First: Make a list of things to do before you die. Realize that you are always inching toward death and still haven’t done a single thing on that list. This is the same thing your mom did; she put things off until it was too late.
Decide to do something about it.
Quit your job. Leave home. Book some flights.
Tell yourself, “If I make it to Ha Long Bay, this trip will be a success.”
Go to Peru. Go to Bolivia. Go to Argentina. Check some things off the list.
Meet a couple of Americans and drive around South Africa with them. Live in a village. Learn to carry buckets of water on your head. Go to Uganda. Ride across the country in a minibus with 24 people and a pregnant goat. Find work as a country-western DJ for the local radio station. Learn to harvest rice.
Go to Rwanda. Spend your days teaching English to genocide survivors. Cry. Teach them to play bingo. Laugh.
Fly to Egypt and immerse yourself in ruins. Find out your grandmother died. Find out your mom is dying, really dying. Fall down a tunnel of darkness. Hole up in a yoga camp on the Red Sea.
Go to your mother’s funeral. Wrap yourself in grief. Return to Egypt on the day a revolution begins. Feel yourself unraveling.
Take a boat to Jordan. Leave when protests begin. Go to Bahrain. Leave when protests begin. Get the nagging feeling that you are creating a trail of destruction around the world.
Go to Ethiopia, an extraordinary country, and plod your way through it. Feel like you’re something less than human.
Go to India, where something in your soul clicks. Love it. Embrace it. Drink in every hot day, every fragrant spice, every bit of eye-popping color. Move into an ashram. Pray.
Go to Thailand. Work with elephants. Meet a friend from home in Bangkok. Travel with her to Cambodia. Stay with more friends. Say goodbye.
Take a bus to Vietnam. Battle Saigon’s scooter-clogged streets and get a feel for the city. Slurp down bowls of noodles. Take a bus north. When the bus breaks down for 12 hours, sleep at a bus station. When the bus works again, it’s the hottest part of the day and the air-conditioning is now broken. Sweat. Make an unplanned stop in a beach town just because you desperately need a shower.
Take more buses. Take a train. Sleep in a dirty train car on soiled sheets. Arrive in Hanoi. Ride on the back of a motorcycle with a man even sweatier than you.
Schedule a boat tour. Pack up. Get picked up at 7 a.m.
Go to Ha Long Bay.
Wake up on a boat in a bay where everything is still. Everything is perfect.
Write that story.
Go to grad school to really dig into it.
Write that story again and again, edit it, excavate it. Work on it in scraps of time between your day job, when you stay up late, when you rise at 4 a.m. to have 20 quiet minutes before the baby wakes.
Sell it.
Have the perfect editor push you where you need it. He makes you laugh, he makes you cry, but most importantly, he makes you better. He reminds you to slow down where it hurts.
It’s Giving Tuesday, which is apparently a thing that follows Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday.
If you still have any money left after all those shopping days, here are my favorite ways to get rid of it:
Landmine Relief Fund
Beautiful young lady in Cambodia
The Landmine Relief Fund was started in 2004 by Bill and Jill Morse — two people I’m lucky to call friends — who were moved to action when they saw how many Cambodians live with the threat of dismemberment and death from landmines. Their NGO supports the work of Cambodian Self Help Demining, which employs a number of Cambodians and makes land safe and usable again. They also created a rural school program to give children in remote areas access to education.
In a country still suffering from the ravages of genocide and war, people shouldn’t have to live on land that literally kills them. That’s why the Landmine Relief Fund matters. It’s one of those rare instances where every dollar truly makes a lasting impact.
I hate it when I donate to an organization, then receive a bunch of fancy mailers, stickers, calendars, and booklets from them with pleas for more money. I realize I haven’t really helped the cause at all — I’ve just paid for a bunch of garbage to annoy me.
That’s why I like the Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation. A minimal amount goes toward fundraising and administrative expenses, with the bulk of every donation going directly to research. They work with internationally renowned scientists, and they’ve made a number of discoveries to significantly advance treatment and understanding of Alzheimer’s.
And since I lost my mom to Alzheimer’s, I’m all for anything that helps us prevent, treat or cure this horrific disease.
Most recently I funded a textile business in Kampala, Uganda.
It’s really simple: Choose a borrower, make a microloan for as little as $25 and create an opportunity for someone. You even get repaid and can use that money to help someone else!
