This Book Is About Travel

by Andrew Hyde

  My living room is a coffee-shop. My TV comes with a sports bar. My bedroom is rented, traded for, persuaded or romanced into. Right now, everything in my life is temporary, which, incidentally happens to mirror one of the big themes of the world.

  My mobility is a choice, for sure, but as much as my movement is dictated by my whims and desires, it is heavily contoured by my friends, networks, events, weather, budgets and bank accounts.

  So what, exactly, happens when I throw out my credit cards and connections? What comes of movement, then? What happens when I am just a guy with a bag in a city that doesn’t know my name? I wanted to know. A discussion at a coffee-shop with a critic of my travels poised this question, and I realized I didn’t know the answer. What would it be like? Would the world be as friendly as it has been, if I knew nothing and no one? I felt like I had to know. I was about to go to Austin, Texas for the SXSW conference. I landed a few days early without lodging plans and I had not told my friends I would be there. This was the perfect opportunity, I thought, to try this out.

  I hid my wallet and phone in the bottom of my bag and vowed that for three days I wouldn’t open it or turn it on. I wanted to be anonymous, homeless, and yet, not necessarily overly focused with either as I lived in a city that didn’t know me from any other guy. I wanted to jump into what life would be like without my current luxuries. I wanted to live the next three days as I would any other days — just under a set of different conditions; with different rules to reality.

  I landed at the airport in Austin, ditched my electronics and wallet in the bottom of my bag and set myself a goal of getting to downtown by sunset. I went to the taxi stand and asked the people in the line if anyone was headed downtown: “Not to trouble you, but is your company paying for the ride?,” I asked one gentleman. “Mind if I join along?” A smile matched mine. “Sure.” A taxi ride straight to downtown and a great conversation later, I had bypassed a $40 charge by simply being bold enough to ask. If I had had $2 I would have hopped a bus, but plan A worked so quickly. I am sure it helped that I was clean and well-enough dressed, and perhaps he had even seen me on the same flight. But still, I was emboldened by how easy it was.

  I was hungry, so I walked around until I found a taco stand. “I’m a bit down on my luck, any way I can work off a taco trade?” A smile matched a smile again, and they gave me a taco in return for picking up the trash around the building. This was going all too smoothly. My backpack and I were off to a great start cruising around the city.

  I had added a sleeping bag to my possessions but I didn’t have a tent. Dusk was falling and a hot Texas winter’s night was rising. Where does one sleep? I honestly didn’t know. I wandered around the waterfront watching the bats swoop out from the 1st Street Bridge. I spotted a homeless looking man and approached him.

  I had so much to learn about the pecking order and etiquette of the hierarchy of homelessness in Texas. “Sir, excuse me, but I just have a question for you: where is safe to sleep around here?” “Have any beer?”

  Let’s not jump to stereotypes here. I asked the question about the beer after the amazingly kind and patient man named Larry gave me his version of the rules of the streets. I tried to mentally parse the rules I should really follow, as it seemed there were really none, just notes on safety, preference and sanitation. Even if you don’t have anything, you still have a need to be in control over something. After an hour of talking and a place staked out, we ventured over to grab a drink from the convenience store. I had forgotten about my no wallet rule and froze as we approached. I didn’t have any money and didn’t think that someone would just kindly buy a guy with a backpack and his smelly friend a six-pack.

  Or a 40 of Old English.

  I tried.

  Off to the street corner for me. Perhaps I could busk for a dollar fifty? I could make a funny sign? “The ninjas stole my family, need karate lessons.” I don’t think that would work. I asked Larry what he did for signs. “I don’t do that.” I had offered to buy for Larry so I thought I should live up to my promise.

  “Let’s just go to a bar and ask for a drink.” Worked for the taco, why wouldn’t it work for a beer? He thought I was crazy. An hour of talking and waiting later we had secured a beer from someone we asked. Larry was quite happy — not only did he get a beer from the guy, but he got my beer as well (I’m allergic).

