Ten Years a Nomad

by Matthew Kepnes

  “Yes, right now. Come on, I’m driving.”

  We headed up the mountain. As Francesco quickly rounded every corner and veered along the tiny, winding mountain track in the dark, I shut my eyes. Francesco assured me we were fine, but I was always afraid we were going to tumble off the edge. In Greece, there are no guardrails.

  “Don’t worry! I’ve been on these roads all my life!” he assured me giving me a “fucking wimp” eye roll.

  Arriving at the festival, Francesco ushered me into the back garden. In front of me were Greek women cleaning large food bowls while huge cooking pots heating soup and goat meat sat on top of large wood fires. Francesco grabbed me a clean bowl from the pile, poured some soup into it, and threw in some chunks of goat.

  “Eat. It’s like deer.”

  I sat down at a table full of Greek men who looked at me like I was an alien from Mars. Francesco said a few things in Greek, and the men smiled, making an eating gesture. They stared as I ate every bit of food. Here I was, a stranger in their world, and these old, cigarette-smoking Greek men watched me try whatever food I was given.

  The goat was delicious. Tender, falling off the bone, it tasted a lot like lamb. I don’t know what the soup was made of, but that, too, was good. It had a thick, rice-porridge consistency. The bread was airy and obviously homemade, soaking up the hot soup well.

  After the soup came wine, more bread, and different cheeses—“from Ios” a grizzled man on the corner with a cap and long cigarette said. The soft goat cheese was some of the milkiest and smoothest goat cheese I’ve ever had. I cleaned the whole plate as a small Greek grandmother with a wooden cane and black shawl stopped and watched.

  “Can I have some more?” I said cleaning the bowl.

  This wasn’t the kind of stuff they served to all us tourists back in town. This stuff was full of melt-in-your-mouth meat, crusty bread, and soup that was bursting with flavor.

  After the meal and another glass of wine, I left the old patriarchs to go watch the dancing taking place in the front courtyard. As the band played on and the night got later, the crowd began to thin out. In the old days, they would have taken donkeys up to the monastery to stay the night. Now people stay until around midnight before driving back.

  Francesco came and got me. It was time to go. “It’s good. You like it?”

  “Yeah, it was the most Greek thing I’ve done in Greece.”

  “Good. Write about it. It will make a better story than about you getting drunk with other backpackers. This is the real Greece. Not that other bullshit.”

  * * *

  I’VE AVOIDED REVISITING a lot of places for fear that I’ll “ruin” my initial experience there and walk away disappointed. For example, in my mind, Ko Lipe is a deserted island in Thailand where I made lifelong friends. Going back to a now-overdeveloped island teeming with tourists and resorts would be something I couldn’t handle. It would be paradise lost.

  But, as Francesco drove me back, I realized Bill and I were wrong.

  You can return to a place and love it just as much—if not more—than the first time but only if you go back with different intentions.

  If you go back expecting the same magic to happen, you’re going to be disappointed. You can’t play the same movie twice and if you’re hoping for a rerun, you’re just setting yourself up for failure. People are what really make a destination—a magical concurrence where time and place produced a magical cocktail of friends and experiences. All my favorite memories revolve around the people who were there and how they made me feel at the time. It was never the place. That was merely the backdrop.

  Just as people who choose a conventional life can get tied down to jobs and mortgages, people like me who choose a nomadic life can get tied down by memories. We can become protective of them—so afraid of tarnishing them that we never again set foot in the place where those memories were made. But just as Bill had a point—you can’t recapture what’s gone—taking that advice too far can cause us to miss out on making new memories.

  The problem wasn’t with the place. It was me. It my false belief that a second visit could never recapture the first one. And while maybe it couldn’t, it could be something new, and good in its own right. You can’t relive the same moment twice, but you can still revisit a place you love. Going back doesn’t have to mean chasing ghosts.

  You have to go back because you love the food, or the weather, or the style, or the beaches, or the people. You have to go back for the sheer joy of it.

  As I’ve spent over a decade on the road, I learned that chasing ghosts is just as bad as never giving a place a second chance. I hated Bangkok until I lived there. I hated Los Angeles until I had been there a handful of times. I didn’t love Berlin until my second visit. So much of a place depends on such a wide variety of factors that it’s hard to say a place is terrible based on just one visit. Likewise, there’s no reason to resist going back because “what if it’s not as good the second time around?”

  Because I was too afraid of tarnishing my old memories, I almost missed out on the wonderful new memories I made on Ios. If I had decided to keep protecting my glass house, I would never have gotten to experience one of the most authentic, deeply enlightening moments I’ve ever had in my visits to Greece.

  Since that awakening in Greece, I’ve found myself revisiting many places. But I no longer feel I’m chasing ghosts. Those first memories will always be special ones. I return now because I want to create new, deeper memories. Because I want to peel back the layers more.

  Heraclitus—who was Greek, after all—would understand. While he told us that we couldn’t step in the same river twice, he didn’t tell us to stop stepping in rivers.

  11

  You Can Only “Run Away” for So Long

  Adventure is a path. Real adventure—self-determined, self-motivated, often risky—forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind—and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you.

