A family from Hanover, NH takes a gap year (9 months) around the world trip! Definitely can relate to this, except I did it as a single parent with 3 teenage girls!!
Sophie’s relationship with the truth has improved steadily over the years. The underlying stubbornness has not changed much.
One of the most appealing parts of the “gap year” plan was that we would be able to return to the life that we left. We were not looking for an escape, only a breather.
The poverty, the vitality, and the sheer excitement of just walking around. I wanted more of it—“it” being the world.
“Travel after college,” he told me. “You’ll get more out of it.”
Kuwaiti citizens (as opposed to the many foreigners imported to run the country) are rich and fashionable. What is a conservative newspaper to do when the fall fashion photos that come over the Reuters wire show bare legs, arms, shoulders, and backs? I was the solution. One of my jobs was to use a black felt-tip pen to lengthen skirts and add sleeves—Christian Lacroix, as interpreted by Charles Wheelan with a Sharpie.
Interesting travel does not sate the urge to explore; it feeds it. This is true even at age fifty.
The pressure that comes when one tries to run against the herd.
We had saved enough cash for a nine month global adventure. It would prove to be one of the most formative experiences of our lives.
A kindly old man stopped and offered us a ride. He was at least seventy years old, smaller than both of us, and wearing a coat and tie. We told this elderly gentleman that we needed to go to the bus station. “Where are you going?” he asked. “To the bus station,” I repeated. “Yes, but where are you going on the bus?” he insisted. He had a faint European accent that I could not place. We explained that we had to get to the airport in Los Angeles by midnight in order to catch our flight. He looked at his watch and said, “I can take you to Los Angeles.” And he did. We stopped for frozen yogurt, and later to see the Pacific Ocean. This kind man, Alex, drove us for five hours and dropped us off at LAX. Obviously at some point I felt compelled to ask him why he was so generous with his time. A little background is necessary to understand his answer. I was twenty-two at the time. I was tan and fit, with a crew cut for ease of travel. Alex pointed at me and explained, “I was liberated from a concentration camp by American GIs. When you were standing there by the side of the road with your pack, you reminded me of a soldier. I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to the country, and this is how I repay it.”
Our world travels were a fifth year of college education, at a much lower cost than a year of tuition. We would be different people if we had not taken that trip.
At age fifty, I wanted to do that again: read, listen, think, stare out the window.
My gap year after Dartmouth did not leave me facedown in a gutter, my parents’ concerns notwithstanding. Ironically, it launched my writing career.
Our role as her parents would soon change—from managers to consultants, as one of my friends once described it.
I get some depressing essays. Many students write about the joy they experienced in elementary school: how happy they were to go to school; how they studied science by hatching chickens and making pinhole cameras; how they loved learning. And then those same students too often go on to explain how their love of learning was beaten out of them by standardized tests and lack of sleep and pressure to get into the right college. Their eagerness to learn was replaced by a bizarre and erroneous notion that education is somehow a competition, not a process whereby a person becomes more capable and complete. There is even a term for the elite high school students most consumed by this phenomenon: “crispies”—because they have burned out.
The reality is that traveling around the world for nine months is significantly cheaper than staying at home.
The primary expense associated with traveling around the world has nothing to do with traveling around the world: It is forgone income. We would not be working for nine months. Even then, about forty percent of our income normally goes to taxes. The good news is that you don’t have to pay taxes on income you don’t earn! So, the real cost of our proposed adventure was about sixty percent of nine months of income. That is not a small number, but it is a far cry from what most people envisioned when we told them that we planned to travel around the world.
Life is about planning for what you can predict, and being realistic about what you cannot.
I subscribed to a number of high-end travel outfitters that regularly sent us glossy brochures for trips to every continent. We could not afford these exotic voyages, but we could re-create similar itineraries more cheaply. There is no law against doing a National Geographic expedition to a cool place for one-tenth the price. (I do this all the time!!)
In Bogotá, Sunday is ciclovia, a communal event in which a major avenue is closed to car traffic and opened up for bicyclists, Rollerbladers, runners, walkers, people with big dogs, people with small dogs, and anyone else who wants to enjoy a car-free stroll on a wide urban boulevard.
A fun snapshot of globalization: two Americans eating Chinese food in a Bolivian food court.
La Paz has installed cable cars as a form of public transit; the cars, which look like ski gondolas, transport people by carrying them over the city. Cable cars are faster than buses because they can glide over traffic; they are cheaper to build than train lines because there is no need to lay tracks through densely developed neighborhoods.
