Twelve Months On the Road - a Round the World (RTW) Trip Update
Month Twelve in Numbers
After a hectic three months of rapid travel and having allowed myself to de-stabilize slightly, I slowed down a lot in April and focused on getting myself grounded again. You’ll see this slower pace very clearly in the numbers:
Cities This Month: 10; Total So Far: 142
Countries This Month: 2; Total So Far: 42
Countries I Ate Avocado Toast In This Month: 2; Total So Far: 38
Miles Walked This Month: 178.1; Total So Far: 3,471.2
An Inward Reset
If you read my last update, you’ll know that in my first three months back on the road after going home for Christmas, I found myself increasingly destabilized. I was yearning for a place to call home, something familiar, and latching onto some unhealthy old patterns. I was struggling to keep exploring in a joyful way and compensating with coping mechanisms that just weren’t serving me. I was getting some deep anxiety because I was yearning to be productive and creative - but couldn’t find the emotional bandwidth to put it out in the world. April (Month 12) was a massive bounce back, a re-grounding of myself and a re-invisioning of what travel should look like for me now.
I slowed down - spending more time in place and doing things for me and less time exploring. I stopped having romances (full stop). I spent about half the month in isolation, not trying to make any friends. I returned to regular habits of exercise and meditation and cut back dramatically on drinking. I adventured - but only as much as my body and emotions really felt willing and able. I retreated inward, looking for a base of stability in myself and my routines because I wasn’t going to have it in a home or a nearby support network.
The progress was incremental but, overall, a large success. My body feels better, having rested, taken quiet time, and worked out plenty. My mind feels clearer, and is grounded in enough self-care activities that I feel stabilized even though I’m constantly on the go and changing places. I’ve caught up on the blog, and finished about 60% of a book I’d started last year. (A side project I had promised to send a friend in February because she might want to collaborate on a TV pitch - but something I just couldn’t seem to consistently stay productive on on the road until now.) With the return of productivity, my anxiety has waned immensely.
The reset timed well because I just met my friend Anne in Singapore, and we’re planning a month of pretty fast adventuring before my meditation retreat. I’m glad I slowed down and focused on resetting myself because I feel ready and energized to explore with her in a fun, joy-led adventure.
In Month Twelve, I moved slowly through small chunks of the Philippines and Indonesia. I got up to some cool things, especially boat trips and hikes, but I also spent a lot of time just relaxing. The result is my stories won’t be packed with wild anecdotes but are more reflective of a low-key, casual style of exploration. Within my summaries of where I’ve been below, I’ve used my regular marking schema. I put asterisks next to the cities I will likely find reason to return to, exclamation marks next to the ones I got my fill of but found thoroughly charming and worth the trip, and left the cities that were a bit less remarkable to me without anything.
I started April off waking up in Manila with a raging hangover - a reminder of my excessive night of gay clubbing the night prior. I was in no fit shape to do anything, so I walked to the nearby mall, bought a large bottle of Coke Zero, and drank it all while watching John Wick 4 in a movie theater. Amidst my recovery from this foggy haze, it began to crystallize for me that I needed to re-ground myself - to begin the process focusing on my wellness. That day, though, I just took off and recovered.
The next day, my friend David and I had planned to drive south to Tagaytay - a town south of Manila known for its ridge views of Tagaytay Volcano in the middle of Tagaytay Lake. We grabbed Burger King en route, commiserating how bad our hangovers had been the day before while also celebrating how much fun it had been to dance, and enjoyed the stunning landscape from both a Starbucks balcony and a small amusement park. Once we’d soaked up the views enough, we went to a spa, got massages, and then sweat out what was left of our hangovers in the sauna. We ended the day grabbing a delicious vegan dinner in the Makati district. The whole time, we shared increasingly vulnerable conversations about our lives, our families, and the goals for the next few years. The whole day was lovely.
When I got home that night and returned to Wi-Fi, I found I had several angry messages and a passive-aggressive Instagram story clearly directed at me from Dalan, my Taipei romance, upset because I hadn’t responded all day. (I don’t travel with data, so I don’t get or send messages unless I’m at Wi-Fi - a fact he was very aware of). With my new clarity that I needed to get my shit together and perhaps re-grounded in what a healthy interpersonal dynamic feels like from having a rich day with David, I broke off the idea that we could pursue something romantic. It’d take re-communicating the message a few times over the next week to make it final - but there was no going back to something romantic after this exchange.
On the morning of my last day in Manila, I took a long walk through Intramuros, the historical district, Chinatown, one of the oldest outside of China, and, accidentally, a very large slum near the harbor. It was my last effort to fall in love with the city - but it proved to be poorly thought through. I finished having crystallized the sentiment that Manila has a woeful lack of urban planning and is not very livable, and a bit sullen having seen the squalid living condition of the slums. While I think experiences like this can really enrich a practice of equanimity and grace - learning how to be around suffering or experience without letting it overwhelm you - I can’t say I found exploring the neighborhoods pleasant.
