What are your plans for the future?

My ideas about the future are unclear. They are being shaped by my current experiences and my reflections on those experiences. One idea that has been taking shape is that of creating an environment of peace and harmony where I can grow internally and in my relationships with others. An environment where hopefully I can sow the discipline of routine and reap an increased sense of connection with and compassion for everybody. That starts first with my family and friends. I only hold in mind a few examples of what such a situation looks like. I imagine working to save money (more through restraint and frugality than long crazy hours) to start a business that will allow me regular communication with the land and people of similar interests (love of the outdoors, curious mind, pursuit of personal growth). One example is a bike or ski rental store that has a cafe and ethnic clothes and crafts store inside.


Why are you taking such a long time to travel?

Mainly because I am intersted in a lot of places and want to see those places deeply. That means learning enough of the language to have basic conversations (and if I am really industrious also learning to read & write a bit), being able to venture out into those parts of the country only reached by foot or require some other travelling hardship to get there and soak up the atmosphere, and the ability to take advantage of any educational opportunities available (like spending time in a monastary or at a Yoga institute or alternative medicine retreat etc.).

If you are taking such a long time then how come you are not visiting the Great Wall of China (insert name of any great site here)?

I actually feel that I have been quite selective in which countries I have chosen to visit. I am looking for depth here rather than breadth. I am also looking for some sort of obvious cultural continuity (e.g. languages, religion, former empires, musical traditions) between the countries I visit so that my experiences can build on each other and I can more quickly achieve a greater depth of understanding in each new country I visit. I am also taking advantage of my physical prowress now to visit those places which require the most fitness to get to, saving the easily reachable sites for later on in life.

Are you trying to find yourself or something cliche like that?

Um, I think I have found myself already. I think that the greatest expression of having found oneself is having self confidence and some idea of what sorts of activities/environments/human company makes you happy. Finding a regular way to engage in those activities, be in the right environment, and enjoy the company of those kind of people is a separate challenge. You first have to know what Quality is to try and find it out there. One person said 'there would not be so much fake gold if the real thing did not exist.' I guess I am a 'true gold' digger.


How are you able to travel alone?

Travelling alone has its ups and downs. For me personally it is an easy solution to problems rooted in character flaws I have that make travelling with any other person long-term a difficult prospect. Here are the advantages of solo travel I have bandied about:

a) you can hook up with anyone who you find momentarily interesting and go their way until you decide that you are ready to move on (I know that my father will read that and say that I am the biggest flake on the planet - perhaps he is right (lets hold a global competition))
b) you can go where you want, when you want, at your own pace and with no compromises
c) being solo allows you to slip like an eel in and out of social and cultural situations easily - you can represent yourself in the way that you feel is best suited to the situation (e.g. you can allow whichever is the most relevant facet of your personality to dominate).

The down side to travelling alone is occasional loneliness when you don't happen to have a good road companion, occasional higher costs for lodging and transportation, and the lack of companionship or an advocate if you become ill.


Are you worried that this extended absence from the working world is damaging your career?

Maybe. I guess that all depends on the perspective of the person that is interviewing me. People view travelling as broadening to different degrees. Some traditional folks in the Midwestern US where I grew up ask how much money any given journey is costing and then say 'you could have bought a new washing machine with that money - what a waste!' Other people (like some members of my family) cap off valuable travelling experiences at a few months and say that any travelling done past that time fails to benefit the traveller and only has the effect of making him/her unable to ever cope with life at home again. At this particular moment I am not holding my career up on a pedestal and giving it offerings of blood and sweat. I doubt that by following my dreams I will ever look back with regret.


What is your budget for this trip?

I don't have one. Call this fuzzy math. Call this just-in-time financing. I have a very small (and ever-shrinking as the NASDAQ is combing the ocean floor for somewhere deeper than the Mariana Trench) amount of money that will take me as far and long as it can along this possibly three-year journey. I may work someplace along the way if I discover that staying in that spot would teach me something and be profitable. We'll see if I can make something like $4000 US (not including air) last almost three years.



What is your route so far?

2000 May - Northern Bolivia
2000 June - Peru (Cuzco and Huaraz)
2000 July - Ecuador (everywhere but the coast)
2000 August - Chicago & New York (visas and goodbye II)
2000 September - Thailand
2000 October - Laos and South Yunnan in China
2000 November - Northern Yunnan (living in monastery near Dali) in China
2000 December - Far Northern Yunnan$BCT(B Tibetan area & Hong Kong in China
2001 January - Chicago for Christmas and then Kathmandu on 18th
2001 February - Hiking across all of Eastern Nepal
2001 March - Kathmandu valley
2001 April - Annapurna Trek, Pokhara, LumbiniMarch - Kathmandu valley
2001 February - Hiking across all of Eastern Nepal
2001 April/May - India: Varanasi, Bodh Gaya, Delhi
2001 June - India: Gokarna, Margao, Hampi
2001 July - India: Auroville, Bombay
2001 August - India: Bombay, Rajasthan, Amritsar
2001 August/September - Pakistan: Lahore, Rawalpindi,Islamabad, Peshawar, Chitral, Gilgit, Escape to Turkey
2001 September - Turkey: Istambul
2001 October - Turkey: Agean Coast, Efes, Olympos
2001 November - Turkey: Cappadoccia
2001 November/December - Syria: Aleppo, Palmyra, Damascus. Lebanon: Beruit, Baalbeck, The Cedars
2001 November/December - Turkey: Konya and home to Chicago, Visit brother Shar in Boulder, Colorado
2002 March - May - Iran: Tehran, Shiraz, Esfahan, Alborz Mtns, Bam, Bandar e Abbas 2002 June - December - East and West Europe by bike and train: visited and worked in eco-communities in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, France. 2003 January - June - West Africa: learned about drumming and animism in Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Mali.