  I’ll tell you that watching Larry down those beers was, well, awkward. He took a grand total of a minute to finish both of them. Then, like nothing had happened, he started walking away. He was done with me. Cheers mate. I decided to part ways and walk around downtown.

  I’ve been to Austin nine times and know it well. Walking down Sixth Street without a wallet made the experience fresh and new. The city is the same place but with doors that used to be open. My initial plan of watching some music and enjoying a drink was thwarted by not having an ID. You have to be

  21 years of age to enter the venues and have the government documents to prove it. I sat outside a venue for about an hour before moving on to Cesar Chavez Boulevard to find a spot to sleep. Larry had mentioned some spots to sleep and I found one pretty quickly.

  The first thing about sleeping under an overpass is that it is very, very loud. Cars and trucks are whizzing by — roaring, thundering! — right above you. For some reason I had never thought about this before, the sounds that come along with vagabonding. It was like watching a movie in a loud, surround sound theater. The second thing about sleeping under an overpass is there is nowhere to go to the bathroom. A quick hike over to a Wendy’s provided me a restroom and some napkins for ear plugs. The third thing about sleeping under an overpass is that someone has designed it so you don’t sleep under the overpass. I was on a steep slope, but it worked. I was happy.

  I awoke with the sun in the early morning scared that someone would find me. It was a crisp Texas spring sunrise where the humidity and temperature seem to dip for a few glancing hours each morning. I woke up scared and a bit disoriented. The worst part of my whole experiment was the feeling of waking up scared. I decided to just fast for the day. I walked over the bridge to the Barton Springs swimming hole and went for a dip outside just below the paid area. I laid in the cold water for an hour or two. You never feel rushed when you have no place to go — perhaps the best part of my experiment.

  More walking. More thinking. At the beginning of my trip, I was pretty shy and tried my best to never stand out for anything. I never wanted to be “that guy.” I had for years made conscious dictations around my dress, my speech and my body movements so to never be annoying or appear out of place. I’d choose not to dance at all, for instance, over looking like I wasn’t a good dancer. If I found myself in an argument I would happily let someone feel they’d convinced me if that meant moving onto another subject. I never wanted to be the loudest guy in the room, but just loud enough for my friends to hear my story. It would take all the energy and guts I had to order a juice and a water on an airplane, for fear of being too demanding, too needy. Yet, here I was, walking around town with incredibly simple goals that were studded with endless land-mines of potential rejections. It wasn’t easy. But I suppose that was the whole impetus, the whole reason why I was doing this in the first place. I wanted to face these fears. When you place yourself in situations that scare you, you learn a lot about yourself. You learn about limits and you learn about thresholds. You learn that so many of the things you think you can never do are really just ideas, perceptions, and self-imposed limitations that you hold about yourself. My homeless project was planned out to be a transformative event in my life where I proved I was tough enough and wise enough to make it without cash or technology, and in a way, I achieved that.

  I spent another night under an overpass, waking up scared and worrying that someone I knew would see me. How foolish, I thought. “No shame,” I told myself as I brushed my teeth and spit into a storm drain. I pretended I planned to buy something at a coffee-shop so I could use their restroom and wash
my face. I’m sure the baristas knew what I was doing, but kindly let me leave and be on my way.

  The days had me walking around, sitting and thinking. I begged a few times and found it to be equally as easy as it was humiliating and dishonest. My experiment, my strategy, in getting food was to use humor. The plan was to be a picky beggar — I would put up a sign asking for exactly what I wanted. My first sign was “craving a chicken taco on corn tortilla, with avocado and hot salsa.” A businesswoman provided me with just that within minutes, in return for her getting to take a picture of me with the sign. My second taco sign read, “PICKY BEGGAR: gluten free toasted half chicken half pork with a touch of cilantro”…well, you get the idea. It worked. I just swallowed my pride and was well-fed in less time than it took me to make the sign.