My friend Matt, with whom I had explored Luxor in Egypt, flew back to Manila on my last night. We met in Bonifacio Global City (BGC) for dinner and drinks at a rooftop bar during sunset (which was gorgeous). BGC is the only area of Manila I really liked - a commercial district that has incredible urban planning - except for a lack of metro or sky rail transit. After dinner, we grabbed a cab and went to Matt’s friends house for a karaoke party. While I went in warily, thinking I’d head home early, I ended up staying until midnight, drinking light gin cocktails, singing, and having a surprising heart to heart with his friend Angela who was visiting home from Germany. It needs to be mentioned that my friend Matt is a musician; like a very good one. He won a presidential medal for his choral compositions this year and tours the world singing with his choir. Sometimes people like this can overwhelm karaoke - and I was worried Matt would. But he didn’t at all - and instead delighted everyone all night with comical impersonations of famous singers and never taking himself seriously. I’m really lucky to meet such incredible people on the road.
The next morning I had to board my ferry bound for Coron at 8AM - a ferry that would take 2.5 days. When I got on, I became very grateful that I booked early enough to buy a bed in a cabin - a small air conditioned room with a private bathroom, electrical sockets, and four beds, each of which had curtains. The tourist class was a large air conditioned room of maybe 100 bunk beds in rows. The economy class was maybe 200 bunk beds arranged in rows in the open air, near a lounge area where they hosted a karaoke party every night. Both tourist and economy had for-pay charging stations - but nowhere outside of the cabins has free electrical sockets. There was not much to do on the ship - no Wi-Fi and no entertainment outside of the karaoke parties, so I took the opportunity to just rest and recuperate. I watched the sunset each night, occasionally walked around the ship to enjoy the views - but mostly I sat in my bed watching movies and tv shows. It was a truly needed couple of days of pure laziness.
I stepped off of the ferry into Coron! (a small set of islands in Palawan) and, for the first time of the trip, took a motorbike with all of my belongings (which is now a backpack). Especially in Southeast Asia, it’s so freeing to be able to transit with all of my luggage by bike (and so much cheaper). I checked into my hostel - which turned out to be one of the most amazing hostels I’ve ever stayed at. The room had perfectly cold AC, cloud soft mattresses, curtains around the bed, a roof deck with a sprawling ocean view, a pool, and even included a light dinner. It was a luxury hostel that I could’ve easily spent much more time in.
The first thing I did in Coron was to take a small hike up to a viewpoint that looks out to the surrounding ocean and islands. I had decided to continue on to a longer, less maintained trail beyond the viewpoint that I had seen on Google Maps. I found it overgrown and poorly maintained as I was walking - but I kept telling myself it’s probably just not commonly walked. After a mile of this “trail,” it cut off into a steep ledge - an area that appeared to be construction that had destroyed what previously was a trail but was now just a piece of wilderness I had decided to trek through. In my travels, I keep confronting moments like this - where I am doing something and find myself actively thinking it’s harder than it should be, only to keep pushing through and to find out at the end it was hard because it wasn’t the right way to do it. Inevitably, I have to go back to the beginning and restart with the easy, obvious route. And no matter how often I confront it, I can’t quite seem to shake this tendency of self. Instead, I just keep being me, and when something feels harder than I think it should, I think to myself “it is what it is” and keep on doing it. Anyhow, in this particular case, I had to trek the mile back, in which it was totally obvious the entire way that the path was not actually a hiking trail anymore.
When I got back to my hostel, I made three friends over dinner who each served as pieces of inspiration for me. Scottie, a flight attendant from Vancouver, was a polyglot who spoke ten languages and liked learning more in his free time; I’ve reflected a lot on this trip about how I abandoned my love of languages and that I want to pick it back up when I go home, and Scottie showed me the realm of possible. His friend Cinthia, also a flight attendant, lived in Quebec but technically worked out of Vancouver - and was an example that if you negotiate well you can keep the job you love and the place you want to live. And Elliot, a non profit program review director from Australia, was changing careers from one that gave him incredible flexibility to travel the world to one that challenged him more; he had decided that what he needed right now wasn’t freedom but purpose. Each of the three was mindful about balancing the pragmatic realities of life with their passions and goals - and each seemed to be constantly changing their approach slightly. They were three people who came into my life at the right moment - a period where I was experiencing intense creative desire but an inability to stay productive - and gave me a slightly different pieces of the inspiration puzzle.
The next day I was finally able to return to productivity. While Scottie and Cinthia studied for the Scuba certification, I sat next to them and began catching up on this blog, which I was more than two months behind on. It had been causing me so much anxiety that it was crippling my ability to channel productive energies anywhere in my life - be it exercise or making progress on a book draft I had promised my friend back in January. Working alongside them helped me crack that wall and get back to work. Beyond grabbing lunch with them, I wrote all day - until sunset when I had drinks with Elliot on the roof deck.
I woke up early the next day to go on an all day boat tour around the Coron! islands - which is the highlight of visiting unless you’re a scuba diver. I spent seven hours out at sea, almost all of them snorkeling in coral reefs and amazing lakes. The experience was incredible; the above water landscape is a lush paradise with royal blue water - and when you dive below, the coral is bright and the fish schools are beautiful. The trip ignited a passion in me for exploring below the ocean that I didn’t know I had - a desire to see more of this unknown, mysterious other world. It’s a passion I suspect has since rippled through me in ways I can’t measure - and one that I expect will one day lead me to get my scuba certification. That night, I got home late and had a sad goodbye with Scottie and Cinthia, who I may never see again, and a tata for now with Elliot who I would see at my next destination.
