the embodiment of everything I loved about travel and what pushed me to give it a go way back in the very beginning: she was a girl who had unhooked herself from modern life and let travel dictate her plans. I’d let plans dictate my travel—a mistake I vowed not to make again.

  Somewhere, I’m sure Heidi agrees.

  * * *

  FINDING ROMANCE while traveling isn’t hard. In the intense forge of travel, romances spring up rapidly. The same mind-set it takes to open yourself up to new experiences also helps you open yourself up to new people. Travel itself is romantic—passionate, scary, risky, all at once—and so it shouldn’t be surprising that travel fosters romance. When we’re on the road, we’re often our best—or at least our most exciting—selves. For a brief time in our lives, we’re people straight out of personals ads: curious, adventurous, full of new ideas and thrilling plans. Anyone seems sexier when setting out to explore a brand-new city than they do on the third of fourth morning of a five-day workweek.

  Travel accelerates relationships, too. You can court, fall in love, and break up, all in a matter of a few days. In that way, there is almost paradoxically a perpetual singleness that goes along with traveling as well. It’s very hard to build a long-term relationship when you are always on the move and never in one place long enough to build a lasting relationship with someone who lives there. And if you are dating another traveler, at some point it’s time for you (or them) to move on. They go one way, you go another, and that’s the end of your relationship.

  In 2006, I was in Cambodia talking to some other backpackers in my hostel when a group of Swedish girls sat down next us. One caught my eye. Or, more accurately, I caught her eye. When we all went out later, she and I talked mostly to each other. Our conversation lasted four months and three countries. We didn’t say good-bye until we were in Thailand, when she boarded a flight back to Stockholm and I stayed in Bangkok.

  The following year, on a tour of Uluru in Australia, I struck up a conversation with a German girl. She became my travel partner for two months. I stayed at her place in Brisbane, and we met up again in Amsterdam the following year. We enjoyed one another’s company—but after a few months, we realized, in a sense, that we weren’t in the same story. We, too, went our separate ways.

  Then there was the Austrian woman I dated while living in Taiwan in early 2009. When my visa expired, and when she moved back to Vienna, our relationship fizzled out. I visited her in Vienna a few months later, but the truth was painfully obvious: she didn’t want to leave Vienna, and I wasn’t ready to stop traveling. Spending time together outside the context of travel, when she was at home but I wasn’t, we both realized that the spark had gone.

  This pattern repeats itself often on the road. I call these relationships “destination travel relationships.” Without “life” getting in the way, relationships, like travel friendships, move quickly. You don’t think about tomorrow. You don’t think about your partner’s past. You simply enjoy each other’s company for as long as it will last. Maybe that’s four months in Southeast Asia. Maybe it’s a few weeks up the east coast of Australia. Or maybe it is just that week together in Amsterdam.

  Destination relationships give travelers a chance at human contact, but without all the messy emotions that so often get involved. They have a clear start and end date. There are no messy breakups. Often, because these relationships tend to end amicably, you can still be friends after. I still talk to the girls I’ve dated on the road. We shared special times together, and then we both moved on. No hard feelings. The logistics of a destination relationship—the realities of a planned route, bus timetables, flight schedules, visa expirations—got in the way. What really brings those relationships to an end is the mutual, if unspoken, agreement that both of you are more committed to traveling than to each other. And that’s fine—there’s no better recipe for an unhappy long-term relationship than settling down before both partners are fully ready. The beauty of relationships on the road is that everyone shares the same set of priorities. And if those priorities don’t make long-term love possible, they do enable a lot more honesty about what we’re really looking for.

  I grew up thinking that there’s something wrong with a relationship that both parties understand to be fleeting. Even as college students and twentysomethings participate in hookup culture, we’ve still internalized the sort of goal-oriented, puritanical message that America is so good at drilling into our heads: the point of hooking up is to ultimately find someone to be with forever, to stop hooking up and start settling down. A breakup, after all, means that something has broken—relationships that end are failures. It took me a while to get over this mind-set, to learn to see the momentary beauty in relationships that everyone involved agreed were fleeting. Impermanence can be beautiful, too.

  It took time for me to learn that lesson, and to recognize the difference between when something was fleeting and something was for real.

