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You are here: Home / Archives for Journey / Travel Reflections

Travel Inspiration: How I Built My Own Path

August 1, 2012 By Guest Blogger

‘A true seeker could not accept any teachings, not if he sincerely wished to find something. But he who had found, could give his approval to every path, every goal; nothing separated him from all of the other thousands who lived in eternity, who breathed the Divine.’ Hermann Hesse

After 13 years of conventional education, this quote was the most important thing I read. It resonated within me unlike most of the things I was taught in school. Funnily enough, it wasn’t something that my teacher had ever stressed any importance on. It comes from the novel ‘Siddhartha’ and I read it during my sophomore year World Religion’s class. I had spent most of my education being told that I wasn’t looking at things the right way, that I had to conform to the educational system that had been set in place, that everybody but me knew what was best for me.

To me, it seemed as if public school education had this obscure ideology that nobody could define, but somehow it was important that every student met the same goal through the same path.

How else would they get into college, get a job, and live some picturesque American life? Since this was something I didn’t want for myself, I became the kid who in one of my teacher’s words ‘would be fired from McDonalds at the age of forty because you are too stupid to work a fry machine’. After dropping out of high school, getting sent to an alternative education boarding school, and spending a year in college not understanding what I was even doing there, I found my path: it was travel.

Fast forward to 2004. I was finishing my freshman year at Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona. I was studying culture and religion at the time and as wonderful a school as Prescott is, I did not feel fulfilled. I became disinterested in my classes as we were always discussing the world as if we understood it, even though none of us had ever explored it. I decided it was time for me to begin exploring.

It started with a summer trip to Thailand. I spent most of my time in small villages as the only foreigner. I had no idea that Thailand was a huge tourist destination until a few weeks into my trip when I passed through Khaosan Road. Those first six weeks in Thailand opened up something inside me that I had only perceived vaguely before. It was an insatiable thirst to experience the world on my own terms: through travel.

Upon returning to Prescott I began searching for ways to get back to Asia. I wanted to go back to Thailand, but I also wanted to go everywhere. India was on the top of my list. After talking to my career counselor at school who had helped me my freshman year when I felt my education and life was lacking direction, he suggested a program called The Institute For Village Studies. The program would bring me through more villages in Thailand for two weeks and India for five. After that, I’d have the rest of the spring and summer to travel.

Upon speaking with the director of the program, I knew that this was the right trip for me. The director was a lifelong traveler and became the greatest teacher I ever had. On that first trip, I designed my own curriculum and studied holistic health in Asia, Tibetan Tantra, and received a service work internship working with hill-tribes in Thailand and Tibetan refugees in India. After three days in India, I told my director that I needed to find a way to spend the rest of my studies in Asia.

It turned out there was a distanced learning program at my school designed for people with families or full time jobs that still wanted to receive college credit. Students would develop their own curriculum and seek experts in different fields to be their academic mentors during their studies. I proposed to my school that I would do that program while traveling the world and they accepted me.

I was responsible for my whole education. I chose every course I took and developed my syllabus and assignments for everything I did. A whole new world opened up to me because I decided to take control of opening it. During my studies, I developed courses such as Cultural and Religious Pilgrimages where I studied the concept of travel as a sort of pilgrimage. I traveled to pilgrimage sites in India and Bhutan and learned the theory, but also experienced what pilgrimage meant for myself. My Indian music course had me watching concerts in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh while comparing the difference in musical styles and taking tabla lessons in Pushkar. My Thai culture and language courses had me in villages in northern Thailand where nobody spoke English and the only way to get around was to speak Thai. I learned more in a month than I learned in three years of Spanish before.

For my senior project, I traveled with my brother from Madrid to Bangkok by train, bus, and hitchhiking. I did a cultural and religious survey of the land we traveled and designed one other course entitled the Mongolian Nomad where we would stay with nomads across the country and learn about their way of life. My brother Justin had just graduated college and was working on his own film project. I ended up graduating with a concentration entitled Experiential Cultural and Regional Studies with an Emphasis On Religion and Spirituality. During my studies, I worked as a translator and guide for Village Studies every winter.