I had a 6AM ferry to El Nido the next day - one I had to be there by 5AM for, so I was awake at 4AM. It was an early start and I found myself walking to the port in the pitch black, exhausted. The ferry was four hours and obscenely expensive, but not terrible. I finally kicked off my meditation habit again - something I had hardly done since India and, as it turned out, was in desperate need of. I cried quietly in the ferry for about an hour as I cleared my mind - and ended it immensely more at peace. After, the productive energy and creative passions that had loosened in Coron started to blossom on the ferry, and I started working on my book draft again for the first time since India (where I had made my way through maybe 10% of it). The anxiety that was binding up my creative energies was starting to unlock - and the general uneasiness I’d been holding inside of me since I left the US in January started to shift. While my formal meditation habit hasn’t returned to daily again, I would say I’ve been solidly back to an average of every other day since.
When I got to El Nido! I grabbed a bahn mi and walked to my hostel to check in, and then had coffee while I worked on the blog for three hours until my room was ready. (I wasn’t going to let the productive stride go to waste.) I then explored the town, which was a standard island resort town, more developed than Coron, with a small but nice beach and cool rock formations. I met my roommate, Marc, a cool younger man from Amsterdam who was traveling for six months with his girlfriend - but separate for the week to take some space. We signed up for a boat tour together for the day after the next. It was a quiet but productive day and nice day - one that I ended watching Schitt’s Creek in bed. (What feel good tv)
The next day, I had planned to catch a shuttle bus to a famous nearby beach, but decided the price was too expensive to make it worth it. So instead, I spent a slow morning in the hostel working until I hit a wall - and for the first time on the road (not a cruise ship or in the US) since September (when I decided I should pause from my compulsive exercising), I worked out. It felt incredible - so grounding. I’ve since returned to the habit, working out every non-transit day for about a month now. The workout enabled me to hit a productive stride again for a few hours until Elliot, my friend from Coron, arrived at the hostel. We walked around the town together, catching up and sharing wild travel stories. We got massages and then had a couple of beers as a sunset bar, spending an hour watching the vibrant hues grow and change in the sky over the ocean. We went back to the hostel and I watched a bit more Schitt’s Creek while Elliot went out to party; it was another ideal, balanced, relaxing day.
On my last day in El Nido!, Marc and I were scheduled to go on our boat tour. Over breakfast, we made friends with a man from Columbia who was also going to join us. About 30 minutes before we were scheduled to leave, Elliot came in, escorting a female guest he had had out of the hostel. He grabbed a coffee and, impulsively, signed up to join the three of us. We spent the day kayaking and snorkeling together - in waters nearly as pristine and paradise-like as those in Coron. At one point, a piece of our propeller fell into the ocean, and the staff spent an hour free-diving trying to find it (and eventually, impressively, succeeding). But the delay didn’t bother anyone, because we were in such a beautiful place drifting on the water. At the end of the day, the four of us played card games and jenga in the hostel lobby for hours - until we all had to drift off to sleep. We accumulated ridiculous, nonsensical inside jokes and talked about anything and everything. It was a day of pure, unadulterated fun.
One of those jokes (which won’t make sense or seem funny) was that I was going to roll over in the middle of the night, look at Marc, and say “Hey Marc! Look at me!” When we got back to our room, it appeared to be just the two of us as the other two beds were empty. Around 2AM, I woke up to go to the bathroom and got back to bed, and then rolled over to see Marc standing next to his bunk in the dark. So, naturally, I shouted “Hey Marc!” When he didn’t respond, I kept going with a chorus of “Hey! Marc! Marc! Hey! Look at me!” Eventually he came over to me, only for me to find out that it wasn’t Marc but a roomate I’d never met who just came home at 2AM - a roommate who looked confused and a bit perturbed to be yelled at by a freak in the bunk next to him. He looked up at me and said “What do you want?” Mortified, I just said “Sorry, I thought you the guy in the bunk above you” and didn’t explain myself further. Thankfully, this roommate was gone when I woke up, so I never had to face the shame again.
Of course, I did tell the story to my three friends the next morning over breakfast, as I was saying goodbye to them. They were all staying in El Nido longer - but I had a shuttle bus at noon to Puerto Princesa, where I would catch my plane to Bali. They all had plans for the day, so I worked on the blog after breakfast, still trying to catch up, until the shuttle bus arrived (at around 12:15) to pick me and five others from the hostel up. We drove to a shuttle bus station where we waited for an hour for other passengers to join. As we waited and the car kept getting more full, the driver packed and repacked and packed and repacked our bags on the roof of the car. Eventually, four people in the van told him that they had flights in Puerto Princesa they would be at risk of missing if we delayed too much longer. The driver shrugged it off and returned to unpacking and packing the bags on the roof; at this point in the delay, I was convinced he was actively just fucking with us. Finally, around 1:30 (90 minutes late), we left. The drive took an uncomfortable six hours and we stopped three times (which, again, I’m convinced was mostly to fuck with the people who had flights). We eventually dropped those four off in the airport about 20 minutes before their flight time; I have no idea if they made it on, but I’m still shocked by the silliness of someone traveling in Southeast Asia and expecting a bus to run quickly or remotely on time.
I arrived in Puerto Princesa late at night and was dropped off at my hostel by the shuttle. For the first time since Taipei, I backslid a little and got too drunk, ate too much pizza and watched Schitt’s Creek in bed. At least enough of the emotional storm had left my body since Taiwan that this mistake didn’t come paired with any texts or calls I would regret the next morning. I would just be slightly hungover and still full. Whoops.
