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Rolf’s latest travel project is the No Baggage Challenge — a journey that will take him around the world without using a single piece of luggage. Every few days, we’ll be updating Vagabonding with a recap of the latest to keep you up to date on the adventure.
After experiencing Madrid through tapas — in 9 dishes and 7 drinks — Rolf crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. A ‘lost in translation’ taxi ride to the nearby city of Tetouan (instead of the intended Chefchaouen), proved to be an amusing afternoon in the souks.
Days on road: 12
Miles traveled: 7,445
Flights: 3
Trains: 3
Bags: 0
“Chefchaouen featured lovely blue alleyways, tasteful handicraft shops, and peaceful travelers’ tea-houses — but we’d been spoiled by the heady buzz of mild chaos that results when you show up the wrong place and make the most of your situation.” –Rolf on The wrong town in Morocco
Our next update will find Rolf in Egypt. To follow the journey in real-time, check out the No Baggage Challenge blog or follow along on Twitter. And enter this week’s reader challenge by sharing what you plan to do to lighten your load in the next year. The favorite entry will win a $500 flight voucher from BootsnAll Travel!
Shortly after last week’s column which highlighted how Burning Man is like vagabonding, we loaded up our hatchback and drove to the event, about two hours north of Reno, Nevada, down a small two lane road that runs past deep blue Pyramid Lake, majestic mountains, and salt flats. We arrived on Saturday afternoon, and our “Summer Camp” theme camp at 3:50 & Athens was set up by Sunday evening.
I noted that creative problem solving is a full-time activity, and our first hurdle was in setting up our hexayurt; so easy and orderly during all of the pre-building, it was chaotic in trying to tape it together in the high winds. Thanks to two of our campmates, we managed to set it up just before the first heavy rain – the first in a decade of burns. The uneven playa and even more uneven taping job left us with puddles at the head of our bed by the end of the weekend, but the vivid double rainbow was a breathtaking compensation.
Social connections abound at Burning Man, both fleeting and long-lasting. One of the unexpected communities that I found myself a part of happened to be located a 20 minute bike ride away. At 6:00 & Hanoi, Camp Nomadia are full-time vagabonds who came together to share a week in the Black Rock Desert. As synchronicity would have it, I met the organizers, Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard, at an Indian taco truck shortly before we arrived at the event. As we sat and enjoyed our lunch, we talked about how we’d all come to be at a roadside stand somewhere on Rt. 447. After telling them of our self-imposed state of homelessness, we found out that they had been living out of their small RV, traveling around the U.S for the last 4 years, and they invited us to stop by. Three days later I rode my bike through the city to one of their public events, a ‘Nomadic Happy Hour’.
About 90 individuals, Camp Nomadia are primarily fulltime RV’ers, many of whom have also traveled in various parts of the world for extended periods of time. Their public lounge area was created from bits and pieces of what the various campers had with them – a table here, a chair there – and welcomed travelers and passers-by alike. I met a woman who spent several months in Indonesia, and a young man who is midway through riding a Suzuki V-Storm motorcycle from Alaska to Mexico.
As our Vagabonding Case Studies have shown, there is a growing community of modern nomads who have freed themselves from the chains of corporate jobs and mortgages in order to travel. Through the internet, they are earning a living and keeping in contact with each other and a public increasingly interested in alternate lifestyles. We will continue to follow these and the hundreds of other stories that we have received in the months ahead. Stay tuned!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to learn more about motivations for travel. “Why?” seems to be the most urgent question put to travelers. It’s asked not just by others, but also by the conscience.
Everyone seems to want an explanation — friends, family, former/current/potential romances, current or future employers. Whenever someone asks, “Why are you going away?”, “Why are you traveling?”, or “Why did you do it?”, do you reply directly and justify your decision to travel? How many different answers do you employ?
It shouldn’t be a surprise that a traveler’s stated reasons and motivations will change depending on who’s asking the questions. There shouldn’t be any moral obligation to readily confess the full range of reasons you travel. How many motivations are intensely personal and will always remain a secret?
Yet the focus on Why We Travel remains, especially in blog-world. Pinpointing the source of the pressure to justify one’s travels is the work of another post. For now, I would urge would-be travelers to resist the temptation of aligning their travel motivations too closely with anything read online.
The motivations submitted by we travel bloggers can’t be taken as the whole story. In the days of the Personal Brand, it’s rare that a blog is used as a true confessional. Who knows who might be reading? Rather, Feeling the Need to Justify One’s Travel + Awareness of a Worldwide (including potential customers/employers) Audience yields cliche. Those selling independence rail against routine, pseudomysticism runs rampant, mountains are made out of minor challenges, and the quest for the self becomes an unassailable catch-all.
I’d rather read an anonymous blog that tells the difficult truth.
N.B. – I’m guilty of plenty of the above cliches in previous posts.
