Thoughts From the Road

At this point I've been traveling for almost exactly five weeks and have just about 10 days left to go. After two FAM trips (for those not well-versed in travel industry lingo, that's familiarization trips—tours offered to travel agents, tour companies, and media to familiarize them with a destination's tourism offerings), two conferences, and a mini-vacation, I'm buzzing with new connections and experiences to reflect upon. Plus, since all these events have given me little time to work, I'm dying to write! So I thought I'd try to organize some of what I'm processing in a blog post. Here are my main takeaways (both about the industry and myself) from my time in Panama and Mexico for the ATTA's Adventure Travel World Summit and ATMEX.

Adventure Travel Conferences Are Like Backpacker Hostels for Professionals

With some new traveler friends on a hostel-run bar crawl at the age of 19.

Between the ages of 18-21, I spent a lot of time in backpacker hostels. I still remember the thrill of showing up at some hostel in a foreign city and finding my bunk, never knowing who I'd meet. There was the Moroccan man in a grimy hostel in Firenze who told me his life story while doling out plates of pasta to hungry backpackers, the Australian girl in the bunk under me in Berlin who joined me weeks later for a night of clubbing in London (when we danced with a couple of good-looking Queen's guards), the Italian guy staying in my room in Cork who chatted with me about God and religion for hours, the Canadian girl I met in my first pilgrim albergue on the Camino de Santiago who has since become a dear friend and even came to my wedding, the band of characters in Siem Reap who convinced me to move full-time to Cambodia, and so many more.

 

In my experience, adventure travel conferences offer a similar (if slightly more professional) dynamic. When you bring together a group of world travelers, conversations consist of hilarious misadventure stories, destination recommendations, and stimulating discussions of cultural quirks. When you add alcohol to the mix, there's a dizzying rush of connection that leads to lots of wild adventures and friendships that feel really deep really quickly. There may not be the staying in bunk beds, going on pub crawls, and hunting down cheap bus tickets I remember from my backpacking days, but the sense of community among travelers is still very much present. And very much intoxicating.

 

Like everything else in life, these conferences eventually come to an end. When they do, it’s like leaving a hostel where you’ve stayed with the same group of travelers for a few days—you’re not just saying goodbye to dear new friends, but to the experiences that brought you together. Chances are you’ll see some of these people at future events (and as a backpacker, I’d often cross paths with friends in other hostels in other cities), but never again in the same circumstances. That little world you created together during the event remains suspended in time, never to be returned to again.

 

I’m leaving these events with a few extra people in my heart—fellow travel journalists and industry professionals with whom I cried laughing, got through difficult moments, and navigated cross-cultural experiences.

Out dancing with some new industry friends after ATWS.

It's All About the People for Me

With a Panamanian community leader at the Junta de Embarra

One of the best things to come out of these experiences for me professionally is the understanding that people are at the center of my work. As a traveler, I’ve always gotten a kind of high out of connecting with people around the world. I’ll never forget the feeling of cracking my first joke in Italian to my desk mate when I went to high school in Rimini, asking my Uber driver in Germany about his experience immigrating there as a teenager, speaking to an elderly gentleman about the power of meditation at a Buddhist retreat in Ireland, sitting on the dirt floor of a new friend’s home in Cambodia drinking beer and singing Khmer karaoke, dancing and drinking and talking and laughing and crying with people around the world whose lives, cultures, and native languages are different from mine.

 

I often think of the Hozier song Someone New when I travel. The lyrics “I fall in love just a little oh little bit every day with someone new…fall in love with every stranger, the stranger the better” perfectly capture how I feel most of the time, especially when I travel. Every human being I make eye contact with or trade a smile with around the world feels special to me. The grandmotherly lady who affectionately made sure our group was well-fed during our time on Isla Cañas, the toothless man at the Junta de Embarra who poured the local sugar cane spirit down his throat while dancing in the mud, the little girl at a weaving cooperative in Mexico who timidly approached me to teach me one of the stitches she was working on—I’m desperate to know their stories. What is important to them? What runs through their minds on a daily basis? What are their fears and desires? What wisdom do they carry? Getting to make eye contact with these people and interact with them in some way (often in a language that’s foreign to me) is what I consider the greatest privilege of my life.

 

If there were a job just traveling around the world to sit with people and shoot the shit over coffee or beer, I’d take it. But for now I’ve found the next-best thing—traveling around the world to spend time with people…and writing about it. What I want out of my travel journalism work is the chance to meet and tell the stories of ordinary people in tourism destinations, humanizing them to readers. This precious feeling of making a connection with someone despite a cultural difference or language barrier is one too good to keep to myself.

I Need Rest and Stability...