I became a believer in Kiva when I was backpacking around Rwanda and met Kiva field partners, the people who work with potential borrowers and help them get the financial services they need. I saw firsthand how very small loans can empower people, lift them out of poverty, and help entire communities. I tend to support women-owned businesses in underbanked areas, but you can fund young entrepreneurs, green businesses, people in conflict zones, anything you want.
I read this article about the world’s most outrageous hotel amenities. They include all kinds of super-posh services that cater to one’s every whim and desire. Like a tanning butler. A fragrance sommelier. A soap concierge — you know, for all those moments when you really want to get clean, but you also need options.
It got me to thinking about my round-the-world trip. I didn’t get any of that fancy stuff! Nobody coddled me, wiped me or sprayed anything on me. At least, not on purpose. But that doesn’t mean my trip was amenity-free either.
None of these things included a sommelier, concierge or butler, but they were amenities all the same:
Amenities: CARBS! Microbrewed beers, a pancake buffet.
After a month of downing watery Bolivian brew, a free beer with actual flavor seemed like the most novel thing ever. And Saya beer is brewed on site by good people who know what they’re doing.
So what if the hostel showers were tepid and the beds were hard? I drank beer — REAL BEER — all night long. And in the morning, there was a free, all-you-can-eat pancake buffet waiting to sop up my hangover.
Backpacking is dirty business. Filthy, actually. One time in Bolivia I found a twig stuck to the back of my knee, and I had no idea how long it had been there. So when my friend and I saw an advertisement for Sol y Luna, it only took two little words to convince us to stray from our planned itinerary: Hot. Tub.
We traveled many, many hours out of our way. When we arrived, we discovered that the ecolodge had a very different idea of hot tub than what we imagined. It was a stone tub, situated outside in the garden. And it was filled by hand, one kettle of boiling water at a time.
But you know what? It was perfectly lovely. It would have been great anyway, but it was especially memorable since I hadn’t felt hot water on my skin in almost two months. The dirt floated away, the heat turned my bones into butter and I was clean for the first time in ages.
Amenities: Movies, chill room, floating bar, bioluminescent plankton, illicit activity.
Bodhi Villa almost feels like something I conjured up in a fever dream. There were beaches, crabs, rope swings and Billie Holiday. A sprawling bar opened into a river dock. The scenery was slightly too bright and sharp and unreal, like looking through the wrong lens at the optometrist’s office. At some point, a chubby Cambodian man named James Brown put me on the back of his yellow Vespa and drove me through acres of pepper plantations.
Days were drowsy and often spent in the “chill room,” but the nights exploded with raucous live music. A group of strangers became my closest friends in the world. We drank together. We sang loudly and off-tune. We jumped off the dock and marveled over the neon clouds of bioluminescent plankton that swirled around our limbs.
I was there for days? Weeks? Whatever it was, it was much longer than expected. One morning I woke up and realized I might end up at Bodhi forever if I didn’t get out. I immediately booked a bus bound for Ho Chi Minh City, about 10-12 hours away.
Before I departed, a new friend handed me a sandwich and a joint the size of a lipstick tube.
I politely declined, “Oh, thanks, but I don’t think I want to bring any drugs across borders today.”
“What? You got big plans for the bus?” he said. “Just take it and remember Bodhi … If you can.”
Almost every night, the owner of this hostel takes all his guests on a bike tour of beautiful Malacca.
It became one of my favorite memories of Malaysia. We carried bikes down skinny stairwells. The hostel owner strapped a radio to his handlebars and blasted Lady Gaga from the tinny speakers. And then we pedaled off into the night, through downtown, down ribbons of waterfront, all the way to a local restaurant that didn’t have a name or a real address. The excursion forged a camaraderie between all of us guests, and I saw things I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
I arrived in Seoul around midnight. I was too tired to travel an hour all the way into the city, so I booked a night at a guesthouse that is located close to the airport. Everything about this place was marvelous. The owner’s husband, Jackie, picked me up at the airport. My bed was ridiculously comfortable. The shower was hot and strong. The wifi was fast. The coffee was brewed first thing in the morning. There were games, DVDs, a Wii, even traditional Korean costumes for dressing up. And I am not exaggerating when I say this was the cleanest place I’ve ever stayed. It was SPOTLESS.