My flight the next day was at 6PM and I had no desire to explore Puerto Princesa, which is a more congested city and one I had heard was much less lovely than Coron or El Nido. So, instead, I stayed in and just caught up on the blog all day, nursing coke zeroes. Before I caught my flight that night, I stopped at a local kitchen I had noticed served vegetables and grabbed some rice with curry - only to find that the extremely drunk owner latched onto me, offering more food for free, and shoving small plates of this and that in front of me while he slurred on for about 20 minutes about how his English wasn’t very good and he owned the shop. After refusing meat dishes about 30 times and paying for my food, I eventually refused his invitation for beer and extricated myself and headed the airport. I had an overnight flight with a 6 hour layover in Manila in the wee hours; not the most pleasant flying experience, but also not the worst.
The next day I arrived in Bali with a reservation to head to Sanur - a sleepier beach town where a friend I had met in Marseille was staying. I had gotten in with a vague plan to find a motorbike ride to my homestay, but found that there were none at the airport itself. So, I wandered out into nearby Denpasar until I found one and grabbed a 30 minute ride with him for about $7. I got to my homestay around 9AM, far too early to check in, so I charged my phone and went out to explore Sanur. I took a two hour walk along its long, pleasant stretch of beach and ate some delicious Indonesian food - then another two hour walk through the town itself. It was a quiet introduction to Bali - and I ended the day continuing to catch up on the blog and watching Beef on Netflix.
The next day I was set to meet my friend, a retired woman who used to base herself in Bali (Ubud). When I met her, she had been in a two month frump of indecision, unsure of where she wanted to now base her life, and so paralyzed in the decision anxiety she was unable to do so much as book a flight out of the country before her visa expired. I was in a similar bind of indecision; I had almost 10 days for Bali but had made no plans and couldn’t decide what to do. I was pressuring myself to move fast and see the island - but my body wanted to rest and relax. While we wandered around the beach and explored the town, she told me what she loved about Bali and permissioned me to take the time as a creative retreat in which I didn’t feel pressured to explore. I encouraged her to join me for my yoga retreat in India, which permissioned her to finally go to India. At the end of our time, I had booked a four day island retreat in a beach bungalow and a three night homestay in Ubud with no ambitions to adventure, and Christine had signed up for the yoga retreat and booked a flight to Dubai (where she is now looking at real estate). We moved each other out of our frozen state of decision paralysis - finding ourselves in each other’s lives on the right day in the right way. After we said goodbye, I treated myself to a haircut and a massage, and then settled into bed for couple hours of watching Beef.
The next day, I made my way to a small, quiet island about a 30 minute boat ride from Sanur - Nusa Lembongan. I walked down to the harbor area hoping to catch a public slow ferry at 10:30AM I thought existed, only to find out it had discontinued eight years prior. (I really should look at publish dates when I look things up.) I spent the next 30 minutes trying to figure out who to book a fast ferry with - and eventually just picked a company with a corner store who I’m pretty sure hiked my price 40%. Sometimes, it take a lot of energy to secure local prices - and consistently in Indonesia, I did not have that energy. The boat ride was comfortable enough and went quickly - and when I got to my beach bungalow I found a simple structure with a bedroom, an outdoor bathroom, a balcony with a partial sea view, two hammocks, and an outdoor couch. Its AC was unable to cool the totally uninsulated space, but it was generally perfect for my little island retreat.
For four days, I just enjoyed the retreat. I worked out and meditated, found local food haunts, took short walks, got two massages and a body scrub, watched the sunset each night - and mostly bunkered down and got writing. I finally caught up on the blog (a huge relief) and finished outlining the book I’d started (another huge relief). Taking the step back and focusing on feeling good and getting back into a productive stride turned out to be exactly what I needed. The island has some adventuring (scuba, snorkeling, kayaking, stand up paddle boarding, surfing, boat trips . . . ) but I did none of it. I let myself focus on finding peace.
The only shocking story of my time in Nusa Lembongan was that at one point I was sitting on my bed writing and a cockroach fell from above onto me. I took it in a napkin and brought it outside - only to find its head was mostly severed and barely attached. As I watched it frantically trying to grab and reattach its head, I decided to kill it because I wasn’t sure it would have any kind of life again. The whole experience was grotesque and depressing.
From Nusa Lembongan, I had a day of transit to Ubud*. I took the ferry back to Sanur and then wrote in a Dunkin Donuts for three hours while I waited for a shuttle I had booked to Ubud. I had to wait for the shuttle outside of a mini market, and when it came, two vehicles came at once lined back to back. The one in the back was marked with the logos of the shuttle company but the driver of the first got out first, and when I asked him if he was a part of the company (pointing to the van) he said yes, confirmed I was going to Ubud, said to pay later, and I got in. Within three minutes in the car, I realized he wasn’t associated with the company, got out, and ran back to the marked van just before it drove off without me. I’m still really unsure what kind of scam I barely avoided with that one.
The drive to Ubud* was slow because the main road essentially has a perpetual line of standstill traffic, with the small town of Ubud unable to accommodate the volume of tourists it takes in. When we arrived, I walked briefly through the downtown - which has exactly as many yoga studios, yoga shops, mindfulness stores, crystal boutiques, and cafes that you’d expect from Bali. Sometimes, it’s charming; other times, its overt pandering feels gimmicky. After an hour, I walked to my homestay which was in a traditional Balinese housing complex, and settled in for a night of writing and a movie.