  When I was in Florence, I was
sitting in my hostel’s large courtyard drinking cheap but delicious wine with Peter when I noticed a beautiful girl across the courtyard who, eventually, noticed me, too. Her name was Anna. She was sitting with seven others—two girls and five guys—all of whom, including Anna, were from Valencia, Spain, had just graduated university, and were getting ready to go to a club.

  “Would you like to join us?” they asked in better English than my broken Spanish, when I walked over to their table with my friend and we introduced ourselves.

  “Of course,” we said.

  While walking to the club, which ended up being right down the street, I did my best to flirt with Anna in the limited time we had before house music drowned out our voices. She smiled and said something in Spanish before turning to her friends and entering the club with them.

  Inside, however, Anna warmed up to me. And as the night wore on, she started talking more, and her body language changed. When we got back to the hostel at the end of the night, we raided the kitchen for late-night snacks and took them out into the wide courtyard where we ate and talked and then kissed.

  “Where is your room?” she asked, pulling away momentarily. “I’m with my friends. Let’s go to your room.”

  My dorm was mostly empty and the two guys in the far corner snored so loudly that I don’t think they noticed us come in. In the morning, after Anna left, I apologized for “coming in drunk so late.” They shrugged. That’s how it goes on the road. And it should have been the end of the story, if I’d known better.

  Later that day, Anna, her friends, and I toured Florence. We wandered to the Ponte Vecchio, the famous covered bridge. The bridge was crowded with foot traffic and lined with shops that were braced perilously over the Arno River. I wondered how it had all stayed intact for six and a half centuries.

  With a limited budget, all we could afford was walking and people watching, splurging only occasionally on gelato to grease the wheels. We watched sharp-dressed Italians zoom by on scooters, and we watched tour groups gawk at the sights. We strolled to Piazzale Michelangelo and we gazed down on the town and its red-colored roofs.

  But the more I tried to talk to Anna, the less interested she became. It was a classic case, exacerbated by the way the road brings you in touch with so many new faces each day and encourages you to compare and take stock of your options: if I was so interested in her, then surely she could do better. The more someone wants you, after all, the less you want them. This experience brought out a host of old insecurities. What did I do wrong? Was I coming across as too needy? Did I not know a drunk hookup when I saw one?

  Deep down I knew I wasn’t going to see Anna again, but it still stung. Fortunately, the hurt we often feel in situations like these is a sign that we’re learning something important. What I was learning was not to make relationships on the road into more than they were, into more than the moment called for. It’s okay to be transitory, and it’s okay to let go—to stop trying so hard to make everything last beyond its expiration date. Just for a moment, I’d caught the eye of a foreign beauty, and in the span of a day, I’d been through love, lust, and the pain of rejection.

  That’s not to say relationships on the road can’t work, but someone has to change the direction of his or her life to make that a reality. Someone needs to say, “Okay, I’ll move to your place” or “Okay, I’ll go with you to that country.” Someone has to cede the wheel or the map, or at least be willing to share it. And, when the whole point of traveling is to enjoy the freedom of deciding where and when you get to go, not many people do that.

  I’ve met couples who have found love on the road, traveled together, and then settled down when one of the partners agreed to a long-term move. Or they started a new life together, finding a new city that neither wanted to leave. You come together when your paths temporarily cross but, if you stick to your original plans, they will surely uncross again.

  That’s how it was for me, the compass was constantly driving me away from whatever fate might have aligned. Travel was my only love. When push came to shove, I always chose the road and the excitement and adventure that awaited. It was why Justine and I split, it was why I knew there was no future for me in Vienna or in Australia.

  But by the time I met Samantha at the end of 2011, in the wake of having blown it with Heidi months earlier, I finally began to accept that the fleeting nature of travel romance was all too fleeting for me. I wanted something deeper and longer lasting.

  * * *

  “WE’RE GOING TO GRAB drinks if you want join us,” I wrote back to Samantha. She was traveling the region with her friend, Kira. Like me, they had a travel blog; when they saw I was in Bangkok, they emailed me to meet up.

  “Meet us on Khao San Road,” I replied

  “Sure,” she wrote back, “We’ll meet you there.”

  I was meeting some blogger friends at one of the roadside buckets bars on Khao San Road. Over the previous three years, most of my new friends had come from the blogging community. It had been strange running into an online friend for the first time in Thailand, or Florence, or the Outback, and feeling as if you’d known them for months or years. But that’s the nature of travel in a networked world, and I got used to it.