It’s been four years since I graduated college and I’m still following my path by running Off The Path Travel with my brother. That Herman Hesse quote is as true as it ever was for me. It has also taught me something invaluable as a tour guide. The greatest thing a leader can do is to teach people to lead themselves. I’ll never tell a person what path they should take. Only they can decide that for themselves. The best I can do is to help them gain the tools to find their own path on their terms.

 

Alex Martin is Co-Owner of Off The Path Travel,which offers authentic responsible itineraries throughout Asia.   Intimate small group tours and specialized itineraries take travelers beyond the boundaries of tourism into the homes, lives and cultures of Asia.  From India to Thailand and Mongolia, Off The Path Travel uses local guides to create relationships and experiences that transcend the anticipated. You can follow Alex on Twitter @otptravel, find him on Facebook or email him at alex@otptravel [dot] com.

Filed Under: Headline, Journey, Travel Reflections Tagged With: love to travel, travel inspiration, travelers

The Dangers of Hitchhiking

June 12, 2012 By Guest Blogger

Thanks to Chael Graham for today’s guest post.  If you are interested in guest posting with IShouldLogOff, email us at info [at] ishouldlogoff.com. Thanks!

When you travel you start to discover new things, and sometimes those new things become
major players in your lifestyle. Tons of people discover travel blogs and are inspired to finally release the
fear they might have held before, to take the proverbial leap from static to enter a world of movement.
Traveling opens up new doors; you learn new languages, you see new lands and feel new sensations.
That hollow feeling at your center tells you that you are happy, that you are somewhere where you can
finally enjoy living.

Traveling around the world on the cheap is a popular search query, and often you can find the
best information possible about how to find top hotels, where to eat, and how to haggle in foreign
countries. That’s all well and good. Unfortunately, however, the most inexpensive way to get from A to
D will require you to overcome a major prejudice that most of us seem to be born with: that hitchhiking
is dangerous; no questions asked, no precautions taken. I’m here to write that it’s not so black and
white.

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The real danger of hitchhiking is to fall in love with it and therefore increase the already quite
slim chances that something truly horrible befalls you. I am not a random blogger writing about
something I only know from research. I am a person, a son, a brother, a cousin. I am not a homeless
vagabond, although that shouldn’t affect how you take this. If I assume that you, reading this, are an
educated person who shared the prejudices against “hitchhiking” that I long ago shed, I find it relevant
to tell you something of myself.

I studied at university.

I love my family.

I have been hitchhiking through Latin America for almost 3 years.

The only time something bad ever happened to me was when I made a stupid choice to walk
through a bad part of Medellin in the dead of night. I wasn’t hitchhiking, I was just walking.

Hitchhiking is whatever you want it to be. Anyone can hitchhike. You can hitchhike for a short
distance, a short amount of time, hell you can even just give it a shot and fail and say you tried.
Hitchhiking is not for any one kind of person. You might see me on the street and think that I’m a
homeless vagabond, and that’s alright. But even the most clean-cut of you can hitch.

I use hitchhiking not only to talk to locals and learn new languages, to see C and B while trying
to get from A to D, but also to see the world from the eyes of someone on the fringe of society. Thanks
to most peoples’ bias (including my family and friends, who have told me they would never pick me up if
they saw me), hitchhiking can be used to observe and critique the absurdities of the untrusting world.

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But that’s not what hitchhiking has to be about. I want whoever is reading this to think more
profoundly about what hitchhiking actually is, and who is actually doing it. If you know couchsurfing.org,
then you know that at first you use it to save money that would otherwise be spent on hostels, but with
time the main reason simply becomes “because it’s the best way to learn.” Hitchhiking is no different.
It’s an exercise in patience, trust and faith in circumstance.

