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.
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 round-the-world trip ended with a summons for jury duty. Because nothing says “Come home!” better than a letter that threatens to put me in jail.
I’m actually one of those weird people who doesn’t mind going to jury duty. While it’s not my ideal way to pass the time, I do think it’s my civic duty and it’s an integral part of my country’s justice system. Plus, if I ever land myself in court, which is a good possibility, I would want a smart gal like me deciding my fate.
However, there was a little matter of me being in Bolivia.
My husband contacted the county court and notified them that I would be out of the country for at least one year. My date was postponed.
Two months later I was summoned again. This time I was in Uganda.
My husband contacted the courts yet again and told them I was out of the country. He was told that we had to provide my itinerary, scans of my passport stamps and details of confirmed flights. We did the best we could, but as a free-form traveler, I didn’t have all of that information.
Unfortunately, the court-bots didn’t understand the concept of travel without a return date. Or travel without a set itinerary. Or travel without pre-booked flights.
A few months later I was summoned again. This time it was for real. I was told that my date, now set for early July, couldn’t be postponed again. Failure to appear would result in a fine, a jail term or some wonderful combo of both.
It somehow felt like an appropriate way to end my trip. What’s more American than serving on a jury right after Independence Day? Throw in some apple pie, and you’ve got yourself an Uncle Sam orgy.
So I flew from Seoul to San Francisco to Palm Springs, arriving home two weeks short of my one-year goal.
Yesterday I drove 45 minutes to the courthouse. I was directed to a beige room and plopped in front of a flat-screen TV to watch “LIVE! with Regis & Kelly.” It was scintillating programming, of course. You know a TV show is good when they include an exclamation point in the title.
A judge thanked us for being good Americans. He also said they would pay us each $15 per day, starting on the second day.
$15? Heck, that’s the best job opportunity I’ve had since returning to U.S. soil. And it’s definitely better than selling blood.
I was determined to get selected. Looking around the room, I didn’t have much competition.
The woman seated to my left told me she breeds miniature dachshunds. She trains them by repeatedly slapping them with a sandal until they behave. She dreams of visiting Italy, but she has a fear of bridges and believes Italy will have too many of them. She travels to Mexico on a monthly basis to buy pharmaceuticals.
The woman to my right sat with her legs spread, both hands jammed inside her stretchable denim pants. She removed one hand long enough to eat a small bag of SunChips multigrain snacks.
The chatty duo behind me said they wanted to serve on the Casey Anthony jury, so they could “fry” her. “I’d give her the death penalty just for getting’ a tattoo,” one lady said.
Out of everybody there, I was certain to be picked. I was a picture-perfect juror. Not only am I bright, attentive and interested, but I’ve been out of the country for a year and haven’t kept up with any local news. It would be 11 Angry Men and One Completely Unbiased and Slightly Uneducated Woman.
Two hours later, I was excused from jury service. They didn’t even interview me.
What a travesty of justice!
Justice league.
By the way, if you’re looking to get out of jury duty — (shame on you!) — I learned a little trick when I was part of a jury selection two years ago.
A judge asked a potential juror if there is any reason why he shouldn’t be selected.
“Yes. Because I can read minds,” said the potential juror. “It gives me an unfair advantage.”
“Fine. If you can read minds, tell me what I’m thinking,” challenged the judge.
The potential juror replied, “You’re thinking that you don’t believe me.”
