Luxagraf: Topographical Writings

How to Get Off Your Butt and Travel the World

How do you make the leap from cubicle daydreams to life on to the road?

There are plenty of guides on the practicalities of traveling the world -- like planning an itinerary, booking cheap flights or living in hostels -- but sometimes the harder questions go unanswered -- how do you find the courage to travel?

Even for those that want nothing more than to escape a life of monotony, even for those that hate their jobs, even for those that feel like they have no life and desperately need some excitement, it still isn't easy to actually get on a plane and go.

I know. I've been there. I decided to travel to world when I was 24. I left to travel the world when I was 29.

For five years I found excuses to postpone my dreams, not consciously of course, but there was always some excuse to stay. Only years later, once I'd made it all the way to India, did I realize what held me back -- fear born of inertia.

Inertia is a powerful thing -- both imprisoning and liberating at the same time. The negative aspect is the inertia that imbues our lives in the form of habit. We get up, we go to work, we come home, and the same thing happens the next day.

The first law of thermodynamics says, more or less, that bodies in crappy ruts tend to remain in crappy ruts.

The good news is that bodies on the road tend to remain on the road.

The question is: how do we make inertia work for us rather than against us?

The answer is that it's going to take some energy. You have to make the change happen. You must decide to save yourself. One thing that I think is absolutely key to understand is that traveling doesn't have to be turning your back on your life at home. I don't think of travel as escaping from my life at home (which I like), but as something that enhances and informs the life I live when I return home.

Eliminate Excuses

The best way to change your habits is to look at what's stopping you from changing.

You want to travel the world, but, like me, you have a million excuses stopping you.

Let's take a look at some common reasons to not travel (this is not an exhaustive list, but it reflects both my experiences and those of people I've met in my travels).

Most of these reasons (excuses) complete the phrase i'd love to travel the world, but...

I don't have the money

Generally speaking this is a less self-indicting way of saying, I already spent the money on something else.

Very few of us are so poor we can't save money to travel the world. It doesn't take nearly as much money as you think; I spent $12,000 including airfare ($2000), traveling for three months in Europe and seven months in Asia. That averages out to $1,200 a month, far less than most of us spend at home (and for the record I was not pinching pennies as I traveled, I ate well, slept in nice, clean guesthouses and didn't pass on anything I wanted to do just because it was expensive).

So how do you save for a trip? That depends, but here's a good place to start: stop buying so much stuff. We all spend a shocking amount of money on stuff we don't need, and this is the number one habit to break if you're serious about traveling the world. Live simply and save your money. Here's how Rolf Potts recently addressed the question of money:

The specifics are less important than your attitude. That is, whatever job you take to travel the world and/or fund your journeys, the most important thing is to stay positive, live simply, and discipline yourself in such a way that you save your money. For my first vagabonding journey around the North America when I was 23, I worked as a landscaper for 8 months. This wasn't a super high-paying job, but by living simply I was able to save enough money to travel the USA by van for eight months.

My experience was similar, I was running a restaurant kitchen (not a good way to get rich), and I mananged to save the money I needed. To expedite the savings I also did some web development on the side.

Start a savings account and, instead of buying stuff, put your money in the account. If you're new to saving, check out Get Rich Slowly for some tips and inspiration and The Art of Nonconformity for some reasons why stuff leads to mediocrity, not the sort of life changing experiences we all crave.

The key to letting go of stuff is realizing how much more valuable experience is -- this is a profound shift of priorities and, in my experience, goes far beyond just saving to travel.

I'm not big on being frugal, but if you simply eliminate stuff from your life, you'll suddenly discover you have quite a bit of extra money.

I can't quit my job

This one is doubly powerful in today's economy.

There are probably some of you who have found completely fulfilling work and are in the place you should be. I understand that, I haven't done a long trip in three years because I had such a job. But if that was really true, you wouldn't be reading this post.

And if your job is not fulfilling and not making you feel like you are doing your best work for the world, then there is absolutely nothing to lose by quitting it.

Think of it this way: the world needs you and you're ignoring it. Working at job you dislike is cheating the world out of your creative genius and passion. Don't be that guy.

As for the current economic situation... if you're really worried about the long-term viability of your job, then what's the harm in quitting?

I only speak English

80 percent of the world is desperately trying to learn something you already know. You're way ahead of the curve here.

Would it be nice to speak Nepalese and chat with the sherpas by a campfire in Nepal? Absolutely, but trust me, no one is going to hate you because you can't (that said, a phrasebook is always a good idea, just making a tiny effort will get you a long way). I have the utmost respect for those who can learn languages, but I suck at it and it has never gotten in the way of my travels.

Besides what better way to learn a language than to immerse yourself in the country?

I'm too old

No, you're not.

I'll do that when I'm older

Sadly, from what I've seen, you probably won't. I've never understood long term deferred gratification -- why would you assume that you will in fact be old? Why take that risk?

If you've never seen it, watch Rady Pausch's The Last Lecture, which is heartbreaking, but very inspiring as well. And bear in mind one of his central messages: "We don't beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well."

Isn't traveling just running away from my problems?

Possibly, but not necessarily; you'll never know until you go. Even if you are running, it may not be away, it could easily be toward. There's really no way to answer this one until you go. And don't be afraid to fail. If you head out to travel the world and discover that you absolutely hate it, hey, you can always go home. But you'll never be able to answer that question until you leave.

I don't have anyone to travel with

I'm an only child so I'll admit that this one had never actually occurred to me, but I can say that being alone, even being lonely, can be a very healthy experience.

However, the truth is, unless you willfully decide to be alone, you're going to meet tons of people on the road. Even if you leave home alone, you won't be alone for long (which is both a blessing and curse, depending on your personality).

Inspire Yourself

Eliminating your excuses is only half the challenge.

Excuses are the result of movement in the wrong direction, and to stop moving in the wrong direction is progress, but only so much.

Once you have stopped your old habits, you must shift directions and move again somewhere new.

Start with something very simple, like taking a different route to work, ride the bus (which also saves money), walking somewhere you usually drive, or otherwise physically alter the way you see the world around you.

Start photographing your day, not only will you get a new perspective on things, but if the results are rather dull then you'll have even more inspiration to change.

Start a journal, write down what you like about your life, what you don't like and how travel is going to change that (this will prove hilarious about halfway through your trip).

These things might sound silly to you, they might seem unimportant. But traveling is about much more than just going somewhere else; it can offer all variety of life changing experiences, but only if you're ready for them, so get yourself ready by changing before you leave.

Start Planning

So you're looking at the world around you a bit differently, now it's time to get serious about this trip you want to do.

It's time for a concrete plan. The simple action of planning can easily become the inertia you need to propel yourself onto the road.

Head to your local library and check out some books. Buy them if you must, but remember we're trying eliminating stuff, so try not to buy too many. And don't get guidebooks just yet, pick something like Rolf Potts' book, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-term World Travel ^[1] or Edward Hasbrouck's The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World, both are excellent and will inspire you in numerous ways.

Delve in into the practicalities of living on the road, sell your stuff, rent a storage unit if you really can't part with all of it, get rid of the things that block your path.

Also start doing some research on how to travel. It sounds silly, but there is an art to traveling. Read travel blogs of those who have gone before you, vagabonding.com is a great site (though it's no longer updated), as is World Hum and Vagabondish.com. Half of what you learn will be wrong and most of your preconceptions will be shot to hell the minute you land, but it doesn't matter, make yourself part of the travel world and eventually you will end up living in it.