How much did the plane tickets cost?

My route to the Andes in South America and back was hellishly circuitous. Since Miami is the gateway to Latin America I flew there on a Southwest Airlines voucher I had and then went from there to La Paz, Bolivia and open-jaw returned from Quito, Ecuador for a total of US $525. My flight back from Quito was on Panamenian air and stoped for a several-hour layover in Panama City.

My one-way flight to Thailand from New York was bought from an agency in Chinatown and cost $600 including a free one-nights stay in Narita, Japan on ANA airlines. From Hong Kong to Chicago I flew JAL for US $630 with only 1 one hour changeover in Narita, Japan.

From Chicago to Kathmandu I flew Lufthansa / Royal Nepal for US $830 with a ten-hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany and a two-hour layover in Dubai, UAE.

From Turkey RT to Chicago I got a one year - no change fee ticket on Lufthansa for US $630 bought from a travel agent in Istambul, by my reckoning the cheapest city to fly out of in the Middle East. Straight no-frills tickets RT to Chicago were available for as little at $350 at that time (but had inflexible return dates and a one month "all travel must be completed" rule).
My advice for would-be bargain hunters that live in a larger city is to go to the ethnic neighborhood of the area of the world that you want to visit, take your notebook and then visit on foot every travel agency there asking for their best price, airline, routing and available seats/dates. The next best thing are airline consolidators like the one you can find at 1-800-cheaptickets or www.cheaptickets.com (which oddly are totally unrelated businesses). The next next best thing is then to look at sites like Expedia.com fare-compare machine, get a sense of the Best no-bargain fare class in that market and call every reliable airline you can think of to ask about their best fare (hoping you get someone on the phone at their end who is willing to work with you to search for the route/date combination that yields the best fare class *these classes are ussually coded by letter - e.g. 'fare class j' etc.*).


What job did you do before and what is your nationality?

Graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the spring of 1995 with a not-useful degree in English Literature, went to work immediately for a social work concern in Champaign, Illinois ostensibly facilitating the mental/skills development of severely and profoundly developmentally disabled adults. This was a brutally under-funded and understaffed organization. The job was good for my civic pride but hard on me in all other areas. Many times a day I was required to clean and shower adults who had shat or pissed themselves. The most creative "clients" (as the developmentally disabled adults were called) would try to smear shit on me while I was changing them. These were people who had usually been in the government care system all their life, often bore the scars of years of physical abuse, felt powerless, and wanted satisfaction which rarely was available. I remember the winter of that year of community service as one long chain of exhaustion and peeling off my toxic nursing home-smelling work clothes in my basement before running upstairs to my apartment for a detox shower and freezing mornings hand-cranking the ancient engine of the handicapped-equipped van that I used to tour my clients around town. I amazingly stayed with this job for one year and will never forget learning that there were a couple of people on the staff that honestly found this kind of work exhiliarating.

From there I did a brief tour of Ontario and Quebec centered around the death of my paternal grandmother who had died after years of alzheimer-like dementia that strangely improved her relationship with the rest of the family. My father's ancestral home is outside of Hull, on the Quebec side opposite the Canadian Capitol of Ottawa and my grandmother was buried there along with the rest of my father's family.

After returning home I experimented breifly with the adverstizing world as a Media Coordinator for a few months in Chicago. While the job paid very well compared to my former social work job it also involved being smeared with shit by my clients. I learned that the creative mystique that hangs around the advertising industry brings an emperial number of willing serfs to the field for a long period of usually unrewarded peonage. I also learned that unregulated business transactions like the buying and selling of adverstising time/space (non-tangibles) is unregulated for a reason because many of the brokers in this area enjoy the confusing chaos of their dealings to curry special kickbacks and favors for themselves at every possible opportunity.

After a protracted search for what I termed 'a good job' I landed at PricewaterhouseCoopers (my father being a partner there definitely aided me in getting an interview) in their Defined Contribution Administration area an outsourced semi-automated 401(k) management service. In plain English that means I got a job counting other people's retirement money using computers. While apparently perceived as a shit job within the firm, it was bar-none the coolest job I had ever had. In just a few months I had a staff of several people I was training, had popularized a paperless recordkeeping method that was much easier to execute and saved loads of annoying computer paper from being necessary. With the help of an excellent manager I had at the time (that is you Nancy Domecq!), I was able to turn a chaotic system into a smoothly running machine.

After helping out on a project for a different part of the company that involved two weeks of work in glamorous Guadalajara, Mexico I was transferred up into a consulting area of the firm. This new job involved gathering a lot of information from clients (who rarely rubbed feces on me) and helping to present that data back in an attractive and educational manner. In short, we were usually helping client companies to learn about themselves with an improvement slant. I did this job for over 3 years and during that time had the chance to visit almost every part of the US and work with a bunch of characters including both massively brilliant and massively boring people (sometimes both at once). While I did not have something in common with everybody they were by and large a more open-minded crowd than your average consultants. Finally I came to a point in this job in which I was walking in place. I was very good at some things and markedly weak in others but not much was evolving in either the former or the latter. I also had an infatuation with the exciting world of the Northwestern US internet startup. After getting several offers from different startup companies (some of which I thought I would love working with) I discovered that I felt this strong need for an interclarey chapter of exotic travel. No company was willing to wait so I scrapped the whole search and said 'lets take a big trip', deciding that there was plenty of time later to land that perfect job role. This interclarey chapter has turned into a book .