  —MARK JENKINS

  HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE your life? Could a few words encapsulate the highs, the lows, the joys, the sadness of it all?

  When people ask me how I like travel, all I can reply is “Yes, I love it. It’s great.”

  To explain all the highs, lows, joys, and frustrations would take hours of conversation. And even that would be futile. Those who understand it don’t need words, and for those who don’t—who haven’t felt the pull of the road or woken up in a sweaty hostel surrounded by foreign strangers—there will never be enough words. The question asks for a short answer, the truth requires experience.

  Travel hits you with so many emotions it leaves you a bit numb. You are constantly bombarded by new sights, smells, situations, and people that it takes time to process all that.

  But the thing you forget as you navigate the sensory gauntlet of the road is that someone else is traveling with you: time.

  Suddenly, one day you wake up and ten years has passed. You’ve aged out of dorm rooms. You relish your sleep. You don’t want to do that pub crawl, because hangovers don’t linger through lunch anymore, they camp out behind your eyes for two days. You don’t care to meet another twenty-three-year-old traveler. You have more friends than you can keep track of anyways.

  Nobody tells you life changes. It just happens. Slowly and insidiously.

  Unlike the moment I went away, there was no defining moment over the last decade where I woke up and said “Yes, I’m different now.” It was an evolution. It was a process of incrementally pushing myself, retreating to comfort zones, and pushing myself again. Changes occurred imperceptibly, until finally enough change accumulated that when I looked in the mirror I saw a different animal.

  One day, I found myself a travel writer. One day, I found myself walking
up to a girl at a bar in Taipei with confidence. One day, I found myself doing adventure sports I never would have done before. One day, I was done. The constant push and pull between fear and adventure, between the desire for the freedom of the road and the need for financial security to stay there, had changed me.

  It changed how I travel. I needed to slow down and, after my wake-up call with Heidi in 2011, I didn’t want to travel as much. Life had become a Faustian bargain. Either I traveled or I worked and, when I did both, I found joy in neither. I wasn’t giving both my twin loves (and yes, I really do love my work) the attention they deserved and as such, everything suffered. I would sightsee less, spend longer in each destination, but still take lots of days off, often in a row, in hopes of “fixing” this gnawing unhappiness in me. If that sounds a little like depression, well, I’m no doctor, but I’m also no fool.

  I had built a career around being a nomad, and, though burnout was happening with increasing frequency, I couldn’t seem to get off the road. I would go through the motions, because travel was who I was. My self-identity was tied up to the concept of me as a nomad. On the road, I felt like a king, and more and more it seemed, heavy was the head that wore the crown. Whereas before I could go months without feeling burnout, now it was only weeks before that happened.

  This led to an internal crisis.

  Travel was my thing. When I felt down or stale, I’d go away again and the cycle would repeat itself. Bored at home? Let’s cash in miles and head to Iceland for a few weeks. Let’s go sail the Caribbean. I’d tell the girls I’d date I wouldn’t be gone long—maybe a few weeks. But then weeks would become months and they were gone by the time I came back.

  I was a ship tossed around by gigantic waves. I had no direction. No course to follow. But, starting in 2012, I noticed life turned into a battle of disparate goals. I kept trying to live too many lives: traveler, business owner, New Yorker.

  I was stressed. Juggling these different impulses had drained me. I didn’t know how to do it anymore. The years had taken their toll.

  Back in early 2012, I began to realize that, while I wasn’t running away in the traditional sense, like a person on a treadmill, I wasn’t getting where I was headed.

  When the book was finally done and before I went to see Samantha in Bangkok, I took a trip to Bamboo Island, a small island in Cambodia that you can cross in ten minutes. There were only ten bungalows. No internet. No power except from 6:00 to 11:00 PM. No hot water. No fans. It’s just you, the beach, a good book, and a handful of other people.

  I went with two British friends who knew the manager of the resort, and he was having a “bungalow warming party” to celebrate a newly built bungalow. It would be him, the local staff, and us. On my last night there, I watched the travel movie, A Map for Saturday. As it ended and the travelers interviewed in the movie talked about going home and their sense of loss, I began to cry. No, crying doesn’t describe it enough. I wept.

  For the first time, I felt as if my travels were truly ending. Unlike before, I would be going home and there were no plans to come back.

  I walked out of my bungalow and sat down on the beach.

  Looking out at the ocean as tears ran down my face, I thought about the path that brought me to this beach in Cambodia. In the distance waves shimmered under the moon and stars. There was no breeze. Just another hot night in Cambodia. Even though the sun had set hours ago, the air hung heavy with humidity.

  After six years on the road, I was going home to Boston. To apartment hunting, furniture shopping, cable bills, traffic, and making sure I have gas in my car. My future held book tours, conferences, work, and deadlines. Responsibility had crept back into my life.

  Would I be able to pick up the routine after so long? Would it be like riding a bike? What a scary word. Routine. To me, it felt like death. The end of freedom, adventure, and the lifestyle I had come to know.

  Behind me, I could hear travelers partying, laughing, and forging new memories. This was the end for me though, and the realness of it all evoked tears from me for the first time in years. Big, baby-like tears.

