“I really want to travel more.”
That’s a statement I hear frequently in my circles in the US. My usual response is “Well then, travel more.”
But, usually, they’re stopped by a combination of the following:
- They don’t have enough money
- They have children or pets at home
- They can’t find the time
I’m sympathetic with all of these reasons, but most people I know who say they want to travel can’t even tell me every major restaurant, bar, or other landmark within a 20-minute walk of their front door.
I have done the international travel thing. At the age of 23, I moved to China for two years to work as an English teacher. Again, when I was 25, I moved to Vietnam to work at a tech company for another two years. I’ve since lived in America and South America in search of a better work-life balance and to scratch my itch for learning about other cultures.
These experiences have been profound for me, and, ironically, the greatest lesson they taught me was that it’s possible to feel like an explorer anywhere – even near home. The very act of changing your routine and location, even for a brief period, can be extremely powerful.
The people and places that you place yourself in and around most often dictate your reality. Exploration is the act of going into the world and seeing just how much like the rest of reality your little pocket is. After which, you come home and decide how much your reality should change.
My goal with this page is to:
- Help you discover adventure in your day-to-day life
- Share what I’ve learned from traveling so others like you can do it more easily
- Help foster a new age of cross-cultural exploration and learning
Below are the core tenants of what it means to be a 21st-century explorer. A movement I hope to start both among my fellow countrymen and like-minded individuals around the world.
You Believe Adventure can be Found in Even the Most Mundane Places
Today, I think there’s a disconnect between what we consider to be travel and what it actually is. When we say we want to travel more, I think many of us are saying “I want to live more.”
Traveling just to check a box and say you’ve traveled is a wasted opportunity. I knew tons of people who moved to the same places I moved, yet they:
- Never left their houses
- Never made local friends
- Didn’t acquire a taste for the local cuisine
- Tried to go home as soon as possible
For example:
When I was in China, one of my fellow teachers was Hell-bent on saving every last penny of his meager $1,000 per month salary. He got his wish and ended the year with roughly $10,000 in his account and the price he paid was either teaching or grading papers in his bedroom all year and little else. Because he’d rarely ventured out of his house, he managed to turn his experience in China into just one slightly more eccentric teaching experience he could have had anywhere else.
Still, some of the idiosyncrasies of China managed to catch up with my friend. I recall one particularly comical experience where one of his students got his name tattooed on her arm as a token of affection. He also was urinated on by Chinese toddlers while jogging on at least one or two occasions.
Considering how much time I spent in both China and Vietnam, relatively little of it was spent going to major tourist spots or traveling the country seeking to cram in a bucket list of sights. My favorite activity was walking around city streets and places around the edge of town where few locals went. I loved discovering restaurants and dives within a few blocks from my accommodation. Once I came home to America, I tried to do the same and managed to gain a reputation among my friends as the guy who knows a lot of great budget restaurants.
By coming home after four years of travel, I learned the mundane realities of day-to-day life could be circumvented via activities like:
- Joining a class down the street
- Teaming up with their next-door neighbor to start a business
- Becoming a regular at a location be it a local bar or restaurant
You Believe People Are People
The biggest disservice you can do to the world is to exotify it. Let me explain.
I accidentally took a poetry class in college thinking it was a long-form creative writing course. It ended up giving me a real appreciation for the craft and was an incalculable boon to my creative writing. During one unit, our teacher had us read a short poetry book by an Asian-American poet named Aimee Nezhukumatathil called Lucky Fish.
In my analysis of one poem in Lucky Fish, where Aimee describes the tropical realms of her parent’s home country, I brought up her use of “exotic” imagery. My teacher took issue with that word and sat me down to discuss how that imagery was exotic only to me and not to the author. I was “exotifying” her work when it wasn’t the work’s intent.
While life in another country or culture might seem exotic to you, chances are your life seems pretty exotic to someone else. Just because something is different from what you’re used to does not make it objectively more beautiful or unsightly.
This is not to say you can’t have an opinion on things that are new to you, it just means you should withhold some of your initial judgment when you encounter novel things or ideas. Seek to understand first before you make a call.
As a 21st Century Explorer, you understand that the people around you are neither all-knowing saints nor unreasoning savages. They are simply people with their own opinions and views who can eventually understand any viewpoint with enough dialogue. Your goal is to better understand why people do things the way they do and learn from the parts that you believe can benefit yourself and the world around you.
You Believe Frugality Equals Authenticity
This is perhaps my most controversial point, but I believe spending less is one of the most crucial ingredients for living a more authentic life both day-to-day and while traveling.
I strongly feel frugality brings everyone:
- Better social connections
- More money to spend on things that really matter
- A greater feeling of accomplishment
I encounter many who believe travel needs to be a solid week of drinking and eating at fine establishments in some of the most expensive international cities around the world. This admittedly serves one purpose of travel (to disconnect yourself from your daily routines), but not the other which is to learn something about the world and yourself.
Why is it that a trip to Cancun means staying at a resort and getting drunk on a beach every day? I’m a big fan of partying on the beach, but that’s something you can just as easily do in most countries. Anytime you attend a carefully crafted tourist event, you’re allowing a lens to be placed over your experience. A film that eliminates many of the struggles that make travel so darn rewarding.
👉 Would you rather go to another country and stay at the house of a friend you made while drinking at a local bar? Or would you rather pay to live at a homestay with a bunch of other tourists seeing what everyone else sees?
Our conditioned response to critiques like these is to say things like, “I just want to do something nice for a change,” or “Aren’t I allowed to have a little fun?”
I understand spending extra money on a nice pair of shoes or a more comfortable bed. However, pricing an experience is not a direct science. Frugality ties in deeply with authenticity as it forces you to rely on your social network, your limited grasp of local languages, and your wits as opposed to just your bank account to get what you want.
I also encourage explorers to beware of falling down the “authenticity hole” where you’re constantly trying to have a more authentic experience than everyone else around you. This, I think, is the greatest driver of “burnout traveling” or trying to pack as many experiences into a week as possible.
One of the coolest things I did while solo traveling in Beijing was posting up in a bar for an evening and eventually getting the bartender and a Canadian couple to go clubbing all night. There are enough authentic experiences out there for everyone and you can even be the one who creates them.
You don’t just collect experiences, you do something with them
Eventually, all travel comes to an end and you return to some of the normalcy of your daily life. If you’re like me, you probably feel refreshed and ready to change some small part of your routine – and I suggest you lean into that urge.
In my opinion, that one small change you make after returning is the entire point of travel, and failure to make that change does a disservice to you and everyone around you. Just as flowers need to cross-pollinate and humans instinctively try to breed outside of their gene pool, we need to bring new experiences and ways of life to our communities.
One of my favorite things to do when I’m out with friends today is teach them the nuances of Chinese drinking etiquette. I love watching as their perception of social drinking changes profoundly just as mine had. Now my friends and I can’t look at toasting the same way ever again and I think our lives are more interesting and authentic for it.
If some wayward tourist came to America and started drinking with us, they could go home and tell their friends they learned a niche toasting etiquette combining Chinese and American influences. And wouldn’t that make the world a more interesting place?
This has been one of my more long, philosophical pieces. I want to occasionally write these along with more consistent content about traveling to and living in other countries. All feedback is appreciated and if you have any, give me a follow on Twitter @Peter_4sure and send a DM.
-Happy exploring