  I ran into Larry again on day three. “If you are homeless and hungry, you are an idiot,” he said. The problem with homelessness wasn’t a lack of roof as much as it was the lack of a secure network (family and medical, namely). Larry was just as comfortable with the idea of living like this for the rest of his life as he was dying alone. There was something raw and real and honest about the way Larry talked. These men spoke from their souls.

  We obsess in society on which keys open which doors without always reflecting on just why it is that we so desperately want to travel between them. My enthusiasm for the homeless project wore down quickly. When more of the same (sleeping worried of getting caught and begging for food and just finding something to do) is all I had to look forward to, I broke. My smiles became less sincere as the novelty of creating signs wore off. Still, the more homeless guys I talked to, the deeper the conversations got. As my anxieties dwindled and my fears around rejection and abnormality grew into something mundane, I began to realize that there was a depth to the people that shared and lived this kind of reality day to day that I hadn’t previously understood. I had never before had a conversation that moved so seamlessly between Sally Struthers, Nietzsche, Ghandi and Mickey Mouse — led, no less, by a guy with only a few teeth. Our fears can act to fetishize things: they construct barriers and insist upon seemingly insurmountable differences — “I am not that, I could never do that.” Fear finds its home in such sentiments. But when you finally face it, you find that you may have misunderstood it all along.

  I’ve met two dozen people in these past few days who didn’t choose to be homeless and didn’t seem to have much of a choice in the matter. Their reality of limited choice was just as real as my choice to put away my wallet and my phone for a few days, only their situation seemed a lot more unnerving. It is one thing to choose to put constraints on yourself within a bounded time frame, it’s still intense, but I knew I had an out, I knew it would end. It is quite another to live day in and day out under those conditions with no real back up plan, and no promised moment of “phew, I am glad that is over.” That feeling is something no experiment can ever really grant.

  But while I wanted to be careful not to equate my experience with the homeless men and women I met, I found that they often reached to secure and assure our similarities, rather than insist on our differences.

  “You are doing this by choice?” One man said to me. “We are too. We are the same, know that kid.

  We are the same. You and me kid. The same.” The same.

  Chapter 19

  THE TRAGEDY OF NEPAL 2011

  The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient unto itself. The heartbreaking will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

  —Robinson Jeffers

  MANANG, NEPAL

  A deep depression hit me about an hour into my visit to Nepal and lasted for about two weeks. Nepal, as a travel destination, is nothing short of raved about. “The Himalayan Mountains are so majestic! The people are some of the nicest in the world!” were common travel tidbits I heard again and again. It’s true that the mountains are beautiful. And I agree that Nepali people can be really nice. But there is much more to Nepal than that, and I am perplexed as to why no one really talks about this. I didn’t find in Nepal evidence for the glowing reviews I had been promised and fed for so many years. What I did find was a developing nation in the throws of some pretty deep economic, social, political, and environmental problems that were becoming worse and worse by the month — with the industry of tourism only helping to hasten the poisoning of the well. Sadly, the pollution in this country is among the worst I have ever seen. Air, land, sound, and water — nothing, it seems, is spared from careless trash. The people can be wonderful, yes, but they are also incredibly skillful about exploiting the tourist scene and their country itself. Everyone you meet has a friend that is in the business of exactly what it is you want to do, and they have a vested commission in getting you to open up.

  So much of this place is changing, and generally for the worse. You can see the mountains from Pokhara, but the smog makes the view just depressing. Is that a celebrated Himalayan peak behind that wall of smog? An argument among tourists breaks out: “no, the mountains are over the lake.” “No, they are over the ridge.” After a few minutes of squinting, a postcard is purchased to settle the argument. The mountains should be behind the smog on that ridge. “Let’s see if they are out tomorrow.”

  Kathmandu is thriving from tourism, but at the expense of the country workers who are forced to leave in search of new jobs which they often times can’t find, pushing them into corrupt jobs and black markets as a last resort.

