Way back in 2002 I did something crazy. I quit my job, sold my car and most of my stuff, put what was left in my mom’s house, and bought tickets to New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore. I thought I would go around the world, but after traveling independently, but never alone, to those countries as well as Thailand, Burma, and Nepal, I became frustrated with the experience. Sure, I was visiting interesting places and taking nice pictures of tourist attractions, but I still didn’t know the first thing about the places I was passing through.
I probably would have went on like this, a perpetual tourist, but China had closed its border with Nepal, forcing me to reevaluate. What was my priority? To fully experience and understand a culture, and learn its language. So I bought a one way ticket back to Bangkok, where I worked for two years as a management science teacher at Bangkok University, and learned the true meaning of “culture shock.”
I never really came close to understanding Thailand, the inscrutable Thai people, or their language, so I cut my losses and took one last trek across China before coming home, three years and two months after I left.
These are my journals, raw and unedited. There’s way too much to read in one sitting, so in an attempt to make them more organized, I’ve put the entries into chapters, since my writing and thinking evolved over time.
I quit my job, sold my stuff, bough a bunch of expensive “travel gear,” then threw most of it away. I did the backpacking circuit through New Zealand and Australia, two of the most beautiful countries in the world, with some of the friendliest people you’ll meet anywhere. I never really got into the whole “backpacking” experience, though, which consists largely of kids just out of school drinking a lot, and my journal entries reflect that.
Chapter 2: The independent traveler
On my own now, I started having fun. In a sense, the true adventure began when I arrived in Singapore with no onward plans. I traveled by myself through Malaysia and Thailand, which was actually pretty easy. Burma was another matter. My first experience in a truly poor country was eye opening. Even though Burma is an amazing country full of happy people, despite the junta that represses them, travel there is not easy, and as a new travel writer, I broke the cardinal rule of travel writing: don’t dwell on the day to day drudgery and rigors of travel. Sometimes I think I should go back and rewrite these entries, but for now they are my original, unedited journals, warts and all.
I may have been traveling, but I always knew exactly where I was going. When I arrived in Bangkok, I had no idea what I would do. I stopped physically traveling and started wandering metaphorically. I studied Thai language for a while. Then I investigated the pipe dream of Thailand business opportunities. Eventually I determined that the only thing I could really do in Thailand was teach.
I studied how to teach English, then ended up teaching “management science,” which is a fancy way to say math for business. I learned that no matter where you are living, working a nine to five job every day makes life dull. It wasn’t a very culturally rewarding experience either because of resentment from underpaid Thai teachers, incompetence from management, and lack of seriousness from students. Culture shock isn’t taking a two week vacation in Thailand and marveling at the elephant walking down the street. Culture shock is teaching at Bangkok University, and I never really got over it. Thus, these raw, unedited entries were mostly to blow off steam in response to the latest crazy thing the students or management did, and don’t make particularly interesting reading. If I were a real writer I would organize them into a book of funny anecdotes, balanced with all the stuff we love about Thailand.
Chapter 5: The wanna be travel writer
I still consider my three months in China the crowning achievement to my adventure, and the most impressive thing I’ve ever done. I think I came a step closer to real travel writing by emphasizing experiences, people, and history, rather than the mundane rigors of travel.
A disclaimer and warning
I made a conscious decision to present my travels as raw daily journal entries, rather than as polished articles. I felt this gave a more vivid and realistic picture of the travel experience. Thus, the good is presented along with the not so good. This kind of traveling is hard work, and I didn’t sugar coat the difficulties I faced. Sometimes I’m tempted to combine it all into book, where the daily difficulties could be balanced with positive observations. But I’m an engineer, not a writer.
Everything written here reflects how I felt on the day it was written, and is probably much different from how I feel now, separated from that particular day by years and miles. So when you feel that I’ve insulted your country or culture, try to remember that this is just stuff I scrawled in a notebook after a long, hard day, and not something I thought long and hard about. If you’re still mad, feel free to send me an email, but remember, your complaint has probably already been made, and I probably agree with it, now that I am older and more mature.