Travelers: The Meaningful Journey

1

The Calling

It is well past midnight. The bright moon rays of the Southern Hemisphere illuminate the dirt road in front of me. I am walking hastily, half amused, half fearful, and naked. Was that a gunshot I heard in the distance? I glance in her direction. She, too, is naked, walking next to me, her motionless face showing no trace of concern. I wonder how she could be so beautiful at a moment like this. Suddenly she accelerates while grabbing my left arm.

This way, this way, quick. We leave the road to cut into the middle of the sugarcane field. My friend, she lives over there, she'll give us clothes to wear.

Too bad, I say, you look gorgeous. She smiles. I swear never to forget this night. We arrive at the doorstep. She knocks on the door. It opens. We are safe. I am relieved, momentarily. Was that another gunshot I heard in the distance? It would take me three more days to make it back to the hotel. When I did I was smiling and had clothes on.

I had met her two days before when I arrived at Nadi on the island of VitiLevu, the largest of the Fiji archipelago. As a single man traveling around the world, meeting local women was rarely a problem. What was problematic was the relationship: unrealistic expectations on both sides slowly dissolved the glue that binds a relationship. While the glue was fast acting, it was seldom long lasting. Unspecified promises also eroded the glue. What I considered a meager budget of $10 to $12 a day did not convince her I was not rich, particularly as it amounted to the weekly salary of some islanders. Neither was getting around using public transportation and walking instead of taking taxis. And she was right. To everybody else in the islands, I was an odd wealthy individual who traveled the world and does not need to work. Early in my travels I had given up explaining how I prepare for this experience and how broke I would be when I returned home.

And why do you travel? she once asked.

To meet people like you, I answered.

I think I have forgotten her name. I remember it had the fascination of foreign sounds I could never pronounce correctly. It is almost as if she were a different person each time I uttered her name. How convenient never to have known her exact name. That night, that moon-filled night, we walked late in the countryside on the outskirts of town. The night was warm, clear and enticing. We arrived at a sugarcane field. There were no houses around. No one to be seen or heard. Soon we were lying down, side-by-side, naked. This is when I heard the hurried steps of what sounded like a very heavy man. I looked up and caught a glimpse of the shiny barrel of a shotgun pointing at the moon.

He is after you, she said. Don't get up, don't move.

Do you know him?

Yes, yes, he wants to kill you…. Maybe kill me too.

I remained entirely motionless for what seemed a long time. Finally the sound of hurried steps became weaker.

Hurry, hurry, I told her, get your clothes and let's go. I looked around. Where are our clothes?

Somewhere! Somewhere! He is a crazy man! He will kill you! No time, no time…Go, go!

The clothes stayed in the cane field. We soon reached the road. The soles of my feet were burning. My heart was racing while my mind was busy assessing this unusual situation. My stopover in Fiji was the second leg of a trip around the world I had started some five months before. Now here I was, naked, walking in the middle of a sugarcane field to escape the anger of a big man (Fijians are big men physically as well as by title) with a shotgun in his hands while reflecting on my motivation to travel by myself to places I used to read about in National Geographic magazines as a child growing up in Sherbrooke in the French-speaking province of Québec.

Adventure was calling and its language was universal. Its appeal was not merely a shotgun heard in the distance over sugarcane near the town of Nadi in Fiji, or the sight of my attractive companion walking by my side. It was also the throb of my heart quickening my thought process while I walked rapidly toward my salvation, toward clothing. There is nothing like a little adventure to help one think clearly. The night was undeniably beautiful and exciting. I was stark naked and my mind was filled with questions and thoughts to consider. Later, later, said a soft voice inside my head. Keep walking, keep listening. But I could not help thinking that soon I would be alone again with plenty of time to reflect on the events of the night. Travelers always have plenty of time to reflect. I couldn't wait to start.

Time for reflection came soon enough. A few days after the Nadi episode, I went to a tiny Fijian island for three days and three nights. I didn't even know its name or where exactly it was located. There are 322 islands in the Fijian archipelago. I just boarded a boat one fine early morning and after a few hours of calm sailing I heard the captain say, That's your destination; I'll pick you back up in three days. Be ready or the next boat may be a long time to come. It was probably on this very small tropical island in Fiji that I became a full-fledged Traveler. It was at this particular moment in my self-assigned mission to see and understand the world better that I began to weigh the motivations and consequences of my undertaking. Why do I travel like I do? What about other Travelers? Do they go through similar experiences? My time on the six-minute island, which was the name I came up with after I realized I could walk around it in about six minutes, was probably the longest time, that is psychological time, I have ever spent anywhere in my life.

It was beautiful on this island. I spent most of my nights sleeping on the beach looking up at the wide starry sky. I had never seen anything like it before. By then, I thought I knew the Southern Hemisphere sky fairly well. I recalled the first time I laid eyes on the sky below the equator; I was in Argentina. I thought I had lost my groundings. No Northern Cross (star), no Big or Little Dipper; instead the Southern cross, the constellation of Argo Navis, which is the ship sailed by Jason and the Argonauts, and the stars in carina, representing the keel of the ship. At least, there was the familiar Milky Way, some 400 billion familiar stars.

But here on this island, too small to be on any map, the sky above my head was so spectacular that I thought I had crossed another threshold beyond which the familiar stars disappear among a multitude of new constellations. The magnificence of my environment was overwhelming. Nonetheless, it was there, on this singular paradise on earth, that I hit rock bottom for three long days and three long nights. It was there that I experienced the dark night of my soul for three interminable days. I lay on the beach for hours on end, day and night, thinking that I could vanish and no one would ever notice. I did vanish for three days, but happily I noticed. I came back on time to catch the boat back to life.