Figure out where you want to go and how you want to get there. I suggest you buy round the world plane tickets, you'll save a lot of money that way, but be sure that your tickets include overland travel as well^[2]. Unless you're hopping islands in the South Pacific, ground travel is almost always cheaper (and infinitely more fun).

But chances are you will need some plane tickets, so when you're ready to kick your butt in high gear, go ahead and buy them. I used airtreks, there are others that will work just as well. Or cash in your frequent flyer miles if you have them.

Buy a ticket, set a date and make the new path real.

Give notice at work. There are few more personally liberating acts than quitting a job.

Once you know where you're headed, it's off to the bookstore in your spare time. Read the latest editions of relevant guidebooks, but don't buy any. If you must, buy the guide to the first country you'll visit, wait and buy the rest when on the road.

But while you're digging through the guidebooks, wander over to the fiction and memoirs sections as well to see if you can find some novels or travel narratives on the area you've chosen. Headed to Asia? Read Graham Green's The Quiet American. Headed to Europe? read Kafka, Dickens or my personal favorite, W.G. Sebald. Headed to South America? Read some Borges, some Marquez or some Neruda. Headed to Central America? Read Arturo Bolano, Ernesto Cardenal or any of the many accounts of the civil wars in the region.

Here's another one some people will find silly: go have a meal a restaurant that serves food from an area where you're headed.

Read, eat, sleep and breathe your travel ambitions. Make them real.

Conclusion

Congratulations, you've almost made it. By this point you have tickets in hand, you have some idea of what living on the road will be like, you have some gear and maybe you've even have packed. You've kissed the job goodbye, shed the stuff that was holding you back and you're nearly there.

About the only thing left to do is get on the plane (or bus or train or whatever).

It's difficult to describe what that will feel like, I've rewritten this sentence about twenty times now and I still can't do it justice. It's a sense of liberation that you will rarely get a chance to feel. Embrace it.

Not very many people create the opportunities to live out their dreams; think about how lucky you are when you walk down the concourse and step on that plane.

A Word about Failure

Not every trip happens. When it's your first trip, failure is hard swallow. But the truth is, there's is no such thing as a failed trip, there are just postponed trips.

For every long trip I've gone on (and that would really only be two long trips, totalling almost two years of traveling), there's half a dozen well-laid plans that have fallen through for one reason or another. I should be writing this from Paris, but I'm not. I bought a house instead -- I failed to travel to Paris.

Like anything, travel is the result of choices, sometimes you go, sometimes you don't just yet.

Don't beat yourself up if your intitial plan doesn't work out. Hang a map on the wall, keep saving and eventually you'll get there.

1. Full disclosure: I write for Rolf's vagablogging.net, it's not a paid job and Rolf has never suggested that I pimp his books. I just happen to genuinely think that his book is one of the best meditations on extended, budget travel that's out there.↩
2. One of my only real regrets in my own trip is that I didn't go overland from India to Nepal. I already had the (non-refundable) ticket so I got on the plane. Everyone I've ever talked to loved the journey from India to Kathmandu and I wish I had done it. Next time.↩

[photo credits, from top down: TheFriendlyFiend,stuartpilbrow, mikecolvin82, rileyroxx, Esparta]

No Strangers on a Train

I have a weakness for trains. It doesn't matter if it's a subway ride across town or the Trans-Siberian railway, count me in.

I blame the whole thing on the The Boxcar Children, certainly not the world I grew up in, where there were very few trains.^[1]

Trains are almost totally unknown where I come from. If trains pass through Los Angeles, they don't do it anywhere near where I lived. When it came to traveling from LA there were two options -- get in the car or head to LAX.

And yet trains lurk in the background of most American myths, from Kerouac hopping freight cars in On the Road to the music of Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Bob Dylan and countless others. Chances are, if something is hailed as "uniquely American," then there's a train in there somewhere.

So how does a culture end up with a mythology built around something most of us have never experienced in any way?

The answer lies more in what trains represent than their practical reality. Rail travel taps into a very primal part of the American imagination -- that we're all free. And by free I think we mean the idea that there is still some untapped thing out there that we can, at any moment, propel ourselves toward.

It's part of the belief that there is freedom in travel -- the way parallel tracks converge in the distance offers the promise of the infinite, toward which we are always running.

That's why the mythology of trains is tied up in that of nomadic wanderers. The train-riding hobos of old are the modern vagabonds' spiritual predecessors; travelers who, like the hobos of pop mythology, place more value on the freedom of movement than the accumulation of things (there's also the similarity in bathing habits, but hey, you have to take the bad with the good).

I didn't spend any real time on trains until I got to India, where I spent nearly all my time on trains.

My overwhelming memory of India is the Indian railway system, which is simultaneously the most mind-boggling complex thing I have encountered,^[2] and also the coolest, most convenient and downright fun way to travel.

My best memories of India are sitting on the steps of an Indian train car, feeling the rush of air, the thousand foreign smells, watching the scenery pass, from the red mud jungles of the south to the dry barren deserts of Rajasthan. In all I traveled nearly a thousand miles by train in India (and saw no less than four major bus wrecks from the comfort of my train car, which gave me additional motivation to stick to trains).

The train system is the life blood of India, not only is it the single largest employer in the world, it's how the country moves.

The vast majority of the Indians I met were fellow rail passengers. The secret is to always travel second class. First is too segregated, you don't meet anyone but army officers and fellow backpackers. Third class is standing room only and generally too crowded to move. Second class is just right.

In second class train cars I met Indians from all walks of life, from the cobbler's family that asked me to babysit their children and offered me the best samosas I've ever had, to the two teenage aspiring rappers who gave me a full day tour of New Delhi when we arrived.

Indian trains offer something I've rarely found in America -- organic community travel.

In the west especially, a community of travelers has become little more than businessmen drinking at the Holiday Inn Express bar, or backpackers smoking in some dingy flophouse, or worse, the online communities we mistake for genuine connections between people.^[3]

Trains have become one of the last real manifestations of our longing for something more -- some shared group travel experience that is almost totally lost in American culture.

I think in the end that's why we mythologize trains, because they harken back to an age of community travel, a real, tangible community of travelers, not just backpackers, but people from all walks of life, people traveling near and far together in a shared space that isn't locked down like an airplane and isn't isolated like a car; it's a shared travel experience and there are precious few of those left in our world.

1. I do remember once as a child taking the train from Santa Ana to San Juan Capistrano to see the swallows, or perhaps the monarch butterflies, that part is hazy, but the train ride I am certain of.↩
2. The single best resource for deciphering train travel and the complexities of timetables is undoubtedly the wonderful Seat 61 website.↩
3. Old man internet joke: what's the difference between a 1998 BBS and Facebook? Ten years of rationalizing our isolation.↩

Leonardo Da Vinci and the Codex on Bunnies

Downtown Birmingham is deserted, even the trees are bare and there's hardly any sign of life, save the occasional car on the interstate somewhere up above, propped aloft on concrete pylons. There's a far too bitter wind for October in the South; it cuts around the brick edifices and concrete parking garages.

I've come to Birmingham for Da Vinci. He of the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel and the Codex of Birds.

You wouldn't expect Da Vinci in Birmingham Alabama, it of the civil rights struggle, much more readily conjured as a synecdoche of mediocre backwaters everywhere.

Yet here he is.

Or his notebooks anyway. I should say that I did not so much want to see Drawings From the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, rather I felt that I should, which I freely admit is a very poor reason for going. But in truth there is more to it than that. I didn't feel I should go because it was somehow necessary to see, an educational exercise or anything like that.