  The horns on the motorbikes are non-stop. The taxis will take you to your destination but they also take you for a ride. Of course they do; cheating tourists is viewed as something akin to a national right, as was boasted by a recent newspaper article. “Merry Christmas, sir!” a 10-year-old boy told me, “Would you like some weed?”

  I wanted to leave within a week of getting there. More than that: I wanted to leave and start a campaign to stop tourism in Nepal. There was no redeeming value. It was soulless, corrupt, and destroying everyone who touched it. Not something I wanted to be supporting. Not in reality, and not in my dreams.

  “Merry Christmas, sir!” a older man said to me on a night so frigid I could see my breath as I sighed it out — rising up into the mountain air as if with purpose. Yeah, with purpose alright, purpose to escape!

  “Need a cute girl? Bang bang.”

  City is city. I get this. This happens. Pollution happens. Black markets happen. My dream of this place happened, and it was far, far off from what is actually here. The political democracy is on a thread and the only saving grace appears to be the “blancas” that come here to spend their money. Nepal is developing alright, there is no doubt about that.

  The bus ride from Kathmandu to Pokhara is a very direct reminder of just how developing this country is. More than 10 police checkpoints stop every car, bike, and bus to inspect permits and tolls. The six hour ride carried us through the formerly amazing and pristine views of valleys, rivers, and mountains — now, sadly, chocked in toxins, litter, and extreme poverty. At one point there was also a police van collecting arrested vendors, drunks, and teens. The motorbikes don’t obey the road closure rules and honk at the mob walking down the street. “Get out of my way!” their imported, ultra-loud horns scream.

  Everything seems to be just this: an urgent cry. The rural areas of Nepal, as I came to learn, are not exempt from the perils that plague the cities. The lived experiences in rural areas are every bit as extreme as the landscapes that they are known for. I met a woman, a mother, who had twelve living children. She had also buried eight. The eyes of people around town are full of either salesmanship, despair, or both. An old lady sells me some beads — made by hand and which go to support her family trapped in Tibet. “That is full of shit!” my guide tells me, yelling out the widow. She scatters and I am told that the beads are from China and there is no family in Tibet. She just says that, he informs me, because she knows that’s what sells to the tourists, that’s what they want to hear.

  Everything isn’t as it seems
. Everything isn’t as you hear. The lore just doesn’t match up. This is telling.

  Isn’t that how I fell in love with Nepal from afar in the first place?

  Time to get out of the city. The Annapurna Circuit is on my life list. It’s a big deal. 220 miles circumventing some of the tallest mountains in the world. Every town along the way has teahouses to welcome the trekkers (60,000 strong per year as of 2009). All set amidst the country’s famed and majestic wilderness — or at least I hoped.

  As with most of my hopes in Nepal, this too was quickly smashed. The land itself is beautiful, stunning really, at least it once was. Sadly, it turns out that the sensibility of wilderness — the honor, respect, and stewardship of one of the Earth’s most famous natural treasures — appears to be completely absent. The prevailing sentiment is more along the veins of “can we make money off it?” Then exploit it! Develop it. Rice fields can fit on most hillsides: great, put them in. The dark secret of wilderness around the world is that the land is usually not developed because it is too hard to profit from. The Himalayas are off limits, but the wooded areas around them are not protected, and you can see that with your naked eye. It’s glaringly, painfully, obvious.

  Trash is everywhere. Not tourist trash: Most of the stuff on the ground was from the locals. It’s easy to see why. A young girl, for instance, asks every trekker for chocolate as they walk by. She unwraps it, eats a bit, and drops the wrapper on the trails. This joins the 10-50 pieces of trash per 10 yards of the trail. The full Annapurna Circuit is 220 miles, and at that estimate, we are looking at 352,000 to 1,760,000 pieces of trash on the trail. Wilderness. Nepal’s tourism is built on the trekking. In addition to the visa fee you pay upon entry into the county is a conservation fee. What, exactly, they are conserving I could not determine.