The hospitality went above and beyond what I expect at a hostel/guesthouse. The owner, Liz, and I had long conversations about our travels and our favorite places around the world. We exchanged e-mail addresses. They took my photo for the guest wall. And then Liz and Jackie practically had to kick me out.
“We can drop you off the train station …”
“Thanks. Maybe in an hour or so.”
After some time passed, they tried again.
“Don’t you want to get into the city …?”
“Uh, yeah. Maybe later.”
Finally, they said I should probably go unless I was going to stay for another night. It actually made me ache to leave. The place felt just like home — only a nicer, cleaner version of it.
A few days later, I received a follow-up e-mail from Liz. She wanted to see how my travels were going, make sure I was safe and see if I needed anything. “Yes!” I was tempted to respond. “I want to pack you up and and take you with me!”
My friend Angie and I had just finished a visit to the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh — acres of rural property where Cambodian people were slaughtered and tossed into mass graves by the Khmer Rouge communist regime.
Some people were beheaded. Some were bludgeoned to death with bamboo sticks. Some were buried alive, tossed into pits and covered with DDT until they perished.
It’s a miserable place, swamped by sadness and cluttered with ghosts.
Angie and I paid our respects to the many lives that were extinguished. We left quiet. We left reverent.
It was unusual timing for such a visit. Osama bin Laden had been killed the previous evening, and I was waging a nonstop, complicated moral war in my head. “Does anyone deserve a violent death? What if the person is really, really evil? Who decides what is evil? Is assassination ever justified? Does this make the world safer? What motivates someone to do horrific things?”
Basically, I was in a confused, plaintive headspace.
As my friend and I climbed into the tuk-tuk we hired, just outside the gates of the Killing Fields, our driver pushed a laminated sheet of photos toward us. It was pictures of people happily shooting automatic weapons.
“You want to shoot? You want guns?” he said.
“Uh, no.” We both shook our heads.
“No guns?”
“No. Definitely no.”
Maybe the other people who visit this memorial want to vent their frustration with the world. Maybe the other tourists are gun-happy. Maybe it’s just a matter of proximity — after all, the shooting range is nearby.
But firing off machine guns was the very last thing I wanted to do.
It’s definitely a highlight for some travelers in Phnom Penh. I talked to backpackers who were absolutely itching to get their hands on some combat shotguns. I even met a few people who made a detour to Cambodia specifically for the purpose of firing off Uzis and M-16s.
I didn’t think it was a big deal. I’ve rented automatic weapons before in Las Vegas (during a Valentine’s Day getaway with my husband! awww!), and I don’t like guns much anyway. But the firearms probably prove irresistible for tourists who have no access to AK-47s in their own countries.
That said, the shooting ranges in Southeast Asia go far beyond anything I’ve seen before. In Phnom Penh, they don’t only offer guns — the menu also includes hand grenades, single-shot M79 grenade launchers and shoulder-fired B40 rocket-propelled grenades.
Whoa.
To be clear, my friend and I didn’t go to this place. But I talked to dozens of backpackers who returned either raving or ranting about their experiences. The things they’ve told me are so crazy, I don’t know what to believe.
The range has fixed per-bullet prices for the machine guns. Grenades cost between $100-200, depending on your weapon of choice.
If you’re bored with shooting at cardboard, tin cans and rusty cars, live animals make for more lively targets. I’m told chickens, geese, goats, water buffalo and cows have all been slaughtered by beer-guzzling, gun-wielding travelers. Technically, this has been discouraged by the government, but it still happens. For the right price, of course.
I also talked to one guy who said he scraped the bottom of his savings account to buy a $100 grenade and a live cow. Well, he missed the shot — and ended up with a souvenir cow to take home. (He did buy it, after all.) He ended up selling the cow back to the shooting range for half the price he originally paid.
The most disturbing rumors involve people — living, breathing targets who cost a cool $10,000. Allegedly the prisoners offer themselves up to be killed because their families receive a cut of the money. For desperate prisoners facing life sentences with no other means to support their loved ones, this is one last sacrifice they can make.
It’s so outlandish, I can’t believe people could pay to shoot other people. That couldn’t possibly happen, right? It has to be a stupid backpacker tall tale.
Then again, there are a lot of horrific things I can’t wrap my head around. And those were true.