Rather, something in my head kept saying, for no reason I could deduce, go to that exhibit. In hindsight I now know that I needed to go for the bunnies.

But let's start at the beginning, the warm, red-lipped smile from the middle age woman who collects my ticket, the very nice white-haired gentleman who hands me a brochure on Da Vinci and his notebooks, the other elderly gentleman in a blue docent's vest who directs me to the back of the line.

Oh yes, the line.

Over two hours worth of people backed up, snaking through the main foyer, up the staircase to the second floor, around the landing and then inside some hidden room where, under glass and guarded by more museum security than I've ever encountered anywhere else combined (Da Vinci may have come to Alabama but clearly no one trusts Alabamians to react well to his arrival), the drawings await us.

Imagine for a moment if, some 500 hundred years from now, a few pages torn from your notebook could draw thousands of people from around the world.

Be a bit strange wouldn't it? But never mind that.

I suspect that, had Da Vinci's codex of birds arrived in Birmingham Alabama say ten years ago, I would likely be standing alone right now. But then there was that damnable Da Vinci Code book.

Yes. I've read it. It was once the only English language book on Ko Muk where I was once trapped for while. It was just me, an Australian who told me with a straight face that he was an ex-lifeguard, a grumpy collection of Thai guesthouse staff, three naked Swedish girls and that damn book. I read it in three hours.

But I digress.

We need to get to the beginning. Further back than just the museum, further back than the curator who set up the show, further back than Italy from whence it came, probably all the way back to Da Vinci himself, who once made some doodles in a notebook, drawing people, drawing birds, drawing horses.

To keep things short we'll setting for the moment I first encountered the bunnies.

The week before I left to travel the world, months before I would read The Da Vinci code, years before I would go to Birmingham, Alabama, I went up to San Francisco to visit Mike and Hilary. Bill drove, fun was had as I recall. For me the thing that sticks out though are the bunnies on the wall (well, that and the wolf coughing in the living room, but that's another story).

The bunnies were on the wall. Two dimensional bunnies. There were posters of bunnies. Specifically Kozyndan's poster of various famous Japanese paintings recast with bunnies. Where there should be sea foam there were bunnies. Where there should have been leaves, there were bunnies. Where there should have been cherry blossoms, there were bunnies.

There were bunnies everywhere damnit.

Prior to seeing those images I'm not sure I ever gave bunnies much thought (several months later in Austria I would eat a bunny and be somewhat unimpressed), but there, hanging on the wall of a San Francisco apartment, were posters of bunnies, hundreds of bunnies, thousands perhaps and I, for the first time, I was forced to think about bunnies. Bunnies in places you would not expect bunnies.

You can see where, if, shortly after seeing such a thing you suddenly had roughly an entire year's worth of free time in part of world where beer is about 25 cents a pint, you might develop something of an obsession with the bunnies in places where there should not be bunnies (what if, instead of rats running around this hostel, there were bunnies? And so on).

I did a bit of googling and discovered that the artist(s) have something of a bunny fetish, bunny fish, bunnies in winter, bunnies in a crowd and so on. When I got back one of the first things I did after I had a roof over my head was order my own copies of the bunny posters.

Of course none of that prepared me for the Ur Bunny in Birmingham.

Eventually the long line to see the Da Vinci exhibit made its way up the stairs and around the second story, through a smallish exhibit of Asian art. Finally, I thought, at least there is something to do while I wait, some art to examine.

As the line wound around the room, there were a number of interesting pieces, but in the corner I spied something that looked like a traditional Japanese or perhaps Chinese landscape paintings -- a tree in fall, some mountains in the background and some, wait a minute, are those bunnies? Holy crap, they are bunnies and they have glowing red eyes.

There, fortunately restrained under protective museum glass, was a Chinese landscape populated by red-eyed bunnies, lurking under trees, trying, but failing, to look innocent.

I had plenty of time to confront the bunnies, to study them in the their natural watercolor state and it didn't take long to feel there was a noticeably evil glint in their eyes, as if wary of being caught in the act of colluding on some nefarious project, almost certainly some sort of world takeover scheme -- not unlike what the conspiracy theorists attribute to Da Vinci, but so much sneakier because no one expects the bunnies.

Bunnies are cute. Bunnies do not generally attack. Of course there was that incident in The Holy Grail and, as we all know, humor has a way of cutting much closer to the truth, but still, bunnies are harmless right? Cute, fluffy little things... but what's with the red eyes? The artist clearly did not have cute fluffy little things in mind when he painted these bunnies.

Red-eyed things are zombies, re-animated nightmares, conspiratorial evil plotting against us. Now I understand the kozyndan posters, they're a warning, a vision of future where bunnies have taken over the sea, the mountains, become like water, like snow, like wind to meld themselves irreversibly into the fabric of our existence.

Think about, with the birthrate of bunnies it wouldn't take but a couple of years for properly conditioned bunnies to replace nearly every atom of our existence with themselves.

Here's what I know: the Ur bunnies have glowing red eyes and while Da Vinci did not, so far as we know, produce a Codex of Bunnies, given his secret society connections, he surely must have known of the Ur bunnies. Known enough to hide the codex and hide it well.

As for the stuff he didn't hide quite as well, well, it was interesting, perhaps even illuminating, but somehow it seemed suddenly unimportant in the face of the inevitable bunny onslaught. Remember, you read it here first.

Elkmont and the Great Smoky Mountains

The road undulates through the darkness, over the long, arching tails of mountain ridges, where the eastern slopes of the Smokies taper off into the Tennessee River Valley. Divets between tiny the rolling hilltops form eerie microclimes of misty white clouds hugging the valleys and road like the fingers of some wispy white mountain ghosts snaking down from the peaks.

With the windows cracked it's not hard to tell that the pockets of fog gather in the cold crevasses where the temperature drops noticeably along with the highway. From the top of every small hill, the headlights move like shiny ribbons though the knuckles of mountains. As the beams dive back down, the view from behind the windshield becomes a bath of smoky white light -- a film noir scene brought to life. And then the car rushes up out of the chilly depths and into the clear night, atop another ridge where the remnants of wood plank fences line the road.

From a particularly high ridge the land is lit up by the rising moon and succession of foggy pockets and lumpy ridges between spreads out like cigarette smoke settling in the creases of some red vinyl cushions, tucked in the corner of an all night diner, straight out of the 1950s.

The Smoky Mountains are, as it turns out, well named.

Were it light, the landscape and buildings in the area would indeed look much like the 50s. Not a lot appears to have changed on the slopes of the Smokies in quite some time. The new developments -- strip malls, cookie cutter suburbs and giant megastores -- are further up ahead, around the bend in Knoxville, Maryville.

But out here in the boundary land of mountain and plain it's just the headlights stabbing through the fog.

I keep half expecting to see some ghostly figure off in the shadowy outline of trees at the edge of the small arc of headlamps, to catch some otherworldly creature slouching through the foggy forest, off to haunt the crumbling farm houses set back from the road, enveloped in night.

Occasionally I pass through a town -- sudden, brilliant, florescent -- gas stations, neon beer signs in a window, telephone wires, stoplights, downshifting and then fading in the rearview mirror, returning to the murky hills.

It continues like that with a brief break through Maryville where Starbucks and shopping malls remind me that I am indeed still part of the 21st century. But then that fades as we move into the mountains again, higher, this time in pure blackness, even the fog is gone.