Medellín, Colombia, had also recently installed a cable car for the same purpose: connecting poor neighborhoods isolated by the mountains to parts of the city with more jobs and opportunity. Scoop loved the irony: a technology that had served wealthy skiers at mountain resorts for decades was now a poverty-fighting tool. (Sara and I were on this cable car) And then we climbed on board. The gondola gave us a bird’s-eye view of La Paz as we glided over schoolyards and playgrounds and bustling streets. Our aerial tour felt almost voyeuristic as we watched people hanging laundry on rooftops or lounging in courtyards shielded from the street by high walls. From above, we could appreciate the activity, complexity, and interconnectedness of a modern city, as if we were observing the human equivalent of an ant farm.
Once again, we opted for an overnight bus, but this time Bolivia threw us a curveball. The bathrooms on Bolivian buses are always locked. The drivers are responsible for cleaning the bathrooms on their buses. Predictably—I write nonfiction books about the power of incentives—the drivers minimize their work by keeping the bathrooms locked, even on a ten- or twelve-hour trip. There is no need to clean a bathroom that no one has used.
Our tour of the Bolivian salt flats left from Uyuni, a cold, windswept city that feels like the Bolivian Wild West. Uyuni exists mostly as a tourist launching point for the salt flats. The streets are unpaved and comically wide. Fierce winds blow dust and dirt everywhere, even blotting out the sun at times. There is little vegetation; most of the buildings are drab cement structures. The whole place looked like it had been painted a color Benjamin Moore might euphemistically call “Wet Sand.” I became persuaded that I could taste the dirt in my food.
There were vast open expanses with strange-colored lakes, curious shades of reds and greens and pinks, as if a young child had decided to color the landscape with the crayons that don’t often get taken out of the box: “green tomato” and “cotton candy” and “pomegranate.” Just when the colors could not get any more incongruous, we came across a large flock of flamingos gathered on a red lake, adding bright pink and watermelon-red to the palette.
The trek finished with a drive through a tableau that looked like a Salvador Dalí painting: misshapen boulders the size of small houses; curious shadows cast on the sand and rock; more lonely colors from the crayon box.
The roads were noticeably better in Chile, which was a mixed blessing. I found myself nostalgic for giant potholes—nature’s speed bumps—as our bus barreled at a crazy speed downhill out of the mountains. The driver crossed himself every time he swerved into the opposite lane to overtake a car or another bus.
Patagonia was the place that inspired me to figure out the panorama feature on my iPhone.
A Labrador retriever had gone straight to Leah’s bag. The security officers led her inside a small building and opened her backpack as she looked on: clothes, shoes, books, sunscreen—and also a large Ziploc bag with more than a kilo of whitish powder. One of the officers held the bag up and looked to Leah for an explanation. “It’s pancake mix,” she said. This was true. We had been stretching our budget in Chile and Argentina by shopping at supermarkets and carrying staples with us in our packs. The mix in the bulging Ziploc bag could be combined with eggs, milk, and oil to make Swedish pancakes, a family breakfast favorite. The officers did not fling Leah to the ground and slap on the cuffs. Apparently flour and sugar do not look like cocaine or heroin to an expert eye. Also, Leah had butter and jam in her pack, which gave credence to the pancake alibi. The drug dog, which had presumably been attracted to the food, was now lounging on the floor, wagging its tail happily. (This is similar to my wife Peggy taking a bag full of bath salts on a weekend trip and being searched. My older daughter Sara once took a bag full of pennies on an international trip and we were searched at every airport.)
I opted for the bad mood cure-all: walking. I left the house, picked a random direction, and walked until I encountered something interesting.
Santiago is not especially picturesque, but it is functional and easy to get around.
Larger debate about how to parent Sophie: Prod her along or let her learn from failure? “We can’t be threatening to take her phone away when she’s in college,” Leah pointed out. Like parents everywhere, we were searching for a magic formula that does not exist.
From Osorno we crossed the Chilean border into Argentina. We were now in the heart of Patagonia, an area near the tip of South America known for its extraordinary natural beauty: dense forests, turquoise lakes, and snowy peaks—all of which we were now seeing as our bus rolled along. We arrived in Bariloche, which turned out to be a prosperous ski town built on a steep hill overlooking a picturesque lake.