And the experiences that come to you are diverse. I’ve hitchhiked on mules in Ecuador, and was picked up by a congressman in Nicaragua. I’ve met all types of truckers, from the speed nuts to the
family oriented, and I’ve slept on their cargo, be it sugar, rice or metal scraps. I’ve met the whole
families of people who have picked me up, like the Solis family in Chile, with whom I spent Christmas
and who treated me like their third son. So many of my circumstances are thanks to hitchhiking; an
Argentinian asado, a Brazilian evangelic church service, a winter solstice hot spring gathering, a Peruvian
Ayahuasca trip, free passage to Machu Picchu, countless countless countless nights in safe with good
people in their good homes. I’ve hitchhiked thousands of kilometers in one sitting through Patagonia, or
just a few kilometers on the back of motorcycles and pick-up trucks everywhere else.

Somehow hitching makes you feel that you’re closer to the real than you might otherwise be.

Author: Chael has a continuous travel narrative and drawings fromhitchhiking around the world at velabas.com.

Filed Under: Headline, Travel Reflections Tagged With: experience, transportation, travel

The Moral Danger of Travel

April 17, 2012 By Jillian

Travelers often focus on their own risk when they set out to explore a new place. What danger am I putting myself in? We ask.What unforeseen risk lurks behind this next corner?

As humans we inherently focus on our own condition. We focus on what will affect us as individuals and often gloss over, if we even pause for a moment at all, upon our own impact on the places we go. Beyond the heaps of crushed water bottles that litter the third world, the most significant impact of travel is the cultural exchange of ideas. But what if exchanging those ideas, or ignoring our differences presents to us a moral danger- the danger of destroying a place?

Summit of Mount Sinai in Egypt


Would you travel somewhere if you thought your visit could destroy the place?

It is easy to say “no”, but the adventurer in most of us, or at least in me, argues with rational thinking. My visit won’t change anything, I will shine as an example of how to do it right.

Recently Abigail Haworth of the Guardian newspaper wrote and article about the utter destruction of Vang Vieng, Laos. The moral and cultural destruction caused by tourism. She could have written the article about so many places in the world, places that have been negatively impacted by tourism.  From the beginning of time tourists have left their mark on the places they visit.  Are we any different today than Napoleon’s troops who etched their name into ancient temples in Egypt? I argue, no.

So, does reading an article like Haworth’s make us less inclined to go? Does it make us look beyond the “me” impact of our travels?

It was with anxiety and insecurity that we visited Vang Vieng at the end of our RTW trip. We had heard the stories about Vang Vieng as we traveled through SE Asia, and from the stories it sounded like there was nothing there for us. Some friends convinced us otherwise and soon we found ourselves at the bus station.

The debauchery existed, of course.  Everything stated in the article is true. But today, there still is more to Vang Vieng than backpackers eating off of “happy” menus and those aspects of Vang Vieng that made it popular in the first place- the amazing landscapes, the gentle people and the caves remain.  Although we completely avoided everything mentioned in the article (and not with much difficulty I might add), I question the greater impact of our trip.  Did we somehow lead by example? Did our visible disgust at the behavior change anyone’s mind?  The answer of course is probably no.

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So what impact did traveling to Vang Vieng have on me?  It made me even more conscious of my impact on the places I go.  Of the example I lead by being an ambassador not only of my country, but of my culture and that it may be the things that I choose not to do that say more than what I choose to do.

Have you ever felt morally conflicted about traveling to a place? Where have you been that has been “destroyed” by the negative impact of tourism?

Filed Under: Headline, Travel Reflections Tagged With: impact of travel

Do You Want To Be Happy?

April 5, 2012 By Jillian

Three years ago we struck out to make our own happiness – we decided that the trajectory we were on was not going to give us that deep sense of satisfaction. We made a conscious effort to live our life the only way we knew how- to the fullest and to keep close to us the things that matter most the people and relationships that inspire us and make us want to be better people. Since that decision, we’ve lived a purposeful life and made decisions that made us happy instead of decisions that fulfilled another person’s expectation.

Two nights ago I felt joy and happiness more than I have in a long, long time. My heart was full and I felt like the purposeful life we’ve tried to lead had come truly full circle. Let me explain.