After a while the zigzags stop and the road follows the river upstream headed to Pigeon Forge, which, when you reach it in darkness, can't help but look like an amusement park at the gates of hell, a last ditch effort of all failed American cultural ideas shored up together -- Elvis impersonators, mini golf, Dollyworld, all-you-can-eat restaurants serving every food imaginable as long as your imagination is limited to steak and pizza, which apparently, for many, it is.

Pigeon Forge is everything that's wrong with America.

Pigeon Forge is Myrtle Beach in the mountains, it lacks any basis in reality and, like Myrtle Beach, it doesn't really exist. It's all just redneck weddings cascading straight out of the chapel and into the mini golf reception area.

I used to think the demise of such places would be gradual, almost imperceptible, until one day they were just vacant and ghostly, joining Bowie CA, Bisbee, St Elmo and other places that simply slipped our collective minds. However, in the case of Pigeon Forge it may well be much faster. The people who come here are the same ones now mailing their house keys to the mortgage companies -- the unreality of it all only lasts for so long. Of course I could be wrong.

And we aren't here for Pigeon Forge, it just happens to have a free condo we're staying in. We're here for the mountains. Smoky Mountain National Park is just a few miles up the road.

The next morning I'm sitting on the patio, bundled up against the unseasonable cold, reading Cormac McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper which is largely set here in these same mountains, but back in the early 1920s. The Orchard Keeper is fiction, but McCarthy spent a fair share of his life in Sevier County and knew these mountains well -- you can feel them living and breathing right there in the turning of the page.

He came out on a high bald knoll that looked over the valley and he stopped here and studied it as a man might cresting a hill and seeing a strange landscape for the first time. Pine and cedars in a dark swath of green piled down the mountain to the left and ceased again where the road cut through. Beyond that a field and a log hogpin, the shakes spilling down the broken roof, looking like some diminutive settler's cabin in ruins. Through the leaves of the hardwoods he could see the zinc-colored roof of the church faintly coruscant and patched of boarded siding weathered the paper-gray of a waspnest. And in the distance the long purple welts of the Great Smokies.

Although with a bit of driving, and some selective horizon framing, you can find crumbling buildings with collapsing siding that does indeed resemble the "paper-gray of a waspnest," or the ridgelines like bruised knuckles interrupting the sunrise, for the most part McCarthy's vision of the Smokies is just a memory, a half crumbled placemarker at a neglected turnout in the road, a few yellowed, slightly retouched photos in a visitor center, a coffee table book of history purchased for friends back home.

I would love to know what McCarthy thinks of Sevier and environs now. It would be nice to drink a pint with him and hear about a time when men and women were sane, cautious and respectful. Of course, if you've ever read a McCarthy book you know what happens to those characters, they are, in one way or another displaced by the less savory, the more ambitious, more full of hot air and power-hungry dreams.

In McCarthy's world the meek very rarely inherit anything save dust and silence, but they do retain their dignity, something painfully lacking in Pigeon Forge.

The mountains are still beautiful, dying perhaps, choking on smoke from Chattanooga and Atlanta, mostly Atlanta, but in the mean time the leaves on the trees run the spectrum from ochre to vermillion with all the middle hues as well.

We spend a few days, driving mainly, but occasionally walking, through the mountains, the trees, along the rivers and streams, the windswept peaks with fog breaking over them like waves of mist and smoke.

There are also the crumbling remains of old grist mills and early towns now abandoned; remnants of a time, near the end of the 19th century when hiking and exploring the outdoors was all the rage -- John Muir helped the trend along, but for a time people genuinely liked to get up into the mountains, out in the desert and see America's unparalleled natural wonderland.

One the byproducts of that era is the ghost town of Elkmont, nestled up against the steep ridges of the Smokies at the end of railway line that used to stretch back to down to Maryville. Elkmont began like as a rough and tumble logging town, and while I couldn't find mention of it in The Orchard Keeper, it dates from 1908 which puts it in roughly the same time frame.

Over time Elkmont ran out of trees to easily harvest and the town gradually evolved into a haven for the socially prominent and wealthy members of Knoxville, Maryville, and Chattanooga -- summer cottages were built, a central hunting lodge was added and members built a number of trails that lead off into the Smokies.

At the zenith of its popularity the Little River Railroad, which ran from Knoxville to Elkmont, offered a Sunday "Elkmont Special" -- non-stop train service to the mountains. That proved popular enough that the Sunday special became a regular, several days a week route.

Then that passed or was diluted somehow, getting out to see the land was condensed down to the somewhat easier, more profitable habit of just buying fleece jackets at the mega-mall and playing a bit of putt-putt golf in Pigeon Forge.

Oh well.

One piece of advice, should you head to Smoky Mountain National Park, don't dig too deep, if you do any more than scratch the surface you might discover some unpleasant things -- like the signs along the river that read: Do Not Drink, Swim, Bathe or Touch the Water; River contains fecal matter.

Yes, the rivers are full of shit. Shouldn't be surprising then that Pigeon Forge is full of shit. Everything trickles downhill as they say.

And we are all more or less full of shit.

Don't drink the water.

And so it goes.

Rope Swings and River Floats

Two weekends ago we went up to the mountains, just outside of Dahlonega GA, and floated the Chestatee River using inner tubes, various pool toys and one super-cool inflatable seahorse. We even rigged up an inner tube to carry a cooler of beer and dragged an extra inflatable boat to pick up trash (as well as hold our own).

It was great fun. We found a rope swing where you could climb up about six feet on the bank and swing out over the river and drop into a nice pool that was plenty deep for the landing.

What made the whole thing possible is that my wife's parents own a cabin in the area, which they are kind enough to let us use.

Since this weekend was my father-in-law's birthday, we decided to head up and do another river run. After parking the car at the end and trucking the tubes down to the launch point, we put into the river. Just beyond the launch point there's a couple sizable drops that we walked around last time, but this time, after scouting things out, I figured out how to go down.

I made it through unscathed and I sat in the lower pool waiting for the others.

In short, things started well.

About a minute later a drowning bumble bee somehow climbed out of the river, onto my tube and then stung my right arm.

For most people that's a moment of discomfort and no big deal. But I'm lucky, I'm allergic to bees so for me it means a moment of discomfort followed by several days of swelling and aching -- as I type this my forearm is about one and half times its normal size. Of course it could be worse, I could be "I have to carry an epi-pen" allergic, which, thankfully, I'm not.

Everyone asked if I was okay or if we should turn around. In hindsight, I should have said no, I wasn't okay and yes we should turn around -- not because of me, just because I know what happened next -- but I didn't, so we continued on. [This would have been a great time for the crazy old man of the river to come out of the woods, point a crooked finger in our direction and prophetically croak, "you're all doomed." But as far as I know the Chestatee lacks any such character.]

For about an hour it was the same peaceful float we did two weeks ago, a few rapids, long calm stretches where the river is too deep to touch bottom, just lying back in your tube watching the hardwood's overhanging branches threading across the gray-blue sky. Or the snarled banks choked with laurel and the occasional honeysuckle, roots protruding out like fingers rubbed raw by the passing water.

It's one of the finest stretches of river I've ever been down.

And then we came to the rope swing.

Everything that follows is essentially my fault.

See, I love to jump off of things. Swinging off of things is even better. And if you can dive... If there's somewhere to jump, swing or dive, I'm probably going to find it.

Of course it's not the safest thing in the world to do, nor am I the sharpest tool in the shed, but you already knew that much.

When we went down two weeks ago I spied a rope hanging down from a tree. Naturally, I immediately started paddling for the shore. Now I seriously wish I hadn't, but I did.

