This Book Is About Travel

by Andrew Hyde

  Perhaps the best deterrent for guidebooks is to look at your home city in one. If your best friend was visiting town, would you give them this itinerary?

  Step 4: Budget, save, and book.

  If I were to ask you to save up $1000 a month for a trip that you will always remember and that will make you a better person, would you do it? You need to save for this trip.

  Start now. Set up a folder in your accounting. Start. How much do you need to save? Generally, and this is very generally, $1500 a month plus airfare is a good starting point. You can do it for less, and certainly, you can always spend more. I spent $600 in Thailand for four weeks of massages, food, and adventures while a single day in Melbourne ran me $200. Other places are much more expensive. You can cut that in half if you want to couch surf or camp. A lot cheaper than you thought, I am guessing.

  Now, airfare.

  A bit tricky. Do you do the RTW ticket that the airlines sell? I’ve done some homework for you here. I price checked my RTW trip with OneWorld (an airline network that offers RTW tickets) and cross-compared that with a bunch of one-way tickets. From my research, the RTW trip ticket would be

  $6400, where as a series of one-ways to the same destinations totaled to $4300. I was surprised. I had heard nothing but amazing things about the RTW tickets (their marketing is amazing!), and yet, for my trip, they turned out not to be cost effective at all. The draw back to one-way tickets however, is that airlines are being increasingly pressured into guaranteeing countries that you will, in fact, leave. In practical terms, what that means is that if I enter China and don’t have means to exit, the airline is responsible for flying me back (free last flight leg for those that don’t mind being deported).

  This is annoying because I have to lie, and I don’t like to lie. Before I check in for my flight, I do a search online for a flight from my destination to home. I take a screenshot of this, and when they ask “when are you returning home,” I flash them this itinerary. That is it. They buy it every time (and a US passport, credit card, and businessman-like looks help, I am sure).

  Ok, to budget. Say you want to go to eight countries, try and make that commensurate with allowing for eight months of travel. Figure on roughly $4300 for the airfare, $9600 for the lodging, food and activities. It is impossible to budget accurately, especially if the Melbourne’s and Tokyo’s are highlights of your trip. $14,000 for eight months of travel bliss. Save up for this: $1000 a month for a year, plus some holiday gifts. It is a stretch, and hard to do. But if you really want to do it, you can do it. When you take off, you can cancel your phone, insurance, rent, and any monthly subscriptions. Look at how much you pay for rent. Look at the trip you could take. Debate with yourself.

  Step 5: Set goals and act. AKA, Learn how to smile.

  What type of trip do you want to have? Really, be honest with yourself. Want to get drunk a lot? Hit on Asian (wo)men? Climb mountains? Learn a new skill? Relax? Meet the perfect partner for your dream band? Make these goals. Write them down. Talk to people about them. Dream with purpose.

  You are going to smile a lot on your trip. I don’t mean smile as in show your teeth. I mean smile from your heart. You are going to play football with a group of kids on the streets of Colombia, and without a word in common know that the world can be amazingly good; that you can feel humbly alive.

  Smiling is good. Feeling compassion towards and for life is even better.

  A note on Safety:

  Many people gave me some terrible advice planning this trip. And most of that bad advice revolved around how dangerous travel could be and how dangerous specific places were. Colombia, I was told, was so bad I would have to hire a local to go to the ATM for me to protect me from robbers that hang out 24 hours a day. In reality, Colombia is one of the safest places in the world. Everywhere has their unsafe feeling spots, simply stay away from them. Looking back, I should have slapped such nay-sayers, and remarked how the very neighborhood that was framing our conversation wasn’t quite safe either. You are going to take motorbike taxis, eat raw foods, swing from zip lines, dive into rivers, and drink until you see the sun rise on the beach. All of this is worth the small risks. If someone tells you a horrible story, look at your local paper that day. Bad things happen everywhere — the only way to know if what they say about a foreign city is true is to go there yourself.

  So, that is how to plan a RTW trip. Start yours.

  Chapter 13

  FRACTALS OF SEIZURES

  It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  CHIANG MAI, THAILAND

  We were following a game trail (deer, we thought) up a steep ridge in the dense jungle outside Chiang Mai, Thailand. 11 of us from a hostel and two nice folks from other guest houses set off and had two great days. About an hour into the hike on day three, one of the guys from the other guest houses, a nice Italian about 50 years of age whom we will call Tizio, started stumbling and violently convulsing.

  I probably don’t have to tell you this, but it’s a scary thing when someone you barely know gets alarmingly ill in the middle of a wilderness you are completely unfamiliar with. Fortunately, I am not a complete novice when it comes to such matters. Right after I graduated high school, I took a 45 day Outward Bound course that featured a Wilderness First Responder certification. The WFR is a very basic EMT course designed for those who are in the wilderness often enough that they may happen upon a situation where immediate care is needed. Although skills are taught, the main point of the certification is “do not get hurt away from roads” — there is very, very little that can be done if you break your femur five miles from the road. Noted. Aside from that, I was also around the wilderness and first aid as an Eagle Scout. Which is all just to say, although I may have a very basic knowledge of what could or should be done in case of crisis or disaster, I have nowhere near the knowledge I should have in order to actually help. And that, it seems, is exactly what I was being called to do.