  Samantha and Kira showed up about thirty minutes after the rest of us arrived. Samantha was short, with beautiful blue eyes and a wide smile. Originally from Oregon, she was affable, funny, and gregarious. As the night went on, we talked until we were the only two people left at the bar.

  The next morning, Samantha joined the rest of us as we talked over our coming trip to Ko Chang, an island near the coast of Thailand. In all the years I’d been in Thailand, I’d never gone and thinking back to how those backpackers in 2005 told me it was paradise, decided it was finally time to see it. Samantha listened intently, then came with us as we went for drinks and to see some sights. Kira’s boyfriend was in town, and she and Kira had been fighting recently, so she had lots of free time on her hands to do with as she pleased. When she mentioned that, it was clear their travel styles were diverging and she was kind of done being a third wheel, so I invited her to come with us to Ko Chang.

  “Come! It will be fun,” I said to her. “We’re only going for a few days. It will be a good way to help your stress. Sometimes you just need some time away.”

  “Let me think about it,” she said.

  A few hours later, she called me. “Okay! I’m in. I’ll go!”

  Samantha was beautiful, smart, and adventurous. In her, I found the travel partner I wanted. Samantha went with the flow and wanted to meet people. We shared a bungalow, went to the beach, and went snorkeling. As we laughed, drank, and partied, Samantha slowly began to relax.

  From Ko Chang, Samantha and I went back to Bangkok, where she and Kira officially went their separate ways for the sake of their friendship, and then we went to Chiang Mai. In Chang Mai, Samantha, having been there recently, became my food guide. We wandered markets, tried khao soi, frequented the famed Dada Kafe for breakfast each morning, and, during the Sunday market, divided and conquered food halls, bringing back random assortments of food to our table to try.

  From there, we went to Kuala Lumpur and then flew to Cambodia in the new year. We were going to spend a few weeks in the beach town of Sihanoukville. Earlier in the year, an email from a publishing house had landed in my inbox. An editor there had found my website and wanted to turn my ebook, How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, into a book. A real book.

  I replied. The offer was real. Papers were signed—and the work began. Slowly. A blog is easy. An ebook is easy. A book is hard. As the March deadline got closer, I began to stress out about finishing it. There was a lot more research than I had originally expected, and I had underestimated the level of detail I’d have to add to the ebook.

  Thankfully, Samantha was all too happy to hang out in Cambodia while I finished writing. We had been traveling together for four months, and she was also ready to take a break.

  We’d spend the mornin
gs working before heading to the beach or on another activity before I’d write again after lunch. At night, we’d meet with a few people for drinks and dinner. As we began to stay longer, we became regulars at a few places and friends with the owners and staff.

  As the clock ticked down on the due date for my book, Samantha left to visit Vietnam with her mom. When you are with someone 24/7 and dealing with the stresses of the road, your relationship ages faster. We’d never officially given ourselves the boyfriend/girlfriend titles, but we were for all intents and purposes a couple. For the first time in many years, I began to think about not leaving, about not wanting her to leave, about not wanting there to be an end to this, to us. And I worried that her going to Vietnam while I stayed in Cambodia to finish the book would be, like so many relationships before, the beginning of that end. Not only that, but once I was done, I would be returning to the States to speak at some conferences, and put in another round of edits, while she was headed home to Oregon a few months after that to help take care of a sick uncle.

  Weeks later, we met up back in Bangkok one last time before I left. I didn’t want to leave her. I didn’t want to say good-bye. So instead, I tried to turn it into a “See ya later.” I invited her to Japan and to Sweden with me (where I wanted to spend the summer).

  “Ohh, you’re going to pay for the trip?” she said sarcastically, laughing at the suggestion.

  “Yeah, I want to see you,” I replied. “You’ve always wanted to go to Japan, and we can find a place in Stockholm for a few months.”

  “Let me think about it,” she said. The next day I left for home.

  Unlike our first trip to Ko Chang, this time there would be no enthusiastic phone call telling me she was in. Our conversations became less frequent. And when she didn’t call on my birthday I knew that she was out. Though she called a few days later and I countered that I’d go anywhere she wanted to go, she said no.