I climbed out of my tube and grabbed the rope and walked up the bank. I quickly discovered that I couldn't reach the handle someone had kindly attached. However there was a bit of rope extending down from the handle, which some other shorter person had no doubt added.

Normally I would have climbed back down the bank and checked to see how far off the ground the little extension of rope would have put me. But for whatever reason I didn't, I just grabbed it and jumped.

Just below the embankment where you launched from there were some stratified rocks sticking out of the water -- fairly sharp, ridged rocks, the sort of rocks that look to have jutted up straight out of the Mesozoic era.

And I hit them. About a millisecond after I jumped I knew I was doomed and I pulled my legs up to my chest as tight as could and tried to control the crash. I hit the rocks hard, but with my feet (the Choco sandals I bought for my trip around the world are still the best purchase I've ever made and they allow me to do things like bounce off rocks without a scratch).

As soon as my feet hit the rocks I twisted my body and pushed off out into the deeper water and managed to avoid more serious injury. However, it wasn't so much my skills or planning that saved me, really it was just dumb luck.

Undeterred (or stupidly if that syntax works better for you) I climbed back up and was joined by a couple of other people from our river party who wanted to give it a try.

Long story short: it turned out that if you were about six feet tall you could reach the handle, if you were five ten like me and someone else put their weight on the rope to stretch it, you could also reach the handle.

If you were five five like one girl who did it, you could be picked up and then grab the rope handle. The problem is that the person picking you up is on a muddy incline and bit off balance themselves.

Which brings us to today.

My wife's brother Jeremy and I stopped at the swing and his girlfriend, Tova, wanted to give it a try. I held the rope and Jeremy held her up until she could grab the handle. It worked and she swung out over the river and let go. We all had a turn and then another.

We went up for a third try.

Same routine, I pulled the rope as taut as it would go and Jeremy held her up to grab the handle. We both thought she had it, but as Jeremy was starting to let go she said, "no, wait."

But it was already too late, he couldn't have held her if he wanted to. Even if he had been able to they both would have fallen and landed on the roots and rocks below.

Instead, Tova swung out about five feet and then her grip slipped and she fell, hard, face first onto the same rocks I had hit with my feet.

When she first came up out of the water I could already see a blue bruise and blood on her leg. I thought for a moment that it was a broken bone sticking up, ready to break through the skin. I went down to help, but there wasn't much I could do. I figured having a broken bone sticking up and having someone throw up on you was probably worse than just the bone.

I looked around trying to figure out a way off the river and out of the valley. But there wasn't one. Even if we had a cellphone, there was no way you could fly a helicopter into the riverbed, it was too narrow and overgrown (I bet Kenso could have done it, but he wasn't immediately available).

The options were: walk upstream or float down. That really isn't a hard decision if you spend much time thinking about it.

Thankfully the majority of her fall was broken by the innertubes we had stacked below to try and cover the rocks in case of something like what happened. Unfortunately we missed a spot, the center of tubes, and that's where her knee hit.

Luckily it turned out out that bloody blue bruise I saw wasn't a broken bone threatening to poke through the skin. Of course that fact that the bruised, bloody contusion was her kneecap didn't really make things much better.

After a few minutes of evaluating our options, Tova said she felt okay enough to continue down. We took ice from the cooler and put it on her leg and Jeremy walked the rest of way, guiding Tova in the small inflatable boat, with her leg elevated and the ice-pack resting on her knee.

Eventually we got back to the car and got Tova to a hospital where X-Rays determined that she had fractured her patella (kneecap).

Which means Tova floated for over half hour down a river with no painkillers other than ice, with a fractured kneecap.

You wouldn't be able to do that. I wouldn't be able to do that. But Tova is considerably tougher than the rest of us and she did it.

I don't know what will happen with her knee in the long run, hopefully surgery won't be necessary. I once did something similar skiing and I know how much joint injuries suck. Her leg is currently in one of those super annoying anti-mobility casts that extends from your mid hip to your ankle, which means you can't drive or really do much of anything.

If you'd like to send a care package or something of that nature, e-mail me and I'll give you an address. In the mean time hopefully the pain isn't too bad.

And I have to say, Tova, I think you're pretty badass for floating the rest of way down the river with a shattered kneecap and a smile. I would have cried the whole way.

Our Days Are Becoming Nights

Everywhere I go I think, I should live here... I should know what it's like to work in a cigar factory in Leon, fish in the Mekong, living in a floating house on Tonle Sap, sell hot dogs at Fenway Park, trade stocks in New York, wander the Thar Desert by camel, navigate the Danube, see the way Denali looks at sunset, the smell the Sonora Desert after a rain, taste the dust of a Juarez street, know how to make tortillas, what Mate tastes like, feel autumn in Paris, spend a winter in Moscow, a summer in Death Valley. I should be able to not just visit places, but in habit them. There is, so far as I know, only one short life. And in this life I will do very few of these things.

Sometimes I think that's very sad.

Tiny Cities Made of Ash

The bells are a constant cacophony, not the rhythmic ringing out of the hours or tolling from mass that the human mind seems to find pleasant; no, this is constant banging, the sort of atonal banging that only appeals to the young and dumb. The firecrackers bursting back over behind the cathedral add an off rhythm that only makes the whole mess more jarring.

But Francisco seems entirely unperturbed and only once even glances over at toward the other side of the park, the source of all the noise and confusion. He's too fascinated with the tattoo on Corrinne's shoulder to bother with what slowly just becomes yet another sound echoing through León.

Francisco is a shoe shiner, but since we're both wearing sandals he's out of luck and has reverted to what seems to be the secondary universal appeal of westerners -- a chance to practice English. We're sipping Victorias in a cafe just off the main park in León, Nicaragua. It's our fourth day here -- with an extra day spent at the nearby Pacific beaches -- in what is, so far, my favorite city in Nicaragua.

Architecturally León is a bit like Granada, but since it lacks the UNESCO stamp it's somewhat less touristy and a bit more Nicaraguan, whatever that means.

It's a city of poets and painters, philosophers and political revolutionaries. In fact, Nicaragua as a whole is full of poets and artists, all the newspapers still carry at least one poem everyday (U.S. newspapers used to do that too), but León is perhaps the pinnacle of Nicaraguan writing and painting, if for no other reason than it's a college town -- the constant influx of youth always brings with it vitality and art.

There are three separate Nicaragua universities in León and even though none of them are in session right now, as with Athens, GA the fomenting imprint of students lingers even when they are gone -- political graffiti dots the cafes, bars are open later, people seem more active, the bells clang, the fireworks explode on an otherwise ordinary Sunday evening.

In short, León has something that most of the rest of Nicaragua (and the U.S. for that matter) lacks -- a vibrant sense of community.

Of course in relation to the States nearly everywhere seems to have a much stronger sense of community and togetherness.

The irony though is that just writing those words together fills me with dread and loathing, a sure sign of my own inherent Americanism.

But the truth is community doesn't have to mean over-priced "organic" markets, war protests round the maypole and whatever other useless crap passes itself off as community in Athens and elsewhere in America.

Every time I go abroad, not just Nicaragua, but Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, just about anywhere, the communities are somehow more vibrant, more alive, more sensual -- full of bright colors, playing children, people walking to work, to the market, to the gym, to wherever. There is life in the streets.

In Athens there's mainly just cars in the streets. Big, fast cars.