I only deeply explored Ubud* one day - when I walked maybe 16 miles through the downtown and its outskirts. I had one of the best meals of my life from a vegan warung for about $2, so good I ate two of them even though I was full after the first. I walked through the Sacred Monkey Forest (which is overpriced), where the naughty monkeys posed for cameras and jumped on tourists. I walked along the ridge overlooking Ubud’s two rivers and then walked in the rain through rice fields (which were both gorgeous nature walks that included historic neighborhoods, really showing me what it is about Ubud that first charmed tourists decades ago). And then I went to my favorite place in Ubud - Paradio - a vegan movie theater where you sit on couches and get dinner. I enjoyed a shitty movie while eating a seitan burger, then walked home. Other than finding delicious food throughout the town, I spent the rest of my time in Ubud relaxing, working out, meditating, and writing.
Even though the traffic in Ubud is stressful and much of downtown feels overcommercialized and insincere, there was an energy to Ubud I also loved. Underneath the layer of overtourism, there’s still a rich creative, spiritual culture that made it famous - and it’s something I expect I’ll be back to explore.
For the only other time in April, I drank too much in Ubud. Really craving cold wine, I bought a box of white from a local vineyard and drank through it in my homestay, once to excess. Like in Puerto Princesa, though, the drinking didn’t come accompanied with any desperate outreach texts. It was just a lazy night of watching movies and relaxing (a little too hard).
After Ubud, I wanted to make my way to Java but wasn’t totally sure how the transit was going to go because I couldn’t pre-book tickets. I took a motorbike to the major bus station nearby only to find it nearly deserted because it was Ramadan. There were a few people in the station who offered to help me find a bus - but they were all trying to charge prices I knew were extortionate. So, I wandered around the station asking random people if they knew where I could go, and eventually I was led to a bus parked near the bus station in front of a small building. I talked to the driver and got a ticket to Java for what was still an extortionate price, but maybe only 40% jacked up. The ride was long (maybe 6 hours) and uncomfortable (because I’m too big for most buses in Asia) but it really wasn’t bad. It included a small ferry ride between Bali and Java.
Once I got to Java, I walked to my homestay in Banyuwangi and booked a 2AM tour to hike Ijen! the next morning and a shuttle bus to a small mountain village with a second volcano (Cemero Lawang) for the day after the hike. The hike was absolutely incredible - with an expansive caldera wrapping around a royal blue acid lake, and a stunning sunrise over the clouds. It was one of the most impressive hikes I’ve done in my travels.
While we were at Ijen, we learned about the local sulfur mining economy by talking to some miners. They hike down the crater three to five times a day in a gas mask and hike back up carrying almost 200 pounds of sulfur over their shoulders; if they don’t have a tram, they also have to do the full hike down the mountain and back (another hour each way) for each load of sulfur. Their shoulders are totally (and visibly) wrecked by this work. They make maybe $20-$30 in net revenue each day for their sulfur, but they have to pay $6 of that to rent a mask and another bit for transit. It’s grueling, backbreaking work and they make almost nothing, and seem trapped in a cycle of rentals and day-to-day living that’s hard to move up through; one of them talked us through the difficult math of a miner trying to save $40 to buy their own mask to not have to rent one anymore. Amazingly, they were all, at least on the surface, joy-filled. They all smiled and were incredibly friendly as they chatted about the nature of the work.
I took a relaxing day, night and morning in Banyuwangi catching up on writing, meditating, and working out before my shuttle came around noon to go to Cemero Lawang - the first adventure of my trip that came close to emotionally shutting me down. It’s a small mountain village connected to Bromo National Park, where I was going to hike the following day. I booked a homestay on Booking - one of the only in the town but one that had no reviews, thinking to myself someone had to be the first. The shuttle bus took 8-9 hours and there were four other people from my hostel with me; they hadn’t booked a place to stay but were told the driver would help them when they got there, something I would learn is the norm for Cemero Lawang as no place uses online booking. When we arrived, the shuttle driver started to help the others to find accommodations and I said I’d walk the four minutes to my own.
That proved to be a mistake. By this time, it was 8:30PM and it was cold and dark in a small mountain village. I walked to the location of the Booking guesthouse to find the national park entrance. They wouldn’t let me in because I told them the name of my guesthouse and they said one with that name didn’t exist in the park. Confused, I walked around the town to find someone willing to let me use their wi-fi and called the number given to me on Booking. He seemed confused but told me I was in the right place but gave a different name, so I went back. When I told the security guards the other name, they called the manager, who came out and said I didn’t have a prior reservation. He said the man I had talked to on the phone called him though, and there was a room - but I hadn’t paid. I showed the Booking reservation in which I had already paid. The manager let me tether to his phone and we called in the man I had talked to on the phone, who seemed deeply confused by now, and told me he doesn’t have a Booking account or a bank account. About an hour into this, we realized the Booking account was a fake account pretending to be this guest house and had given me an arbitrary number of a local tour guide - the deeply confused man on the phone. The manager took pity on me and offered to let me stay at the price I had booked for, a discount. But to go in, I had to pay to enter the national park - something I wasn’t planning to do because there’s a free entrance - and pay for the guest house in cash - something I wasn’t planning to do because I had already paid for an accommodation. And, I didn’t have that much cash with me - so the manager agreed I could figure it out the next day and pay him then. At the end of this chaos, I had a small private room that had water, sometimes, and electricity, sometimes. Emotionally fatigued, I bought a few beers and dinner and settled into a comforting movie.
