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Last week, I wrote about Outside magazine’s Best Places to Work feature for those searching for a workplace that values the right work-life balance. Another option is breaking out of your own home territory. If you don’t love where you live, but you can’t cut the ties to an office paycheck just yet, you might consider relocating to a place where you feel like you’re on vacation—even when you’re punching the clock.
Michele Meyer did just that. Drawn to Hawaii since her first visit as a teenager, she yearned to live there as an adult. A copy editor at Yahoo!, she figured out how she could convince her manager to let her move to Hawaii and continue working remotely. After things changed and she was faced with the choice of moving back to the home office to keep her job, or stay in Hawaii—she decided to stay put. “I found that once I left, I didn’t want to go back,” said Meyer.
Since then, she’s worked to help other folks who love the island lifestyle. Her blog, How to Live in Hawaii, gives practical tips on the local lingo, what it’s like to live in Hawaii, and where the jobs are. She’s taken her own experiences and used them to help others who consider moving to Hawaii.
Your surroundings are a big part of what makes you happy. If mountains move you, or the beach is where you’d love to live, consider making it happen. When you do ultimately make the long-term travel move, it’ll feel that much better returning to a home you love.
“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
I have carried this quote from Shel Silverstein around with me for quite some time. Aside from it being generally inspirational, I can’t help but feel that it applies heavily to travel and the vagabonding lifestyle, as well. A lot of us start out getting a lot of criticism or negativity from those around us when we tell them we are embarking on long-term travel, or organizing a lifestyle where travel is a maximum priority. A lot of times, instead of being met with excitement about our journey, all we hear are fears and condescending remarks.
This quote urges us to be mindful of all of these voices of caution, to calmly hear them out and take what we can from them. However, the truth in the last two lines I feel applies greatly to travel. On the road, truly anything can happen. As travelers we try to yield to the spontaneity of the moment for the very reason of experiencing these unique moments. Shel Silversteins’ quote reminds me of the infinite possibilities the road can bring.
Age: 29
Hometown: Originally The Isle of Man, Now London
Quote: “ If you have to ask then you’ll never understand… Vagabonding will impact your life like nothing else can.”
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Kanchanaburi, Thailand
The photo above, which shows a gravestone belonging to one of the nearly 7,000 Allied POWs buried at the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery in Thailand, illustrates the difficulty we have in making sense of tragedy.
Last week two talented photojournalists, Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, were killed in the Libyan city of Misrata. In the past several days articles and tributes have painted a picture of men, one from England and the other from North Carolina, who traveled often, traveled relatively light, and traveled for a purpose.
In a New York Times article titled War, in Life and Death, David Carr writes, “Tim and Chris were very different men who died because they had something in common: each thought it important to bear witness, to make images that communicated human suffering and send them out to the world.”
“Many people have died in the recent wars the two men covered,” Carr continues, “and we should not make the journalist’s error of elevating the deaths of Tim and Chris above those of others. But beyond the personal loss for their families and friends, there is a civic loss when good journalists are killed.”
I certainly feel the loss. I’ve been in the habit for some time now of visiting Chris Hondros’ website to check out his images, appreciating what they say about the world, about our neighbors. My favorite (if I can use the word for something so tragic) is the iconic photo of a little girl in Tel Afar, Iraq, terrified, with her parents’ blood splattered on her face and clothes. In 2007, Chris recounted the incident on NPR.
This post is not a call for all travelers to head off for the Tel Afars and Misratas of the world. It is, however, a gentle reminder that travel can be about much more than gear selection and budgets and beach parties. It is also about the question of Why? What might we learn from people like Chris and Tim, who were often asked why they did what they did and could give a profound answer? How can we incorporate that into how we experience the world?
Reflecting in Vanity Fair on his friend Tim’s death, Sebastian Junger says, “That’s also part of what you died for: the decision to live a life that was thrown open to all the beauty and misery and ugliness and joy in the world….What a vision you had, my friend. What a goddamned terrible, beautiful vision of things.”
“For as one comes to understand people who live by institutions and values different from one’s own, at the same time one comes to see that these people are, nevertheless, at bottom quite like one’s own people. The alien culture at first appears to us as a mask, enigmatic or repugnant. On closer acquaintance we see it as a garment for the spirit; we understand its harmonies and appreciate them. Finally, as acquaintance goes deeper still, we do not see, or for a time forget, the culture, but look only to the common humanity of the men and women underneath.”
–Robert Redfield, “The Study of Culture in General Education, ” Social Education, Oct. 1947
Man asleep at work. Photo: cell105 / Flickr
In my post last week, I talked about whether it’s safe to travel now. As a bit of a follow-up, I’ll talk about when it’s dangerous to sit still for too long: always.