For instance, in León the houses are not the stolid tans, boring greys and muted greens you find in Athens, but brightly colored -- reds, blues, yellows, crimson, indigo, chartreuse even -- the doors are not shuttered and double-bolted, there are no lawns, no barriers between the life of the home and life of the street, everything co-mingles, a great soup of public and private with each overlapping the other.

The clatter of the Red Sox game drifts out the window, along with the smell of fresh roasted chicken that mingles with the dust of the street, the kids gathering in the park, the declining light of the day, the first streetlights, the evening news, the women in curlers walking in the shadows just behind the half-open wooden doors....

And it makes the streets more fun to walk down, there's something to experience, things to see and hear and smell and taste.

Which isn't to say that León is Paris or New York, but in its own way it sort of is. Certainly it's better than my own neighborhood where I know exactly what color the houses will be before I even step out the door -- and not because I know the neighborhood, but because I know what colors comprise the set of acceptable options in the States -- where the children are staked in the front yard on leashes (invisible for the most part, but it won't surprise me when the leashes can be seen), neighbors wave, but rarely stop to talk and certainly no one walks anywhere unless it's for exercise.

Why are American neighborhoods so dull? Why no happy colors? Why make things more lifeless than they already are, given that our neighborhoods are set up in such away that we abandon them all day and return only at night to sleep?

Dunno, but I can tell you this, León, Paris, Phnom Phen, Prague, Vientiane and just about everywhere else is far more exciting to walk around than the average American town. And it isn't just the exotic appeal of the foreign; it's about architecture, design and the sharp division of public and private those two create to make our neighborhoods into the rigid anti-fun caricature that the rest of the world sees.

Do I sound like a transcendentalist-inspired, anti-american crank? Sorry about that. I like America, really I do. And I hold out hope. One day my house will be vermillion -- my own small step.

Plus, that's a big part of what I enjoy about traveling -- seeing how other people construct their house, their neighborhoods, their cities, their way of life... see not just how it differs from our own, but perhaps see some ways you could improve our lives.

Like hammocks. We desperately need more hammocks. Lots of hammocks.

But León isn't perfect. In fact it fails on several levels -- take that butt ugly radio/microwave/cell tower on the horizon -- why the hell would you put that in the middle of otherwise majestic 18th century Spanish colonial city?

León, I'll miss you, you're just about perfect as far as Central America goes, maybe just see about moving that radio tower....

You Can't Go Home Again

The wind became constant on the second day, changing from the occasional gust that would precede an hour or two of torrential rains, to a steady 20-25 knot blow as if Zephuros himself were paying a visit to the island.

Once the wind became constant, silence retreated back to wherever silence goes in a world where squalls rule. At first you just notice the clattering palm leaves and of course the near deafening roar of the the rain on the tin roofs. Both mingle with the background of surf breaking just below the bluff where our cabin sits, facing east -- to Cuba and the oncoming clouds. But on the second day I started to hear other sounds -- the low steady groan of a turbine, like the sound you make when blowing on the top of an empty bottle. Then there are creaking screws and rusted hooks that hold up the hammocks on my porch. And of course the hammocks themselves, finely woven Nicaragua cotton battered about in the wind.

When the rain comes it's horizontal, making awnings and porches a useless defense. The only way to stay dry is either inside or pressed against the leeward side of a building.

The first time we came to Little Corn Island it was April, the tail end of the dry season. It rained once or twice, but never for more than five minutes and always followed by more sunshine.

This time it's the end of June, just well into the wet season, and the island is an entirely different place.

Naturally I wasn't really expecting it to be the same. I knew the weather would have changed, I knew the people we had met would be gone, save a few and I knew that it would be a different experience.

But I wasn't entirely prepared for how different it would be.

When I first returned from Southeast Asia, I wrote that it was impossible to go back. That travel was singular and unrepeatable.

My actual words were "You will want to hang on to things when they are perfect. You will want to stay in Vang Veing, a floating village, on an island lost at sea. You will want to return even after you have left. You will want things to be the same when you return. But they will not be the same."

For all the overly-dramatic certitude, that was just a theory. Being the son of a scientist I hate to spout untested hypotheses, but now we've tested it and I can definitively say that I was right -- there is no going back.

Going back must mean going again, otherwise it would imply that you, the place and everyone in it are static, fixed, immutable, and of course that simply isn't the world we live in.

The danger in going again is that we will compare the present to the past and for some reason the present rarely fares well in that comparison.

So yes, you can go back, physically, but be prepared for something entirely different -- for instance, here on Little Corn not only are the people different, but the very island has morphed and changed -- the rain comes daily and the beaches are almost non-existent.

Ali, Little Corn's self-appointed medicine man, tells me that the shifting tides pull much of the sand back out toward the reef and the considerably bigger waves breaking on the far side of the reef would seem to prove his point. Eventually, come December, the tides will shift again, bring the sand back in.

But in the mean time the island has literally shrunk. The beach where we spent most of our previous trip is now under two feet of water at high tide.

I was sitting up at the Casa Iguana restaurant area yesterday thinking about how much even places can change, not in a matter of years, but months, even days. The remarkable thing about traveling is that it's not simply a matter of moving through space, it's time as well.

In fact it might be one of life's more undisguised illustrations of the intrinsic link between space and time.

Arriving somewhere is somewhat like a game of pool slowed down.

When one pool balls strikes another there is that infinitesimal period of time where the balls actually compress, changing shape as they transfer energy.

If you were to slow time and and magnify space sufficiently, you would see the balls compress as they touched -- that minute moment of contracting and expanding, the transfer of force, the temporary mingling of color and atoms, the kaleidoscope of impact -- somewhat akin to what it's like to spend a week in one particular place.

You travel somewhere for a week, a month; you exist in that compressed space, impossible to observe from the outside, but very tangible and obvious within the kaleidoscope of the moment. Everything slows to near stop in relation to the outside world.

To an outside observer there is merely the impact, some photos on Flickr and the balls are already headed in opposite directions, vast expanses of blue-green felt suddenly between them.

From the outside it looks like mere mechanics -- people and places collide and some record of time is produced -- but from the inside the experience is very different.

As the one-time champion of the Denver pool halls, Ramstead Gordon (who was later dethroned by no less than Neal Cassady), once said "This is not a game of physics, it's a game of magic."

No two shots will ever be the same, no two or three or ten balls will ever cluster exactly the same way twice, no matter how similar they might seem from the outside.

Duplication is almost certainly impossible, why else would our culture be so obsessed with the things we can duplicate if not as some defense against the things we cannot?

So yes, as in pool, the places and experiences of travel are finite and you can never go back. But you can go again and bask in the changes because that's part of what makes it so interesting -- just don't try to fight it.

Returning Again — Back on Little Corn Island

This is a first -- going back to somewhere I've already been. Generally speaking, the world seems so huge and so full of amazing destinations that repeating one never struck me as a judicious use of my short allotment of time. However, given a rather small window of time for our honeymoon, Corrinne and I decided that the vaguely familiar would be more fun than something totally unpredictable and new.

Of course, the universe being what it is, our second trip to Little Corn Island has been unpredictable and entirely new. Other than the Best Western, still stolidly sitting directly across from the Managua airport, coming back to Nicaragua has presented a host of new and interesting experiences.

For instance we weren't counting on the fact that the increased gas prices have severely pinched the average lobster fisherman and to protest the fact that lobster prices remain at their pre-expensive gas levels, the fisherman converged on the airstrip on Big Corn Island and proceeded to blockade the runway with trucks and their own bodies, effectively cutting off the island from the mainland for four days. All inbound flights were forced to stop in Bluefields, leaving stranded travelers milling around a town with very little to offer. Those looking to go the other way, back to Managua, were in even worse shape -- no incoming planes meant no outgoing ones either.