The Patagonia Brewing Company is an architectural masterpiece. From the front, it is a warm, modern building—lots of wood and glass—that would fit comfortably in any upscale ski town.
We discussed the paradox of South America: every country we visited had a robust food culture yet relatively few overweight or obese people. My policy brain hypothesized that this is because the diet is low in processed food and the lifestyle is more oriented toward walking, particularly in the cities.
Patagonia forced us to confront one of the trade-offs of the trip: we had opted to sample the world rather than going fewer places and staying longer. Patagonia is a place where I would have loved to spend more time, especially with a bigger budget.
The good thing about hitting bottom is that things tend to get better.
Poste restante is a holdover from the days when anyone without a fixed address could have mail held for them at a post office.
New Zealand felt familiar, especially the prices.
Having them in a confined space after traveling for thirty-six hours was like chain-smoking in a fireworks factory.
The things that made New Zealand familiar also made it less culturally interesting. Katrina said at one point without irony: “New Zealand is cute. Like Vermont without snow.”
A ferry carried us across the Cook Strait to the South Island, where we picked up a new rental car and made our way to Nelson, a sleepy town with lovely ocean views and some of New Zealand’s best wine country. (Nelson is adjacent to the world-famous Marlborough Region.)
There were no great life epiphanies. I felt no urge to quit my job or sell my possessions.
“Do you have what it takes to cross four lanes of Saigon traffic?” The dominant form of transportation is the motorbike; there are often ten or fifteen riding abreast. Rarely does the traffic come to a complete stop. As a result, crossing the street requires a leap of faith: step off the curb; walk predictably; and hope that all fifty motorcycles will steer around you, like a school of fish swimming around a fixed object. And never, never stop or turn around.
The Cambodian countryside has a unique rural beauty: glimmering rice paddies; water buffalos plowing the fields; myriad shades of green and brown; ponds with pink and lavender lily pads. As we rolled toward Phnom Penh, the setting sun cast a warm light on these bucolic scenes, as if they had been painted by French impressionists.
In a culture-bending evening, we had dinner at a German brewhouse surrounded by Russian tourists as a Vietnamese cover band played Pink Floyd and Amy Winehouse. It was a relaxing place to pause before stacking ourselves on another overnight bus to Hoi An.
India is one of the most bustling and unpredictable places in the world; Calcutta is one of the most bustling and unpredictable places in India.
The soundtrack for our cross-city trip was an incessant honking, to which our drivers contributed aggressively.
Slaves were captured in the interior of Africa, brought to Zanzibar, and then exported to the rest of the world.
I ran across the busy street, where the red, yellow, and green lights had no more impact on driving behavior than if decorative Christmas lights had been hung across the intersection.
For all the luxury of the Willingdon Club, there was one incongruity: a striking number of dogs wandering the grounds, many of whom were sleeping comfortably in the sand traps on the golf course. The dogs looked healthy but out of place roaming the manicured lawns of Mumbai’s most prestigious club. Eventually I asked Sumer about this oddity. “Ah, Charlie,” he said with a smile, clearly relishing an opportunity to tell a story, perhaps apocryphal. “When the club was British, there were signs posted on the grounds: No dogs or Indians. Now there are both.”
As our pulses returned to normal and the perspiration dried in the breeze, Leah leaned across the aisle. “That was more fun than the beach resort,” she said. I knew exactly what she meant. There is a rush that comes from plunging into chaos and emerging successful.
The only evidence of the air-conditioning was that the windows were sealed shut.
Sophie does hysteria well. By that, I do not mean that she handles hysteria well. I mean that she is really good at being hysterical.
THE INCIDENT BEGAN INNOCUOUSLY at a train station on Dubai’s shimmering metro system. CJ noticed that when he rubbed his shoes on the surface of the floor in the station he could gather static electricity. After he shuffled around for a while, he could give someone a small shock. As we waited for the train, CJ repeatedly shocked me. After I became bored with his antics, he shocked Sophie, who warned him angrily that he needed her consent to shock her. CJ argued that he did not. We boarded a train, at which point Sophie declared, “It’s always crucial to get someone’s consent.” CJ missed this subtle turn in the conversation. “Not if it’s someone I know,” he answered. Sophie pounced. “That’s rape!” she declared. “Huh?” CJ replied.