The next morning, I woke up at 4AM to do a sunrise hike of Bromo!. I happened to bump into a Polish man en route and we walked together, finding the hike to be surprisingly tough given that all the blogs had said it was easy. We settled on a sunrise point on King Kong Hill - and stood there for an hour in dense fog that completely obstructed visibility through the entire period of sunrise. Eventually, we started to walk down, and there were some lower viewpoints with partial visibility because the fog had started to lift. We then walked back into town - him to go pick up his wife and daughter to do the national park together, and me to sort out my cash situation. I walked 1.5 miles down the mountain to the closest ATM, only to find it didn’t work for me. I stayed for maybe 30 minutes just trying over and over again in hopes it would miraculously change given the next closest ATM was an hour away, driving. It didn’t. So, I hiked back up the mountain and began my quest to exchange US dollars for Indonesian rupiah. There are no formal currency exchange offices in the village, so I began wandering around asking for help. Eventually, someone pulled in a man with a fanny pack, and I made a handshake deal to trade $100 for 1.45 million rupiah. Finally, I had cash.
Once the cash was sorted, I paid for my room and I set about hiking Bromo!. It’s super fucking cool. The first section is a massive caldera - sunken land covered in volcanic ash called the sea of sand from an eruption 8,000 years ago. You can still see lava river paths in it. Then, I hiked up Bromo, an active volcano and probably the closest thing to hell on earth I can imagine. You walk around an unfenced path maybe 3 feet wide around the rim of the caldera, which plunges down into boiling mud pits, steaming sulfur, an endless stream of smoke, and a wildly loud rumbling from underneath. I managed the walking path alone, so score one for my fear of heights.
After I finished the hike, I set about trying to make a plan to get out of this fucking village the next day within my budget, first finding out the manager of my guest house doesn’t do it. I then walked around the village for 90 minutes asking hotel and business owners if they help, finding a few private vehicles that would cost $30-$40 to drive me the first hour to the closest major town. It took me quite a while to find a hotel owner who had a friend who ran a shuttle bus once a day for a better price. I booked the shuttle bus to Probolinggo - the nearest town - but they couldn’t help me book or figure out the next legs of transit (Probolinggo to Surabaya and then Surabaya to Yogyakarata).
At the end of the day, I was exhausted and grumpy, and settled into a local restaurant to have dinner. An Indonesian family of five was sitting next to me, and they asked me to join them. We chatted and ate for about an hour and they ended up paying for my meal. Amidst the chaos of trying to figure out my plans in the village, they were a small spark of undiluted nice experience.
The next day, I got on my shuttle bus around 10AM. En route, the driver told me he could get me transferred onto an express bus to Surabaya for a price I knew was about 150% hiked. Just wanting the transit day to be slightly easier, I took it. After about 50 minutes of a drive, he pulled over in what looked to be the middle of nowhere along a road and shuttled me out, dropping me with another man who took my bus money. After about 5 minutes, a bus pulled up on the other side of the road, and the man and I scurried across the busy street and I ran onto the full, hot bus, dropping my bag in the aisle and stealing a seat. A man was walking around selling small bags of fried tofu for about 50 cents, so I grabbed a couple, hungry. That bus took about 90 minutes to get to the next town’s bus station, Surabaya. From there, I still had to get to Yogyakarta, which required another bus.
Once we got the Surabaya station, I immediately set about asking people where to go for a new bus, and they pointed me toward the intercity bus terminal and to a specific aisle. I learned en route that the local name for Yogyakarta is Jojga; I saw a bus heading to Jojga, pointed to the city on my map to the bus driver hoping to confirm it was going where I wanted, and hopped on. It left within five minutes of me finding it. That bus ride was 9 hours and the absolute scariest I’ve been on. It was like the night bus from Harry Potter, swerving between traffic and literally swaying side to side. Locals were holding onto the seats in front of them. It made no bathroom stops the entire time. It was unpleasant.
Eventually, around 10PM, I got to Yogyakarta - and it was absolutely pouring. I realized I had forgotten to download the full city map or to save the location of my hotel, so I tried to figure out where I was going, eventually finding GPS coordinates in Apple Maps and putting them in Google Maps. I talked to some local drivers at the bus station, who agreed to take me for a hiked price. Eager for the day to be over to just get to my hotel, I agreed to their price. One of the men put the name of my hotel into his phone and explained to the other how to get there - but then when I got into his car, the man asked if I have maps on my phone and asked me to give him directions. I didn‘t have data but I did have a partial map because I had the region downloaded, so I routed him toward the point I had saved on the map. After about a 40 minute drive, I told him to pull over where I could walk about two minutes to that point, a walk I’m fine making because the rain had stopped for a moment, only to get there and find out that that point is not where my hotel is. Then, as I’m stuck outside, the pouring rain started again, so I started scurrying through this dark residential neighborhood looking for a place with wi-fi, my phone battery at about 2% at this point. I jumped into a hotel and they were kind enough to let me use their wi-fi, where I found out I had saved the wrong location and we had passed my hotel about 20 minutes earlier in the drive. I ordered a second car on Grab, and about 20 minutes later, around 11:30PM, I finally got to my hotel in Yogyakarta, where I finally got some food and fall asleep.