Those desperate to make connecting flights onward from Managua were forced to charter fishing boats for up to $1200 and suffer through what had to be a very punishing ride across rough seas all the way back to Bluefields where they might be able to catch a (now very crowded) flight back to Managua.

Fortunately the same sort of blind luck that has gotten me this far prevailed and the fishermen gave up the strike the morning we were set to leave.

Stranded on Big Corn

Unfortunately, the drivers of the panga boat that runs between Big Corn and Little Corn didn't feel like there was enough business to bother with the evening trip the day we arrived. So Corrinne and I, along with a dozen or so fellow travelers, were stranded on Big Corn that night.

Being stranded on an island in the Gulf of Mexico probably doesn't sound all that bad, but if the island happens to be Big Corn, well there just isn't much worth seeing or doing on Big Corn. And everything nice on Big Corn is at the south end, but our ferry was set to leave the next morning from the north end, so heading out for an explore seemed like a good way to miss the morning boat and possibly spend yet another day waiting.

We holed up in a guesthouse just off the public shipping dock and spent the the afternoon and evening drinking and talking to the other people stuck in the same situation. Most of the local restaurants were closed, though we did manage to find a decent plate of shrimp and of course, plenty of Victoria to go around.

And I made a hilarious discovery that proved a revelation to even the two dive masters who lived on Little Corn -- topless lighters. The store across the street from the Big Corn ferry sells the sort of cigarette lighters that have built-in flashlights, but rather than a simple LED flashlight, the manufacturer decided to go to the next logical level and packed in an image that looks to have been pirated from 1970s-era Playboy pinups. The result is a spotlight of a half naked Playmate, which provided no end of amusement to our stranded group.

In fact, Big Corn would have been pretty much okay were it not for the dog somewhere in the vicinity of our guesthouse that sounded like it was being skinned alive. It wasn't, though the next morning several guests volunteered to do so, but it barked, yelped, cried and otherwise howled from around the time we went to bed until just before dawn. I actually didn't hear it much since I can sleep through just about anything, but no one else got much sleep that night.

The Wet Season

The first day on Little Corn we managed to find a bit of sun in the afternoon and somehow were already under shelter every time the rains came. Shelter is an interesting thing in the rain though, finding a roof isn't enough because the rain is almost completely horizontal thanks to a steady onshore wind, which has been increasing in force ever since we arrived.

The first night we ate dinner at Casa Iguana with the owner's brother, who is currently involved in a sun-dried fruit project that might, if all goes well, one day be on the shelves of your local Whole Foods or Trader Joe's market. We sat a while afterward drinking mojitos with Camilla, an English girl we met the day before when we were all stranded on Big Corn.

Still tired from a lack of sleep during the five-day party that was our wedding and the dog from the night before, we turned in early, this time with earplugs firmly in place.

However, we somehow ended up in the cabin with no window blinds and around midnight a pretty massive storm blew in with winds that howled and horizontal rain driving straight under our porch awning and lashing against the window. But that wasn't what woke me up, it was the lightening flashes that turned night into day and somehow managed to burn through my closed eyelids that woke me up.

Lightening doesn't especially bother me, I do after all live in Georgia where it's a near daily occurrence in the summer. But as I lay there in bed watching the torrential rains and flaying palm trees in the eery white glow of distant flashes, it suddenly occurred to me that we were sleeping in metal-roofed hut pretty near the highest point on the island -- basically a lightening rod with walls.

So I lay awake thinking that being killed by lightening on your honeymoon was exactly the sort of horribly cheesy and predictable plot line that life seems to love -- up there with the super athlete contracts cancer, the day trader who suffers a heart attack on the first day of retirement and all the other things that Alanis Morrisette would say are ironic, but of course aren't. They're just strange coincidences. And I fear strange coincidences.

I lay awake for an hour or more considering safer places to be in the storm and didn't really come up with anything since just about every building on the island has a metal roof. In the end I decided that being struck by lightening in my sleep would be somewhat better than the same while you're awake so I drifted off again and woke up to windy, but sunny skies.

In Love With a View: Vagabonds, Responsibilty and Living Well

Tim Patterson, editor of MatadorTrips.com, recently published an article entitled How To Travel The World For Free (Seriously). There are some good tips in the article, even for the seasoned travel vet.

But what's far more fascinating is the response from commenters many of whom tore into Patterson, calling him everything from a "rich, privileged, arrogant hipster" to a "dirty hippie." Here's a random sampling of some comments on Patterson's post:

there are three possible answers for how he can do this and not have to worry about his obligations. 1). He's a jobless loser that contributes nothing to society... 2). He's a rich, privileged, arrogant hipster who, while preaching a lifestyle of no consumerism and organic foods, really travels around in a BMW, listening to his iPod, blogging on his Macbook Air, contributes nothing to society... 3). He's a 14 year old idealist who's parents were hippies, but now work for Haliburton.

That's the sort of cynicism that just depresses me. Why are you so convinced that everyone else is a selfish privileged asshole? At long last, have you no sense of decency sir?

Trusting people you don't know while you sleep in their house is a good way to end up half-naked, raped, dead and in a ditch.

Mom? Is that you?

In fact, the further you get from the cities, the more viciously backwards with respect to medicine, hygiene and hospitality the people get... and, eventually, you reach places where the word 'culture' is completely inapplicable, and your life is seriously in danger.

My personal favorite though is the commenter who cites the words of a Pulp Fiction character as an example of how to live. Wonderful, murderous assassins are who you look up to?

Why Vagabonds Make People Mad

So why all the vitriol about a seemingly innocuous concept -- that traveling doesn't have to cost a lot of money, isn't all that difficult and hey, you can even go right now.

Part of the negative reaction comes from the widely-held belief that travelers are a privileged lot -- privileged because, unlike you and I, they can just drop their lives and leave. People like us, who feel tied down by responsibility, find the suggestion that we actually aren't patronizing and yes, elitist -- how dare you tell me what I can and can't do?

But when I dig a bit deeper into this sort of thinking, I generally find that by elitist, most people really mean enviably rich.

It may be splitting hairs, but I find that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, Americans actually admire elitists. To paraphrase and twist John Stewart a bit, we want advice from elitists. We don't want advice from people that believe everyone's a murderer.

But we also don't want rich people who've never struggled telling us that it isn't hard to drop everything we're struggling with and head out into the world.

The irony of course is that, in this case, the hostile reaction comes in response to an article that has ten tips on traveling cheaply -- in other words, it's trying to show you that you don't need money to travel.

That said, you'll never find me denying that I am very, very lucky and have been handed an incredible amount of privilege in my life, especially relative to the rest of the world.

But 90 percent of America is in the same boat. Troops do not storm our houses, bombs do not fall on our cities, Malaria, Dengue Fever, schistosoma and other killer diseases are unknown here (though that may change).

We are all privileged. For one American to call another privileged is a pot-kettle-black debate.

The privileged part is just a cover for a much deeper and more personal issue in our lives.

So why do we attack the author as an elitist? It's a psychological defense mechanism.

Stop and consider for a moment what Patterson is really saying: it's not hard to drop your life and travel.

Living Well

The debate that happens in the comments of his article cuts right to heart of some very personal ideas -- just how important is your "life"?

The unspoken assumption in that statement that ticks people off is the implication that everything you're doing is trivial -- that the life you're leading is so meaningless that it can be abandoned without a second thought.