Dubai is like the love child of Saudi Arabia and Las Vegas: a gleaming city-state in the desert where many things are new, shiny, and bizarrely large; but also an absolute monarchy in which Islam is the official state religion and one can be deported for kissing in public. Dubai is home to the tallest building in the world, the architecturally impressive Burj Khalifa, and also some of the world’s largest shopping malls. The Dubai Mall, for example, is so big that we walked five miles without finding one end or the other. The Mall of the Emirates has an indoor ski hill. The phrase “shopping mecca” takes on a more literal meaning in these places; many of the female shoppers are in full burkas.
Dubai has one of the largest and most impressive airports in the world—a gigantic shopping mall with airline gates. Dubai also has an older airport, which is the infrastructure equivalent of a crappy car that you keep for the kids after you buy a new one.
We got off the train in a leafy neighborhood and followed the crowd. As the stadium came into view, we encountered a large group of men peeing in the bushes at the edge of an open field. This was not four guys bashfully relieving themselves. There were thirty men lined up in a row urinating in the bushes—a combination of German organization and third world sanitation.
My Dartmouth colleague Michael adores Berlin: the music, the parks, the food, the public transit. He eagerly sought out an opportunity to spend a year there on sabbatical. The fact that he is Jewish adds a layer of complexity to his relationship with the nation. He remarked to me at one point that the math on “good Germans” does not work. What he meant was that many German families have been told that their grandparents were not supportive of the Nazis. Michael’s point is that there could not have been that many good Germans, or the bad ones would not have prevailed. The Jewish Museum in Berlin is a reminder of this. The Holocaust is only one piece of the museum’s much larger story. The most powerful exhibit is on the history of anti-Semitism, which has ebbed and flowed for centuries. There were waves of persecutions and massacres during the Black Death in Europe, for example, as Jews were blamed for the plague. The lesson is clear: when the going gets tough, humans find scapegoats.
Tbilisi is a place where cultures have intersected for centuries: Ottoman, European, Russian. The architecture, food, and dress reflect this melding. A person plopped on a main street in Tbilisi for the first time would recognize much while still struggling to identify the country: Ottoman architecture, but it’s not Turkey; bustling and developed, but it’s not Western Europe; vestiges of the USSR, including massively wide streets, but it’s not Russia.
FOR MANY MONTHS AFTER WE GOT BACK , I could not read the travel section of the Sunday New York Times. I had no interest in exotic places. Instead, I relished wearing regular clothes, sleeping in the same bed every night, and having hot water with good pressure every time I stepped into the shower.
People don’t usually take off with their family and go around the world, and that pitted us against some powerful social forces. I worry that some of the most talented people I know, including the students I teach, have been suffocated by conformity—an American culture in which we “live to work” and mindlessly accumulate. This adventure was, in part, an effort to push back on that. I’ve tried to make the case that the barriers to doing something like this are lower than one might think. A big reason many people don’t do it is because many people don’t do it.
One thing about raising children—the research is clear on this—is that there is no substitute for spending time with them. Even when they tell you they don’t want you around, the truth is that they do. This trip was the ultimate family dinner.
Life goes on without you. We came back to a place that was—the presidential election excepted—pretty much the same as we had left it. I mentioned earlier that our dogs wagged their tails excitedly for less than a minute and then went to sleep in their usual corners. Our friends did the human equivalent.
The greatest luxury is time. We slept until we woke up refreshed. We read for long stretches at any time of the day. We wandered aimlessly or sat on a park bench for no particular reason. Our meals were not rushed.
The fraction of the world’s population living in absolute poverty has fallen from around forty percent in 1990 to below ten percent today.
Rising prosperity and increased environmental degradation are related, particularly in the developing world,
And it turns out that experiences, rather than things, are what make us happiest in the long run. This is a paradox, admittedly, because spending money on objects gives you things that last while experiences are ephemeral. But here is the weird thing: research has shown over and over again that experiences have the most positive long-term impact on our well-being. How could that be? Because experiences “become an ingrained part of our identity,” says Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich, who has synthesized a number of studies on this subject. Here is his explanation. First, experiences connect us to the people with whom we share them. Second, experiences make us into the people we are. And last, even bad experiences morph into positives over time. Gilovich writes, “Something that might have been stressful or scary in the past can become a funny story to tell at a party or be looked back on as an invaluable character-building experience.”
Fortune favors those who get their passports and go.
At some point, I started to read the New York Times travel section again. There are so many cool places in the world that we still have not visited. How is it that we have never been to Morocco? Or to the Dalmatian coast?