  Crap.

  The sequence of events went roughly as follows:

  11:34-Seizure. Tizio literally starts convulsing while walking. His convulsions cause him to trip and he begins to fall down the steep slope to his left.

  11:34-First Contact. The last two hikers, myself and Taylor, rush to the scene to stop his fall (also helping stop his fall is a bamboo cropping). The fall was two slow flips, all while convulsing. We keep his head from hitting anything (else) and try to get him to talk to us. I remember the whole “don’t let them chew their tongue” advice, but that seems like the least of our worries right now. His eyes are rolling back deep in his head, he isn’t breathing and he isn’t responding to verbal commands. He is laying on his side (good). He has a deep cut on his back that is bleeding from the log that kept him from falling anymore (bad).

  Oh yeah, and Tizio is Italian, so a bunch of guys yelling in English might not be the best choice to get him to calm down once he wakes up. Fortunately we have Gwen, a twenty-something Italian, who is able to get to the scene in time to step in as a translator. We try our best to stay calm saying things like “hello, you had a fall. We are your friends from the trip. It would be really great if you would wake up.”

  After what feels like a minute — or ten — but is really only twenty seconds, his eyes come back and he starts coughing (breathing!). He tells us he is very uncomfortable on the trail slope, and wants to go somewhere else. We try to convince him to lay down but he doesn’t want to. In fact, not only does he not want to lay down, he wants to get up and hug each one of us. And, being Italian, he not only wants to hug, but he also wants to touch heads.

  I’ve been told that after having a seizure, many people feel an amazingly strong urge to give and receive affection. Though he was wanting to touch heads — a common custom among Italian male friends — we all thought at first that he was trying to kiss us. Let’s just say it was a little odd, a little awkward. There we were, a large group of peopl
e from around the world — most of whom were complete strangers as of a mere few days before — in the middle of the Thai jungle as Tizio makes his rounds hugging each one of us again and again and telling us how much he loves us. He was acting very, very confused and Gwen noted that he seemed almost to be acting as if he were a child — another thing I have been told is quite common after a seizure.

  We ask the guide — a nice Thai man — to call an ambulance. His response, thinking it was just a fall was “All OK, just fall, hike out this way. Cold beer at camp.” We finally get him to call an ambulance, though we find out later he has no concept of a seizure.

  Tizio is still confused. He stands up and sits back down — a lot. He is full of love. He is emotional. Amidst the ups and downs and hugs, he starts pouring out his whole life story. He was a loser, he said. A drunk. Single for most of his life. He was ashamed of his career and the fact that he still lives with his mother. He had set off to Thailand because he wanted to forget all about his medical problems, he wanted to make friends, he wanted to meet a girl, he wanted to fall in love. He wanted to feel accepted, he said, by someone. By anyone. It was a raw moment, and one we all felt.

  That type of honesty will make any man cry. Which I was on the inside, and the shock of the whole situation kept it there. “Remain calm” is like wilderness rescue 101. Now is not the time for any leaky, sentimental eyes about the tragedy of our lonely, modern world. The other hikers seemed to feel the same. Our lingering glances and hushed words with each other conveyed the mixed energy of adrenaline, concern, empathy and an overall vibe of “oh my god, this is deep; this is intense.”

  11:46-Tizio gets back to the trail. He has leveled out. He is talking to Gwen, though still a little confused and still acting quite child-like. Most of his talk is about loving everyone around him and his family. I smell whisky on our guide’s breath and begin to lose faith in him.

  11:52-Weak pulse. I remember that I should check that type of thing. I could get it, but it was weak. Our guide asks us if he was using any illegal drugs. No. We pick through his bag and find two prescriptions. One is a seizure medication.

  2:00-Tizio takes his medication. We double check the labels, seems to be the right dosage (again,

  Italian).

  12:10-We reach the road. We walk around 200 yards to the road. Tizio is walking on his own and seems to be freaked out, but he is doing fine. There is blood on his back, legs, head and arms, but the bleeding seems to have stopped.

  12:40-First truck. The first truck arrives and takes us down to the nearest village. There isn’t a huge rush to get him off to the hospital.

  12:41-Heart Rate of 104 at the village. We reach the village and get out of the first truck. We get Tizio to lay down and drink some water. Lots of cryptic messages are coming from the guide such as “all ok, we go back up” and “we pay for scrapes, not head.” It turns out all the calls he has been making have not been to get help, but to check on the insurance policy the tour company has. They have concluded that a seizure is something they don’t cover and they tell us as much. If he goes to the hospital (what I wanted to do) it would be on his dime (what he didn’t want to do). Although we said to call an ambulance, the guide called his boss who checked the insurance. This feels horrible. We keep on trying to get out of them when the truck to Chiang Mai (hospital) would be coming, but our inquiries are always met with the same quick response: “Soon, no worry. Cold beer at camp.”

  Though, worry we did.

  We treated his back scratches with Tiger Balm and his general condition continued to improve, although he remained a visibly shaken up.