I arrived home in a frustrated mood. Going out for the mail, I was intrigued when I saw a letter from Austria. Ripping it open it was a lovely note of friendship from a couchsurfing friend. Although we had wished her well on Facebook at the news of her baby’s arrival in November, she sent us a translated baby announcement and a personal note. In January we sent her a change of address note and an invitation to visit us. Our decision to reach out and let her know we were thinking of her resulted in an opportunity to share in her happiness.

Opening the front door, I was shocked to find a package against the wall. Friends from Israel, who spent a few weeks with us in January, sent us a package for Passover.  Again, another friendship that we have consciously worked on building and strengthening.   A complete surprise and a gesture that filled my heart with happiness.

Moments later I rejoiced at the news that a good friend of mine had her first baby. By rejoiced, I mean cried like a baby tears of unadulterated joy. She is good friend who it would have been easy to drift away from over the years. She is a person that I have made a priority in my life, whose friendship I have consciously worked not only to maintain but to cultivate because I believe SHE is worth it.

And that night we went out to dinner with friends to celebrate their long awaited engagement.  It was a moment worth waiting for and seeing the happiness on their faces reminded me that I am lucky to have such people in my life.

My heart was full of joy that evening and not as a result of anything happening directly to me.  It was all a result of living a purposeful life, putting others as a priority and consciously building relationships.  You choose who you want to share your life with so choose wisely and consciously make those people a part of your life.  Relationships take work, but choosing to make those relationships better and support friends in need and make friends a priority will come back two-fold.

“The happiness you give to others comes back to you!

For happiness moves in a circle.

That happiness that goes out of you travels back to you!”

Filed Under: Headline, Travel Reflections Tagged With: friendship, happiness, joy

When it comes to happiness, “memorable” can trump “fun”

March 27, 2012 By Guest Blogger

Here’s something I find fun: a massage.

Here’s something I don’t find fun: spending the first night of a vacation in a half-flooded roadside motel in the Catskills that’s lost power and plumbing due to Hurricane Irene. My family (my husband, 7.5-months pregnant me, my 4-year-old and almost 2-year-old) is stuck there because downed trees and flood-buckled bridges have shut all the roads.

Yet if you ask me about my road trip to Maine right before Labor Day this past year, I’d say the trip was “great.” We did have lots of fun in Acadia after the hurricane fiasco, but I think the tracks laid down in my brain by the initial nightmare heightened the whole experience. I view the trip as something I will remember my entire life.

Coastline of Acadia National Park in Maine

Whereas I don’t remember my last massage. Looking back on my life, I think I’ll be happier if I’ve had more memorable experiences, rather than fewer.

Call it the paradox of happiness. Things that make you happy in retrospect are not always fun to live through. I’ve been thinking about that lesson as I try to figure out what to do with my small children for our vacations over the next few years. Traveling with small kids is not easy. There’s all the stuff you wind up packing, the eternal hunt for hotels with cribs, eating in restaurants when your kids want to crawl on the floor, the constant need for bathrooms. Plus I’m not even sure they’ll remember what we do! It would be easier — and certainly more immediately pleasurable — to just hang out at home and spend the money on shoes.

But the experiencing self is not necessarily the best judge of what is good in life. If it was, we’d never do anything but watch TV. We might want to have sex, but that would involve going out and finding someone to do it with — and that takes more effort than turning on the TV. A better judge is the remembering self — the self that looks back on what has happened, creates a narrative arc and passes judgment on all things in context. The remembering self likes a good story. And travel with kids is sure to produce them.

That’s why, even if some travel isn’t immediately “fun,” I still think it’s a good use of money. It buys happiness — just not in the way one might assume.

Laura Vanderkam is the author of All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending and 168 hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. She blogs daily at www.lauravanderkam.com.  Follow Laura on Twitter.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Gary Brownell via creative commons licensing.

Filed Under: Headline, Journey, Travel Reflections Tagged With: family travel in maine, travel memories

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