The next morning I was deeply emotionally fatigued. My plan was to stay three nights and then take a 12 hour trip to Jakarta, where I would stay for two nights and then fly to Singapore. I really didn’t want to do that, both because I didn’t want another long transit day in Indonesia and because I had heard nothing pleasant about Jakarta, from tourists or locals. So, I splurged and spent $76 on a new flight from Yogyakarta to Singapore, with my first $74 flight out of Jakarta being non-refundable, and extended my stay in Yogyakarta by two nights. It was a quiet city where I had a private room with nice AC. I needed the break and the ease.
I didn’t do much in Yogyakarta. There are two famous nearby temples, including Borobudur - the largest single structure Buddhist temple in the world. I couldn’t find a way to get there that was remotely within budget though, so I decided to skip it and come back another time if I want to. The city itself is charming, with bright street art, atmospheric historic neighborhoods, and stores selling traditional Javanese art like Bhatik fabric and string puppets. But, in many ways, it was forgettable. I found a local restaurant that I went to every day for breakfast and lunch, ordered good vegan food for delivery every night, and got a massage. I spent pretty much all day writing on my book and the blog, occasionally taking breaks to explore the city or watch a movie. It was a necessary period of recuperation.
On the last day of April, at the end of the day, I took a break from writing and caught up with a friend from Brazil who had just been assaulted by voice memos. After, I found myself putting on music and sitting in bed, breaking into deep, full body sobs for about 30 minutes. At the end of it, something cleared my body. The weight, the loneliness, the anxiety, the yearning that had been trailing me for the first three months of 2023 and that had been starting to move through my body in April essentially cleared. The month ended with a blank slate of types - a readiness to move forward and to more energetically interact with travel.
This coming month is my last full month of travel. I already met my friend Anne in Singapore and now we will travel through Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos together (or at least that’s the plan). When she leaves me to fly back to the Netherlands, I’ll head to Chiang Mai - where I will take my three week meditation retreat and stay in place until my yoga teacher training in Rishikesh. The only thing left after that is to plan my route home in August; it’s looking right now like I’ll travel a bit in India again, then go to Dubai, and then home by August 10. But that could change. The wild rush of movement and excitement is really winding down now.
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LIFE ON the ROAD continues to be A LEARNING PROCESS
Each month, I use this section to expand on mental stirrings that have felt impactful. But, even with all of the alone time I took this month, I continue to be less esoteric than I usually am. Unlike the last three months, I don’t think it’s because I’ve been sick, busy, or lacking mindful presence. I think this month, I did a better job just being - and less work doing or thinking. I processed big picture things as they became relevant, but I didn’t also burden myself with overthinking life or being overly intellectual. I just took what life was throwing at me and handled it piece by piece.
Most of my thoughts this month had to do with my own needs and the impact of not meeting them, or how easy it is to overlook some needs. These may be very personal to me, or there may be some human universality in them. Who knows:
I stepped into this month super behind on my blog and the book I’d been working on. There was a flurry of passion, creativity, inspiration, and a desire to put myself out in the world moving through my body. But I was having trouble putting it into paper - because of being sick, because of moving too fast, because of feeling a sense of obligation to see more things. When I finally caught up this month, I realized that having all of that stored up inside of me was causing me immense anxiety - like a pressure building up inside that could only be released through creative work. I’ve been reflecting on how human it is to need to feel challenged, to express yourself, and to be creative - but I had never really thought about what the impact is of not doing that. It’s not just a lack of the good feeling of making something - but there’s a tense hollowing that happens without it. I think before this, I’d always though of creative pursuits as additive and fun but not necessary - and now I see them as essential to a well-lived life for me.
In the process of catching up, I found myself using a punitive style of self-motivation to get caught up. (I have to do X number of stories and blogs a day.) Growing up, I was a pro at this kind of forced productivity - but it largely hinged on how severely disassociated I was from my physical and emotional self. But now when I was trying to push through my anxiety, I found this kind of punitive scheduling made my anxiety worse; I’d sit creatively blocked and try to force myself to be productive, then feeling like shit about myself when I couldn’t. I had to tinker with my self motivation a lot this month because, for the first time maybe ever in my life, deep anxiety was stopping me from starting. So, instead, each day I wanted to work, I tried to ask myself what I’d need to unlock inspiration. Sometimes that was a massage, sometimes that was coffee, sometimes that was a workout, sometimes that was a break. But slowly, each day, as I tried to give myself what I needed to unlock productivity, I became more and more productive, less full of anxiety. Setting goals for myself began to not feel punitive, especially because I wasn’t emotional whether I exceeded them or didn’t meet them. I may have had targets - but each day I focused on doing as much as I could within the window that felt good and natural, and didn’t force out more. Now, after that slow, deliberate push, I’m back to my regular productive stride.
When I’m in a bad emotional or physical place, I can become super-serious, focused on working my way through it through serious introspection and hard work. In the process, I can lose sight of the simple truth that everything in life is easier if it’s fun, if you’re laughing, if there’s joy. I lost sight of this mid-month as I was working to re-stabilize myself. I found myself hyper-rigid, lacking my regular spark and passion. I found that I had forgotten to have and be fun. I’ve found myself reflecting a lot recently on how easy it is, at least for me, to lose sight of adding fun into everything when things don’t seem inherently fun. I think it requires conscious effort to create fun when it’s not arising naturally, easily. But it’s a conscious effort I need to be more aware of, to be on guard for when it’s missing - because that’s what makes every part of life feel good to experience.