Bogotá, Colombia
A little self-disclosure: I’m suspicious of people who like to party all the time, and I tend not to travel with those who think the apex of a journey involves getting drunk off your rocker in Cancun or even in some Siberian tavern filled with Russian coal miners. If you put me at an all-night outdoor party surrounded by inebriated folks screaming and shaking their bodies, by 3 o’clock I’ll probably be looking up at the moon and wondering what torture-survivor, what orphan, what exhausted refugee or immigrant is seeing that same moon at that very same moment, and I’ll be wishing we could funnel some of this energy and enthusiasm towards helping them.
(Having said that, here’s one more disclosure: I do participate in the occasional party. The energy, the laughter, the act of living in the moment – I like it, not least for how it counters my tendency to live too much within my own thought world.)
Like many of you, I’m attracted to people who strike a balance between “having fun” and “having meaning”. Travel is but one way we can cultivate this balance in our own lives. If in Cambodia, for example, enjoy lounging on the beach in Sihanoukville, but also consider spending hours with your journal at the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh, weaving both places and realities into your Cambodian experience.
And if in Colombia, you won’t be able to help but thoroughly enjoy yourself. However, also consider delving into the tragedy of the country’s internal conflict, which, among other things, has left thousands of “disappeared” people unaccounted for (see photo above).
Or if in Jerusalem, enjoy the nightlife on Ben Yehuda Street or sip a beer at the Jerusalem Hotel, but also consider standing outside the Sbarro’s Pizza a few minutes and remembering the lives lost to a suicide bombing in 2001, or consider calling up a group like the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and asking if they can assist you in a tour of nearby Palestinian communities that have been devastated in their own ways.
Chris Hedges, a former New York Times reporter who has covered many a conflict and shares his reflections in a short but powerful book called War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, speaks about this need for balance:
We are tempted to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning. The other temptation is to disavow the search for happiness in order to be faithful to that which provides meaning. But to live only for meaning–indifferent to all happiness–makes us fanatic, self-righteous, and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness, both equally worthy of human communion.
The examples I’ve used for “meaning” could imply that I think meaning is found primarily in paying attention to violence and injustice, but that isn’t what I want to convey. What I do hope to suggest is that travel, when done well, is much like a life well lived: it is about more than just self-oriented fun.
As always, your own thoughts on the topic are welcome in the comment section.
Conte crayon sketch of dancing, from class "Drawing Movement", model: Claire Litton
When I was a child, my mother thought I’d join a nudist colony; I was always taking off my little toddler dresses and running around in the backyard with nothing on. As an adult, I’ve managed to parlay comfort with my body into an easily portable financial application: nude figure modeling.
There are two genres of nude modeling (it’s always “nude”, by the way; if you say “naked”, it’s not art): photography and life drawing. The major difference is that one has longer poses, and the other could provide years of entertainment for people on hotmodels.com. Life drawing classes are usually full of earnestly artsy young people, frowning and sketching and talking about shadow and depth. They hold up their paintbrushes and squint at you; you feel like nothing so much as a bowl of fruit with longer legs. Photography modeling is usually only for one or two people, and you have to contort yourself into painful poses, usually holding some sort of unusual prop. When I first studied photography, I used to use my friends as models. “Here,” I’d say, “take off all your clothes and go stand on your head next to that garden gnome, holding this pumpkin.”
I do the bulk of my posing through art schools, local universities with art programs (including the somewhat illustrious Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA), for members of the photography collectives that pop up around large-ish towns, for Dr. Sketchy’s drawing nights, for open figure drawing sessions sponsored by local community members who just want some practice drawing, for museums, for illustrators…you name it. Good models are worth their weight in gold — although you usually get paid from between $15 and $30 an hour for art classes, and from $25-$50 an hour for photography.
Usually, when I’m posing, I’m not even aware of being naked; the artists are friendly and shy and painfully aware of the present situation. I liken it to what happens when an amputee walks in; suddenly, everybody notices that someone in the room is missing something vital. Rather than draw attention to the lack, you ignore it and draw maturity around you like a veil, playing the part of someone who really doesn’t care about nudity at all. A certain amount of comfort with being nude in front of groups of people would be required for the job, though — that’s one of the reasons why art schools are always so desperate for models.
You don’t have to be typically good-looking to do figure modeling. All you have to do is be willing to sit very still for several hours at a time (you do get breaks). Modeling well is about more than being comfortable in front of other people with your clothes off: it’s about being able to see through their eyes what might be interesting to draw or sketch, and to hold as still as possible while they get their vision down on paper. It’s about collaborating as a silent partner, and being the focus of attention without it actually being about you at all.