That's why the attacks on Patterson are so personal and so vehement, because Patterson is, consciously or not, attacking people's most cherished belief, that our lives mean something and are important.

Obviously no one wants to think otherwise.

But I've done it -- dropped everything and left -- and, for me, as much as I am loath to admit it, it was true. Everything I thought I needed to be doing turned out to be totally unnecessary and yes, meaningless.

In fact I spent the first month of my trip wrestling with that. I was caught between feeling like I was finally doing something that did matter and beating myself up about having been suckered into the previous life, now rendered meaningless.

In other words I understand why some people reacted to Patterson's piece the way they did.

The debate that happens in the comments of his article cuts right to heart of some very personal ideas -- just how important is your "life"?

American culture tries to convince us that if you do the right things, you life is very valuable. There are some long standing, deeply-ingrained, fundamental axioms that lead us to believe that relaxation, travel and not working are contemptible. Instead, we're told, you need to work hard to "get ahead."

The notion that the importance of your life is dependent on your ability to "make something of yourself" is pretty well ingrained. Advocating otherwise is going to bring you some hostile reactions (as Patterson recently discovered).

I'm not saying I'm immune. If you learn anything traveling, it's that you can never escape your own culture. That's why I spent most of a week in Goa, India feeling guilty. Guilty that I was enjoying my life rather than working for some future enjoyment. Guilty that I had apparently been wasting my life for some years prior to that moment. Guilty that I was able to finally escape that when so many people never do. Guilty for all sorts of contradictory things.

And scared. Scared that when I got back, jobless and penniless I would end up homeless and starving to death. Scared that I might not make it back (India's bus system will do that to you).

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you about how I came to peace with it all. But the truth is that never exactly happened. In India I ended up meeting an Englishman who had a seemingly endless supply of excellent scotch and I quickly forgot about my guilt and fear. But it comes back.

I know, that's not the answer you were looking for. Bear with me.

Making Something

Let's go back to the notion of making something of yourself. I do believe in "making something of myself." And I am aware that that's a uniquely American idea, or at least western, since we seem to have somewhat successfully exported the idea to Europe as well.

What's interesting is how we define the key variable in that sentence -- what does it mean to make something of yourself?

In defending his co-writer, fellow Matador author Josh Kearns offers all sorts of ways that travel can lead to a more meaningful definition of who you are. He cites Alan Watts, Lao Tzu and some other very wise men to point out that in fact traveling can be exactly what you need to "make something of yourself."

But in many ways that simply begs the question -- if you're open to Alan Watts and Lao Tzu, you probably didn't disagree with Patterson's original argument. If you think Alan Watts was a communist and Lao Tzu comes with Kung Pao chicken, Kearns' argument isn't going to say anything to you.

How you answer that question -- what does it mean to "make something of yourself" -- greatly affects how you view the world around you and will determine how you react to a stance like Patterson's.

It's pretty easy to see how the more vitriolic commenters answer the question, all you need to do is reverse engineer the thought process. For instance, it's not hard to imagine that the person quoted above, who says staying with strangers is dangerous, lacks a strong sense of faith in humanity.

I have no idea why, but I'll make a guess -- one way to make something of yourself is to make nothing of everyone else.

If you see everyone around you as a murderous bunch of rapists and psychopaths, you get to see yourself and your family and friends as shining examples of humanity. You've made something of yourself -- You're better than the murderous bastards out there -- without doing anything at all. You're most likely going to lead a miserable existence, but it is one way to answer the question.

For others the answer to the "make something of yourself" question is tied up in western technological superiority. Like the man who says that the further you go "the more viciously backwards with respect to medicine, hygiene and hospitality the people get."

In order to think that you need to believe that your society is superior to everyone else's because we have all the things we value and they have none of the things we value -- never mind what they value, that's irrelevant. So you can say you've made something of yourself because you're part of (by your own definition) a superior society.

But here's what I think Kearns and Patterson are trying to say -- these might not be the best ways to "make something of yourself." In fact you might need to get completely outside yourself in order to make something.

If your definition of living well is making something of yourself and your primary means of making something of yourself is making less of everyone else then it's not surprising that anyone who suggests temporarily abandoning your life and your society is going to make you confused, angry, fearful and perhaps guilty.

The View From Here

Which brings me back to my own experiences in Goa -- fear, guilt, anger and confusion.

No, I never have entirely come to terms with the guilt or the confusion, but the fear and anger did go away. I quickly realized that there was no point being angry with myself for failing to leave my life sooner, I took comfort in the fact that at least I left eventually.

The guilt is still there. Much as I enjoy sitting in hammock in Nicaragua I spend a good bit of my time sitting there thinking about how I should be doing something with my life -- writing a novel, building a website, at the very least writing something about my travels.

You name it, I've felt guilty about not doing it.

But this last trip I started thinking about something else more troubling -- have I turned back into someone who thinks their life is important? Have I forgotten that feeling of total freedom that comes from abandoing your "life," that relief of realizing that all the things I agonize over in my "real" life, are actually quite meaningless?

See unlike the commenters who don't buy the vagabond argument, I suffer from a different American cliche.

For me, America ingrained its devil-may-care adventure motif far more than its make-something-of-yourself cliche. From Lewis and Clark to Jack Kerouac, there's a strong cultural legacy of lighting out for the territories.

Now I'm in an entirely different situation than I was when I left for my last trip.

I'll be married later this month. The common wisdom is that traveling with a family is somehow impossible, in America there's a myth that once you're married and have kids you have to settle down and that butts up against the myth I've been buying into all this time -- Kerouac and the rest.

I still don't know if it's my idea or just me replicating that devil-may-care cultural meme, but I reject the idea of settling down and I've met enough traveling families to know I won't be the first to reject it.

It may be more difficult to travel with a family, I'll have to get back to you on that, and fear not, I will get back to you because I will do it.

But the thing that strikes me is that, if I hadn't already set out, rejected my own life and gone through everything that I went through, adding a family to the equation might well make the whole idea seeming completely unfathomable.

And that's something I think many of these self-styled vagabond travel writers leave out of their "anyone can do it" travel pieces.

Anyone can do it, but it takes a hell of a lot more courage and effort for some than for others. I have no doubt that Patterson and Kearns are both aware of that and I understand that including the nuances just isn't something online journalism generally allows for, but it's a shame because it ends up alienating the people who could most benefit from some encouraging.

So while I agree with both authors, I think the "just do it" incantations are every bit as hollow as a Nike ad -- even when they're true.

And the glibness of most travel writing, particularly those of the so-called vagabond stripe ends up having the opposite effect that the proponents intend (Rolf Potts is a notable exception).

I'm not going to tell you that it's easy to drop your life and take off to see the world. However, I will say that it isn't as hard as you think. Your job isn't as valuable as you think, there's probably someone who'd love to rent your house and your kids will thank you when they're older (mom, dad, thanks).

I'm also not going to say that I don't buy the idea that you should strive to "make something of yourself," but the important thing about the "making" is that you define what that means. For some it might mean sticking to one job and providing for a family. For others it might mean dragging your family around the world on a grand adventure. Both answers are valid -- just make sure that it's you, not your culture, making the decision. And make sure that you realize both really are valid possibilities -- the only limitation to your life is your own imagination.

For me, making something of yourself is a never-ending process and one of the key elements is exploring all the different ways people around the world answer that fundamental question -- what does living well mean?

[VGB image from [Rolf Potts][7], cartoon from the ever hilarious xkcd]