  “Are you okay?”

  I looked up to see a girl I didn’t recognize standing over me. “Do you want to join us all for drinks? I think you’re the only one not at the bar,” she said in an accent that sounded a little Scandinavian.

  “I’m heading home next week and just wanted a moment to myself. It’s a hard thing to have to deal with, ya know? The end of all this,” I said holding up my hands.

  “Yeah, I would be sad, too. How long have you been traveling?”

  “Six years.”

  “Holy shit! That is a long time! I’m eight months into a yearlong trip. Six must have been amazing!”

  “Yeah, it was,” I said with a pause, “… the best part of my life.”

  “I can’t imagine what it would be like to go back home after so long.”

  There was pity in her voice.

  To a traveler, nothing is worse than the end where the fun stops and the pressures of society return. Whenever someone tells you they are heading home, you put your hand on their shoulder and say “I’m sorry” as if you’re mourning the loss of a fallen comrade. You leave this adventure that seems to stretch on for eternity, a place where you are the captain of your own ship, for the rigid constraints of “the real world”. The one we all tried so hard to stave off.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “Well, if you want to join us, you know where to go. Chris is going to play that chicken fried song again,” she said as she stood up, her pity party coming to an end.

  “Yeah, thanks. I just need a few more minutes,” I said as she left. “I’ll be there eventually.”

  * * *

  MAYBE IT WOULDN’T BE SO BAD, not being permanently on the road. I might even become less stressed as I spend my days working in a self-made nine to five and then took breaks where I didn’t have to work. I could make my own schedule. I’d take trips. Travel wasn’t over.

  That was the self-talk I practiced in my head as I flew home from Bangkok and then, looking for a city larger than Boston, moved to New York City, signed a lease, and bought a bed. I unpacked my bag, hung up my clothes, and filled my fridge with food.

  As the book tour for How to Travel the World On $50 a Day ended in the spring of 2013, I took a few trips to Europe, sailed around the Virgin Islands, and went back to Southeast Asia for the winter. Slowing down proved harder than I thought. Whenever I felt bored or antsy, I’d simply find an excuse to leave the city. My empty fridge a testament to my transient nature.

  As that year turned into 2014, I found myself living two lives: the life of a traveler and the life of a New Yorker. I moved in and out of the city often, justifying my travels not as travel but as “work trips” I needed to take to make sure the blog ran smoothly. I moved around. Fell in love again. Burned out again. My love/hate relationship with travel seemed to get worse the longer I went away. Or the more frequently. I couldn’t tell.

  Though I was living two lives during the years of 2013 and 2014, it wasn’t until my friend Scott died in 2015 that I was living in a way that was keeping me from appreciating the benefits of either.

  I can’t remember when I met Scott Dinsmore but, like so many of my modern friendships, I know where: the internet. Scott ran Live Your Legend, a website about doing what you love. Over the years, we bonded over our shared love of travel, entrepreneurship, helping others, good cocktails, and Taylor Swift (we’re both super fans).

  Like me, Scott had a transformative travel experience. His came when he was turned down for a dream job and went instead to Spain to run with the bulls. A seven-week trip turned into a year, and Scott said that the experience changed how he looked at the world. “Spaniards prioritized enjoyment over money, and I realized life did not have to be lived the way it was in the States,” he later wrote. “Exploring, seeking meaningful adventure and limit testing quickly became a huge part of life.”

 
; It was the same transformative experience that had shaped my own view of travel—it’s no coincidence that Scott and I bonded. Later, shocked by discovering how many Americans report that they have fantasized about quitting their jobs, Scott founded a career-coaching company dedicated to helping people find challenging and fulfilling work. His TEDx talk on “How to Find Work You Love” was viewed nearly three million times. Scott’s lessons from a life of exciting travel and fulfilling work resonated with so many people—and they certainly resonated with me.

  We would often catch up at conferences. Our busy lives rarely overlapped but whenever I came to San Francisco, we’d meet up for breakfast. I was proud to call him a friend.

  In early 2015, Scott and his wife Chelsea sold everything, slung their backpacks over their shoulders, and set off to travel the world. We chatted frequently as Scott peppered me with requests for advice and tips.

  “Where do we go for nice weather? Are we crazy to go to Morocco in August? What’s a great place in Central Europe to spend a month?”

  I felt like his consigliere as he tried to conquer the world.

  So when I woke up to the email letting me know Scott had died, I was in shock. There had been an accident. The details were fuzzy.

  It turned out that Scott had died while climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. It was the last day of his and Chelsea’s trek to the top, and they were taking a trail that wasn’t normally used. The trekking company had decided to use a different route not meant for beginners. There was a rock slide. Screams. No place to hide. Scott was hit by a falling boulder. It was over in seconds, and there was nothing anyone could do.

  I always wonder what he was thinking in his last moments. When a rock is barreling down at you, what do you do? What did Scott do? Was he frozen in fear? Did he run the wrong way? Did he even know what was happening?

  I read the email over again. I called my friends. I cried. I kept thinking it was going to be like the movies—the doctors would be wrong, he’d jolt back to life, and we’d all say, “You had us worried so much!”