What’s weighed heavily on me recently is the importance of familiarity in life. A lot of what has been destabilizing for me this year is the lack of anything familiar - a home, a restaurant, a friend, a routine - in a period when I’m craving familiarity more than I am adventure. Familiarity brings ease, comfort, certainty. Small things like knowing the walking route, which bus to take, where you’re going to sleep all add up to such an important foundation in my life. In this period, I know I can’t have it for myself, so I’ve been focusing more recently on adding the familiar in my ever-changing context. A regular prayer before bed, coffee in the same mug, a consistent workout style, a moment of quiet reflective writing in the morning. I know I need more - and I can see how important it is - but I’m doing what I can do fill it in little ways for now. But I can tell that my body is ready to have a home again. I’m super grateful I have all of this month with a good friend that I know, and that I stay in place after that for my retreats.
I’ve gotten a lot of massages this month - but the reason has gone beyond because it feels good. I’ve been yearning for physical touch - but I wanted to take a break from on-the-road romances. I realized massages are a way to buy some level of intimacy, of care and concern, of attention and mattering to a second human being. I realized that paying for it doesn’t soften the experience for me, because it doesn’t matter if they’re attending to me because I’m good to them as a friend or because I’m paying money. In the moments I need touch and affection from a second person, massage is a reliably powerful way to have it met for me. It’s so nice that it’s affordable in this area of the world.
In addition to familiarity, I’ve thought a lot about how important it is to meet my body’s need for ease. More and more often, I find myself paying for slightly more expensive lodging or transit to give my body a bit of comfort and certainty - at the expense of adventure usually. When life gets too consistently unpredictable, too burdensome, too isolated, or too challenging, my nervous system just goes haywire. I’ve spent a lot of my life finding ways to convince myself ease is lazy, or that ease is something you can just re-frame and look at from a different perspective. But I have found embracing prioritizing ease has been transformative for me this month. That’s how I ended up sinking the cost of a plane ticket and buying an new one - and that was one of the single best decisions I’ve made for my nervous system this trip.
All of my lessons this month have been about being kind to myself when my nervous system is overextended and I lack a foundation of stability and comfort in my life. It’s a combination of contexts that I’ve never experienced before, so it was an entirely new journey for me in self-compassion. I think this is the journey that I was called to finish in January when I hit the road again - learning to have a rock-solid foundation of stability rooted in self-compassion, without supports from the external world and others. Leaning entirely on myself and my own ability to be kindly with myself. I don’t think that’s a wise way to live life generally - but I think it was an experience I needed to have for myself.
I’m Very Over budget
If you’re wondering how much this is costing me - so far, for twelve months in Europe, the Middle East, Christmas in the US, North Africa, India, New Zealand, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, I’ve spent $26,133. I wrote about my budget here - but I’m now thoroughly and unrecoverably over budget - by about $2,600. New Zealand was even more expensive than I expected it would be, but I don’t regret it at all. Those three weeks with my niece were invaluable, and I think if I had gone any cheaper I would have cheapened the experience. And I’ve recovered less money than I expected in Asia, staying essentially exactly on budget in my first three countries when I expected to stay well below budget. I’ve found tour and ticket prices to be higher than I expected, often extremely heightened for tourists, and I’ve spent more on luxuries like massages recently to invest in self-care. I’m already expecting this month will come in just about on budget given our pace of travel and what our hopes for it are . . . And I had originally been expecting to recover a good chunk budget in these countries.
I expect I’ll end up slightly under budget for all parts of my trip except New Zealand, so I think my worst case scenario will still be under $32,000 for the entire journey. It seems the $2,000 my parents gifted me for the trip will be put to use after all.
My Minimalist Pack Has Grown Some
I’m now four months into my minimalist (one overhead backpack) packing and it’s largely gone well. I left with one weeks’ worth of clothes (7 underwear, 6 socks 7 t-shirts, 2 shorts, 1 jeans), including some options for colder weather (1 thermal long sleeve, 1 rain coat), two pairs of sneakers, flip flops, one workout outfit, one swimsuit, a kneepad for yoga and workouts, my iPad, my Kindle, chargers, a dirty laundry bag, a few K95 masks, and a bag of toiletries (including an electric body groomer and a supply of inhalers). In my first month, I did pick up a few new items, including a puffer jacket (because it got really cold in North Africa), a new pair of pants (because my jeans were proving too baggy), two small bags (a fanny back and a drawstring to carry when I’m out and about), thin material shorts (for casual wear), new socks (because some of mine had holes) and a shawl of sorts (for cool but not cold weather). In month three, I also picked up a travel mug for coffee and wine.
With these additions, my bag is definitely more tightly packed - but still able to fit in an overhead; I do have to take some of my heavier objects out and put them into my smaller bag, though, to stay under the 20 pound limit for budget airlines. Overall, I’m happy with this pack; it has gear for most weather, some quality of life supplies, and has not required extra baggage fees yet. If I could change one thing, I’d swap out one pair of pants for a lightweight set of pants better for hot weather. Overall, it’s definitely easier to pack light if you’re never bumping into cold weather.
With this new pack, it’s easier for me to walk where there aren’t many sidewalks, to move quickly, to get in buses or trains with my bag, to take motorcycles and scooters, and to explore with my luggage when necessary. It took me a couple of months to get used to the added physical strain of the backpack - but I’m now thoroughly sold that it’s superior to a roller bag. It’s allowed me to be such a more nimble, flexible traveler.
At some point when my energy stores are back up, I’ll post a bag 2.0 blog about more minimalist packing. My energy reserves for the blog do continue to be low, though, so I’m not promising it anytime soon.
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