Have you ever been stuck in class or at the office and felt like you were dying inside? It might not just be your mind playing tricks on you. The New York Times had an alarming article titled, Is sitting a lethal activity? This quote by a doctor summed it up nicely:
“Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”
Whether you’ve traveled or not, many of us can relate to that dread of being at a desk job. The computer monitor attacks your eyes, the fluorescent lights can harm your skin, and fat builds up in your body from your lack of movement. That doesn’t even cover stress, which is a leading cause of a whole host of physical and mental problems.
On the flip side, travel is much more active. You’re walking to sights, you’re flexing brain muscles by navigating a new place, you’re carrying your backpack, etc. You’re 100% engaged, physically and mentally. When I was traveling, I gained a trim figure without seemingly exercising. But I actually was working out, by doing the day-to-day tasks of being on the road.
Have you ever come back from a trip in better shape than when you left? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Perhaps the perma-vagabonding life isn’t quite within reach and you need a job that will not only value your love for travel, but also will pay you enough so you can squirrel away cash for that travel. How do you know which companies support a healthy work-life balance?
Outside magazine’s May issue helps you weed through the companies who just talk a good game and identifies the 50 best places to work, sorted by location, average salary and more. Not only that, but an article about winning company philosophies on work-life balance shows that more organizations are taking similar paths. To round out the feature, company leaders share their thoughts about what makes their business stand out from the rest.
If working for yourself isn’t in the cards, and those lottery tickets haven’t yet paid off—why not work for a company that cares about the things you care about?
One of the fun parts of travel is getting out and trying to navigate a foreign city on your own. Many travelers relish the simple task of trying to navigate public transit from the airport to the hostel where they are staying. There is simply a fresh zeal to figuring the workings of local buses and rail systems to get out and see all of the sights a place has to offer.
I’ve always enjoyed this particular element of travel, however after a trip to Kyoto – with its multiple separate metro lines that require their own separate transit tickets – I found myself singing the praises of the simple and efficient public transit system back home in Korea.
The whole of the Korean transit system is accessible with the country’s T-Money card. The small credit card-sized transit card can be loaded and reloaded endlessly. The credit that you load onto your T-Money card never expires, so it is common to see locals loading the equivalent of hundreds of dollars onto their cards to avoid frequent reloading. Reloading machines are in every metro terminal and are available in English.
Absolutely all forms of public transit are accessible with the card. The buses, metro, and even taxis use the card as fare. What’s more, the entire country uses this card. The same transit fare card that is used in Seoul is used in Busan and Gwanju, and indeed everywhere in the country. If navigating travel terminals frustrates you, or if you are simply short on time, the T-Money system can save you on a lot of hassles.
In places like Seoul, public transit in extremely cheap. A single fare in one direction is usually 900won, or close to about US80cents. Seoul is rather large, and if you find yourself needing to transfer between metro and bus to get to your destination, both legs of your commute is counted as a single fare if you make the transfer in less than 30 minutes.
In all of my travels, I have yet to find a public transit system so simple, efficient, and cheap.
Age: 27
Hometown: St. Petersburg, FL
Quote: “Between the two – living frugally and working part-time – I have been able to support slow travel. I try to limit the number of plane tickets I have to buy and in that way tend to stay in a region for at least four months at a time.”
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A 1972 Monty Python sketch called “Travel Agent” contains a classic scene where the Eric Idle character goes on an over-the-top rant about package tourism, at the expense of Michael Palin’s travel-agent character. Many of the references are dated now — and the whole scene is drenched in hyperbole — but many of the frustrations of overly structured group-travel still ring true. Here’s the rant in full:
“What’s the point of going abroad if you’re just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea — “Oh they don’t make it properly here, do they, not like at home” — and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamares and two-veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White’s suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh ‘cos they “overdid it on the first day.” And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentals with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they’re acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you’re not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting “Flamenco for Foreigners.” And adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there’s an excursion to the local Roman remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney’s Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local color and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing “Torremolinos, torremolinos” and complaining about the food — “It’s so greasy isn’t it?” — and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres. And sending tinted postcards, of places they don’t realize they haven’t even visited, to: “All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an ‘X’. Food very greasy but we’ve found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney’s Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’.” And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can’t even get a drink of Watney’s Red Barrel because you’re still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you’re thirsty and there’s nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it’ll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of “unforeseen difficulties”, i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris — and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody’s swallowing “enterovioform” and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn’t there to take you to the hotel that hasn’t yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there’s no water in the pool, there’s no water in the taps, there’s no water in the bog and there’s only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can’t sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door — and you’re plagued by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers’ wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe — and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn’t like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone’s comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free “cigarillos” and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on “Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich” and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody’s talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane…”