Lighting incense to meditate in a temple in Cambodia.

I’m someone who lives without regrets, but if I could go back and scold the version of myself who thought it was a good idea to cram two adventure conferences with FAM trips, a vacation, and a hosted trek into six weeks, I’d do so.

 

I thrive on independence, which I use to take care of my physical and mental health (an important thing for someone with chronic illness). Over the years, I’ve learned the practices and routines that help me feel my best, and I’ve tapped into the self-discipline needed to keep up with such practices. Much of the past six weeks has involved following a schedule I had little control over, and an exhausting one at that.

 

I’m burned out from forming deep connections with people and then parting ways, I’m tired mentally, physically, and spiritually, and so ready to get back to being in charge of my own routine. In the future, I’ll probably schedule my trips differently so that I have a little more time in one place to find some stability, quiet, and independence.

...But I Also Thrive on a Little Chaos

Maybe it’s because I grew up a peaceful home in the middle of nowhere or because I’m someone with a calm interior world, but I’ve realized that I crave a little messiness in life. Living in the US, I have gotten used to the Western way of strict rules and schedules, which stress me out more than anything. In other parts of the world, especially the developing world, these rules and schedules give way to a looser way of life.

Traffic flows less in a pattern than in a free-for-all, every rule has a human exception, and time is nothing but a construct (exemplified by the expression “ahorita,” the diminutive form of “now” in Spanish that usually means anything other than now) To me, all of this leads to a greater permission to be human that I enjoy much more than the Western way of doing things. All the need for control I see in the Western world seems to me like a fruitless attempt to stave off the unpredictability of life.

 

In the US, I follow the rules and the schedule carefully in an effort to avoid inconveniencing anyone. But on this trip (in Mexico especially), I felt liberated from those constraints.

There Are a Lot of People Doing Amazing Things in the World

It would be impossible to count the number of times I’ve felt inspired on this trip. Listening to the Panamanian-American couple talk about their decision to give up high-powered careers and city life to start a tour company that shares the incredible natural wonders and local communities in Cambutal, speaking with a Peace Corps volunteer about the importance of empowering young Panamanians in remote areas, hearing from community leaders in Mexico who have banded together without any government help to create a network of tourism experiences that benefit their communities, attending conference keynotes and workshops on sustainability, Indigenous tourism, regenerative travel and more…

 

Everywhere you look in the world there is suffering, greed, and destruction. But when I attend events like these that shine a spotlight on people working together to improve the world, I’m reminded why I believe in an ultimate “good” in spite of all the pain of human life. And I am honored that it’s part of my job to amplify the stories of people doing amazing around the world.

We Can Learn a Lot from Indigenous Communities

A demonstration on traditional Mayan weaving practices

It’s a long-held belief of mine that the world would be a better, more peaceful place if Indigenous people around the world hadn’t been killed en masse or forced to assimilate to the culture of their conquerors. That the rights of Indigenous people around the world have been denied and violated time and time again feels to me like one of the greatest injustices on our planet. So getting to witness and learn about the rise of Indigenous tourism in Latin America and how it preserves traditions, provides economic opportunities, and educates travelers has been fascinating and uplifting.

I Hope I Never Take This Lifestyle for Granted

The view of the Bacalar lagoon from my room

I’ll admit—there are ways in which travel has lost some of its glow for me. When I was 19 boarding a plane bound for some new country, excitement pulsed through me. Now, getting on a plane is a tiresome activity not unlike commuting to work. I used to enjoy sleeping in hostel bunk beds and using shared bathrooms, but now if I have to share a room or take a cold shower I feel a flash of annoyance. The more tours I experience and beautiful scenery I come across, the more it takes to impress me.

 

If I sound spoiled, that’s because I probably am—I’ve been traveling the world since I was four months old, and for the last year have been going on trips that are mostly free. My relationship to travel has changed since it's become a part of my work, which is natural but still sad in some ways.

 

That being said, I still am enormously grateful to be a full-time travel writer. Throughout the last five weeks, I’ve experienced surges of intense appreciation—when swimming in a glorious waterfall pool in the Panamanian jungle, dancing until 3am with friends from around the world, taking a boat ride through mangrove-lined canals on the Yucatán peninsula, sitting alone with a coffee on a rainy morning, I’ve thought: I can’t believe this is my job. I get to be here right now when there are billions of people around the world who will never come across such an opportunity. Sure, I’m young and relatively new to travel conferences and hosted trips so gratitude of this magnitude may not last, but I will do everything I can to make sure it does.

 

With each trip I take, my world expands a little bit...what a gift that is! The stories I write and the little piece of my heart I leave with the people I meet along the way are my ways of saying thanks.