A few years ago, I met a quirky little Australian woman at the airport in Quito. Colorful and gregarious, with a salt-and-pepper pixy haircut and an outdoorsy Aussie air, she seemed like a retired archeologist who’d unearthed cool things like King Tut’s porn collection or an ancient Tahitian bong. I sat and talked with this spunky lady, 50-something and backpacking her way through Latin America, for a few hours before our flight to Bogotá, me having to give class at the university that afternoon, she en route to Cuba for a week. When we separated in Colombia, we promised to keep in touch.
This week, I received an email from her, asking me if I’d be swinging through Oz any time this year. I was all set to answer “no,” when the Cosmic Travel Spirit whispered in my ear, “check the airfares to Australia.” Lo and behold, United Airlines is offering round-trips from LA to Sydney in November for $650, and it’s only a hundred more on chic new V Australia.
There went my new iMac.
See, I’m already building my own three-month round-the-world adventure, piece-by-piece: New York to Dublin, $234; Dublin to London, $48 (and not on Ryanair); then Stockholm and Berlin and Istanbul and Mumbai and Kuala Lumpur before landing back on U.S. soil just in time to celebrate my 32nd birthday on Halloween, all for under $2,000. The plan, then, was to transition permanently—for the time being—to Brazil. But my travel budget, bolstered by the severance package I’ll be receiving from my job next month, was maxed-out. After all, I’ve already decided to buy a second pair of bifocals and start using contact lenses at the nightclub instead of the LASIK surgery I had been eyeing; the savings from that decision netted me the cost of the transpacific flight.
And so it goes with making travel decisions that, for some, may seem frivolous, but for those of us stricken (or blessed, depending on one’s perspective) with wanderlust, are serious life-altering choices. Even now, as I transition from a secure career with a secure paycheck to freelancing and freewheeling in a new country with myriad X-factors, from housing costs to income prospects to personal technology upgrades (I still don’t own an I-Pod, y’all), I get occasional pangs of anxiety regarding whether or not I’m making a wise decision in spending much of the little savings I’ve accumulated on the intangible sugar rush of a personal world tour. But they say it’s all about priorities, and right now, my priority is to live life, not accumulate it. Or, rather, to accumulate life experience, not just baggage (you can continue the metaphor as you wish).
Though I had long desired to do a round-the-world jaunt, I hadn’t considered that now would be the right time to take it, since I had no idea of when or from where in the near future steady income would be coming in. But I caught wind of a crazy sale fare—Malaysia to the States via Korea, one-way, business class, $630—and thought, well come June, I’ll be job-free, rent-free, and responsibility-free: do the damn thing. The momentum surged as I picked up other cheap one-way tickets from capital to capital, and I found myself with a ten-country itinerary and a comparatively small dent in the bank account, and an EDA in Brazil of November 2nd, instead of August 2nd. The only way I could assuage my built-in sense of responsibility and risk-avoidance was to be philosophical: we take risks getting out of bed in the morning; why not get out of bed in India for a change?
So I’m sacrificing a nice, comfy two-bedroom apartment with ample workspace in São Paulo for a shoebox in the sky (and possibly a roommate). I’m sacrificing six months of dedicated, no-day-job writing time for maybe six weeks of it before I’ll have to start bouncing at a strip club or selling bootlegged hip-hop mix CDs at the Sunday afternoon flea market. And I’m sacrificing my slick, state-of-the-art, and, upon further reflection, unnecessary I-Mac for two weeks in Australia with the quirky retired archeologist I met in Quito.
Because I’ll never get to experience the world at this age, at this price, ever again. Of that, I’m certain.
Fly Brother tackles international travel in unabridged, unapologetic, full and complete color. It's also the blog name of writer and educator Ernest White II, a tall, ruggedly handsome, erudite, occasionally delusional Black American male currently residing in Colombia.
See, now I'll be following you everywhere. I have to say that maybe the universe is telling me something but between this post and a conversation that I had with a retired derby girl (yes, I play roller derby and yes, it's all real) about living life and doing what you love someone is telling me that my notion of seeing the world is the right thing to do. Even though, I plan to juggle work, school (unless I go to London for the mass comm degree) and travel, I know for sure that's what I want to do now. I've been liquidating my assets - all I have right now is my condo - and making strides to be free but in the interim, I'm planning my adventure. :)
i didn't know you were going to get an imac. and you're right, you didn't need it anyway.
i think i'm going to clip this post and let my 15-year old son read it. i actually want him to do the things that you, i, and my almost 23-year-old son have done so far.
when the 15 year old finishes high school, i'm giong back to my globe-trotting ways. to be honest, if i could get his teachers to put his lessons on youtube, while promising to have him back for exams, i'd sell my house *today* and go globe trotting -- and take him with me.
i like your posts on how to do all of this, and do it cheaply. i should be writing such things as well, but i'm a bit too lazy i think.
june is the month where i get introspective; i'll probably wrote articles like this and like on fly-brother once my birthday passes.
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