I must admit, both on the road and in my personal life, I have no tolerance for picky eaters. I have nothing but sympathy for people with food allergies, as I regard the condition as the most cruelly unfair punishment on this Earth, and I respect the lifestyle decisions made by vegetarians and vegans. However, I am instantly infuriated by people who turn up their noses and cringe at the mention of eating goat meat or horse meat or even wild dog, simply because it is not something found within the culinary practices of their own culture. “How on Earth could somebody eat horse meat, “ they shudder. Horse meat happens to be hugely popular throughout South America, many parts of Asia, and even in some European countries.
I feel like this kind of shock and knee-jerk revulsion is a product of narrow mindedness. Simply because it is not a familiar tradition in your own culture, does not make it off putting or wrong. You also run the risk of seriously insulting the culture in question by denouncing their long held traditions. Even if it’s not the most frequently consumed meat product, it is nevertheless part of the culture’s culinary history.
And like I tell my kindergarten students, “How do you know you don’t like it if you don’t try it?” Where did we learn that eating certain meats/plants/etc is more bizarre than eating other types of things? When traveling to new areas, our bellies should be as open to new experiences as our minds. Our approach to life and the world around us will be shaped and refined by our travels, and our plates should be too. So try the live squid in Korea, the horse meat in Argentina, the goat meat in India! Your palate may just surprise you.
“We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called “apparitions,” the whole so-called “spirit world,” death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God.”
–Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Rolf’s latest travel project is the No Baggage Challenge — a journey that will take him around the world without using a single piece of luggage. Every few days, we’ll be updating Vagabonding with a recap of the latest to keep you up to date on the adventure.
Rolf spent 36 hours in Paris catching up on blog entries, shooting a video demonstrating his laundry routine, and touring familiar Paris sites in a vintage Citroën 2CV, before catching an EasyJet flight to Madrid.
Days on road: 6
Miles traveled: 4,927
Flights: 2
Trains: 2
Bags: 0
“There was a time when, believe it or not, I thought Paris was no big deal. This was before I had ever been there — back in the days when I was living and traveling in Asia. At the time, I was so enamored with places like Bangkok and Varanasi and Ulan Bator that I thought Paris would be a bore by comparison. I was wrong, of course: Not only is Paris a fascinating place; it is (in ways that are more subtle than you might think) my top candidate for the most beautiful city in the world.” –Rolf on Rolling retro-style (and doing laundry) in Paris
Our next update will find Rolf tapas-roaming in Madrid, before heading south to Chefchaouen, Morocco. To follow the journey in real-time, check out the No Baggage Challenge blog or follow along on Twitter.
The best travel soundtrack is made of the distinct sounds of a place. A foghorn’s wail, the sizzle of cooking, a howler monkey’s roar, or an imam’s call to prayer—all can bring us back to a place as easily as seeing a photo. What about your playlists? Do they help conjure a moment on a trip just as easily?
I suppose it depends on whether you actually make playlists for your travels. When Andrew Evans was getting ready for his Bus2Antartica trip, he asked Intelligent Travel readers to make song suggestions for his playlist. Anthony Bourdain has written about how music can make a travel moment. NPR has even gotten into the game, with a list of 95 songs for driving on I-95.
My own playlists have, until recently, stuck to genres like funk, reggae and blues. But while listening to “…And I’m Out” by Galactic, I was inspired to create a list of travel-related songs for myself—to inspire me whether I’m working at home or looking out an airplane window. Sure, maybe I’m late to all this, but I never made mix tapes, so musical list making had to sneak up on me sometime.
Do you have one foolproof travel playlist, or do you make a new one for each trip you take or each country you visit? This week, while I’m planning a surf safari, I’m listening a lot to “Road Trippin’” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I think I’ll use it to inspire a new list.
What are your favorite travel tunes?
Stone Forest Chinglish. Photo: simplyla / Flickr Creative Commons
Do words construct worlds? That’s the idea behind this Wall Street Journal article: Lost in translation. Scientists and linguists have been doing some fascinating research into how languages affect cultures.
Even the simple act of reading can be quite complex and revealing. English speakers read from right to left, but Hebrew speakers read from right to left. Pormpuraawans, a group of aborigines in Australia, communicate in absolute compass directions. When facing south, they read time as going from left to right. When facing north, right to left.
The role of politeness matters as well. Keigo refers to honorific speech. These are the levels of respect in which Japanese speak to one another. Foreign students of Japanese go crazy trying to figure out the appropriate way to address a Japanese person. Sound too casual, and you look rude. Be overly courteous, and you look ridiculous.
Greetings can show what cultures view as important. “Have you eaten yet?” is a common way to say to hello in many Asian languages. In Osaka, Japan, locals often greet each other by asking, “Are you making any money?”
Some countries are more numbers-oriented by language. In Mandarin Chinese, the months of the year are labeled by number, not name. January is “Month 1,” February is “Month 2,” and so on. The days of the week are similarly labeled.
In America, just look at the many ways advertisers say that their product is new. The future is something people are excited about and want to see now.
Have you learned about a culture by studying a language? Share your experiences in the comments.
@Backpack Foodie & Kim:...