  1:30-In a truck back to Chiang Mai. By this time he really does seem fine. He decides not to go to the hospital. We say goodbye to him at his guest house. The host greets us and asks him how his day was. We tell her the story and it looks as if she is going to keep checking on him throughout the night, which helps to ease all of our anxious hearts.

  Just a few short hours before, we were a group having a normal, care free, vacation day. And yet, within such a brief window of time, we had moved through an experience together that afforded all of us different views on what it was to live, to love and what it means to take a deep breath of air. It wasn’t just the intensity of having a near medical crisis in the wilderness that had affected us, though it certainly helped to draw us all into a reflective mood. What had been so powerful hadn’t been the seizure itself, but rather the rawness and vulnerability of a grown man so willingly professing his love at the same time he was so desperately longing for it.

  A few weeks later I had a long day of reflection floating on my back in the ocean. As I gazed upwards, my body lulling with the waves, I could only see the top of a cliff 100 yards above me with a drip of a waterfall, slowly releasing down into the ocean. As it fell, the wind whipped the drops into a blurred spray of fractals as they landed all around me. Looking up, the drops created moving and temporary formations with a beginning, middle and end. I thought of Tizio. Is life and love, I wondered, anything more than a fractal created through a base of habits, interfacing with the turbulence of the world?

  We never heard from Tizio again and I am not sure what ever became of him or his search for belonging. I will always remember the way he wanted to forget years of standing out for the wrong reasons over a medical condition out of which he had little control. His quest for acceptance is something I think of often. Why are we so cruel? So slow to embrace? So eager to attack? Is he simply a misunderstood man or are we all part of a tragic culture? I hope he is alright. I hope is happy. I hope he found love.

  Chapter 14

  UNAVOIDABLE CIRCUMSTANCE

  David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.

  —Douglas Adams

  NAIROBI, KENYA

  “The U.S. Department of State warns U.S. citizens of the risks of travel to Kenya. U.S. citizens in Kenya, and those considering travel to Kenya, should evaluate their personal security situation in light of continuing and recently heightened threats from terrorism and the high rate of violent crime in some areas. “

  A welcome to a new country you don’t particularly want to see when you check your email upon landing. Customs took a few minutes and cost $50 (visa on arrival), and I was outside within 20 minutes of landing. It is raining hard, although the skies above me appear blue as I hail a cab to head to the hotel. When it rains, traffic becomes worse than it usually is in Nairobi, often described as a parking lot. The cab driver turns off the engine as we wait for an intersection to clear. All the drivers seem to have turned their engines off. We are all busy waiting.

  The police check the trunk of the car for explosives before we are allowed to pull into the gas station. The taxi driver notes how the police here are only armed with a nightstick, so if he really had something dangerous, it would be easy to just keep driving. A similar checkpoint at the shopping center — where we head to find an ATM that doesn’t think my card is being used by a fraudster. The malls are very western, as are the discussions on how Kenya is to move forward from the elections of 2007 that left the country in a wake of violent shock, or in shock at the violence. We drive though a few of the areas that had the most blood. Open street clashes. Blades and blood in the middle of the markets. I’m here as a tourist to learn as much about the culture and history, and to cross more than a few items off my bucket list.

  “On March 10, 2012, assailants threw four grenades at a busy bus station in Nairobi, killing nine and injuring more than 50 Kenyans.” The newscaster is reading into the camera from an iPad on a local news station. A crisp suit and nice graphical setup show a very professional v
isual front to a station that stops broadcasting when the power grid goes down, which is almost daily. There are nicer suits than you see in Soho, NYC. I feel like I have to dress up to go to the grocery store. The rhythm to just about everything is different from what I am used to. The language is both abrupt and musical.

  It feels like every day is made up of ten songs from ten radically different genres that have nothing to do with each other — beginning just as randomly as they end. Smooth jazz breakfast, backed up to dubstep traffic, on your way to aggressive punk shopping. The songs generally don’t complete. Onward to the next one.

  The local media is depressing. No matter what is happening in the news, though, I have control over what is happening in my space, where I am right now, where it is currently raining, hard. Oh. Okay, maybe I don’t have control over everything. It is the wet season in Nairobi, a city originally founded by the British in 1899. A capitol city was formed by colonialism, or so goes the books. History is sometimes incredibly weird.

  When we stop for lunch our car is guarded by the block captain walkie (much like Mango in Panama City). This time the walkie is a city-appointed addict, as opposed to his self-appointed Panamanian counterpart, Mango.

  We head to a national park named “Hell’s Gate” on the recommendation’s of yesterday’s taxi driver. When we get into the park, it becomes clear that the driver has never been here and that I just got tricked into a huge fare for a freshman guide. Oh boy. Oh, well. Let’s make the best of it and have a great day exploring the park. Over here we go; over there looks nice. The entryway to the park has huge plumes of steam rising from the geothermal power plant. The sulfur smelling steam infiltrates the car, and at times, completely engulfs the road. We drive up the ridge on roads that are half washed out from the recent floods only to find a sign that said the spot we are looking for is the way we just came. Looking out my window downward I can see 30 feet of where the road used to be.