Hitting rock bottom or hitting a wall were expressions used by Travelers I would interview four years later while doing research on Travelers for my Ph.D. dissertation. I use a capital T to refer to travelers who chose to travel by themselves around the world on a budget and for a long period of time. My research, conducted from 1997 through 1999, uncovered key experiences sought by Travelers and the values associated with these experiences. Ethnographic fieldwork provided a much-needed analytical distance from my own experiences as a Traveler as well as insights into the culture to which I also belong. Indeed, one of the key experiences Travelers go through during their time on the road is hitting rock bottom. I did not know about it when I hit rock bottom on the six-minute island.

I will come back to this key concept experienced by all Travelers later on in the book. But for now, I would like to quote Paul, a Traveler from Germany. This is how he describes his experience of hitting rock bottom. He refers to it as hitting a wall.

On this day, I hit a wall, a thick and solid wall, and I could not climb it or walk around it. I had to take it apart brick-by-brick, and it was like each damn brick was one aspect of my life I did not want to look at before. It was painful. It took me a long time, and for a long time while traveling in Borneo I was so depressed. I felt that I was lost in the jungle of my mind, just like the jungles of the island. But now I know that it was necessary, and I feel better for having been through this nightmare. After that experience, I never traveled the same way again, never took anything or anyone for granted anymore. For me, hitting this wall was a turning point in my life. Now, I can appreciate my life, my travels, my friends and family, everything, everything I now appreciate better.

Neither did I know that upon my return to my life in the United States, I would be unhappy in my professional and personal life, finding issues with many of daily life acts I had never questioned before. I remember getting up in the morning, sometimes forgetting to have coffee, one of my favorite moments of any day, on the road or at home. I was going through reverse cultural shock, which is often experienced by Travelers and anthropologists alike when they go back home—another phenomenon I discovered during my research on Travelers. This is probably what the French romantic writer René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) refers to when he describes how upon his return home he soon found himself more isolated in his own country than he had ever been on foreign soil.¹

The return home is a struggle for most Travelers. I was depressed. It was during my two years in Atlanta where I worked as a Cultural Attaché for the Québec Government that I resolved to find out more about the culture of Travelers, a culture I knew a lot about as an insider, as a member of this culture, but very little from an analytical point of view. I wanted to step out of that culture in order to assess and understand it better. That's the reason I went back to graduate school in 1997.

I was thirty-three years old when I boarded a plane to Cairo, the first stop on my world journey. Perhaps I had made that decision in response to a midlife crisis I felt tightening up my throat every time I put on a tie to go to work in the morning. Was it not what Elliot Jacques (1917–2003), the Canadian psychoanalyst, had in mind when he coined the term Midlife Crisis?² It may have been my creative response to the unwavering life cycle during which we all need to make adjustments here and there in order to bring fresh meaning and enthusiasm to our endeavors. My age also put me in the second age group of Travelers (thirty to forty-nine years old), probably the fastest-growing of the three age groups I devised for the purpose of my study.

The first group, eighteen to twenty-nine, is the largest as well as the traditional backpacker/student Traveler. The third group, fifty to seventy-five, is also growing rapidly but its numbers were still relatively small in the late nineties. Over the course of my research I conversed with over 250 Travelers and over thirty other types of travelers and tourists (as a point of comparison). I conducted forty-seven in-depth interviews of sixty to ninety minutes each and over 100 informal interviews. I also led three focus groups during fieldwork in Mexico and New Orleans. These interviews, along with recorded participant observation activities, constituted the core data of my study.

I also interviewed less-experienced Travelers before or at the very beginning of their trip. I talked to more experienced Travelers in between trips or at various stages of their journey, as well as upon their return home at various periods after the completion of their travel, from immediately after their return to as long as four years after. Seasoned Travelers rarely spend more than two years before embarking on another journey. I have also talked to Travelers of all ages; the youngest was seventeen, the oldest seventy-five. The Travelers' nationalities also covered a wide spectrum of nations (France, Holland, Switzerland, England, Israel, Norway, Sweden, Japan, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Germany, Spain, Croatia, Finland, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Taiwan, Turkey, South Korea, India, Ireland, Mexico).

All of this investigative and analytical work would come years later and none of it was nearly as important as working through my personal issues when I hit a wall on the six-minute island. Gazing at the night stars, I began to sketch my life itinerary: What had happened before the six-minute island and what could happen after? For three days I disappeared and felt suspended in time, floating above the now, reviewing the track of life, of my life. My Pacific island became the center of the world and the center of the world was nowhere. I closed my eyes and dreamed of my life.

I grew up in the blue-collar neighboorhoods in the eastern part of Sherbrooke, a medium-size city in the eastern townships of the French-speaking province of Québec in Canada. Sherbrooke was largely an ethnically homogeneous city where the vast majority of residents spoke French while living on streets with names such as Johnson (the street I grew up on), Wellington, King, and Galt. A small but influential English-speaking minority lived on these streets, mostly in the northern part of the city. My father, an electrician, sometimes did work for a friendly Lebanese man who served very strong, very sweet coffee in very small cups. My father loved it. I do too now.

I wanted to be an archeologist, a spy (and/or diplomat) or a monk growing up, though not necessarily