This trip was my first attempt at traveling with the Ritchey. I chose to go to Romania because there are two books that I really like set in this country. Also, I wanted that “autumn, Balkan (ish), Ottomon (ish) village vibe.” Finally, I wanted mountains! Transylvania is home to the Carpathian Mountains.

Briefly, a few winners and losers from the trip:

Winners

1. Food. Romanian food is very hearty. Lots of meat, brothy soups, polenta, and desserts like apple pie and my favorite, lichiu (pictured below).
2. Dog deterrent device. Romania, like many countries in this part of the world, has dogs that are unfriendly to cyclists. I’ve dealt with them many times before in my travels. Before this trip, I fretted about dogs. And then I thought, “why don’t I protect myself somehow?” Soccer shinpads? Pepper spray? I then came across this clicker (thanks, ChatGPT) which emits a high-frequency sound that distracts dogs. Almost unbelievably, it actually worked. As the dogs would approach, I would press the button, and it would scramble their brains and they would back off. Indeed, you do have to point it in their direction, so it’s not a “set and forget ‘forcefield,'” per se. But definitely a great thing to have.
3. The bicycle. I was able to successfully take the thing apart and put the thing back together! Yes!
4. Komoot. Komoot was a terrific navigation app. I had my AirPods in, listened to directions, and it (largely) told me where to go.
5. AloSim. This was the first time I tried an “e-SIM.” It worked great! I didn’t have to buy a physical SIM card; I could instantiate, monitor, and top-up data—which ran through their local cell towers, and didn’t involve my US carrier in any way—from my phone.
6. People. Broadly, Romanian people were lovely and hospitable. Including the woman on Day 1 that let me come into her backyard and use her hose to wash down my bicycle that was once so caked in mud that I couldn’t even push it.

Losers

1. Aggressive children. On one occasion, I had to fend off a group of particularly aggressive children at the entrance to Bunesti (after entering from the Viscri side). This was really not fun. From there on, when entering my villages, I modulated my speed to be somewhere between “slow enough so as not to startle any dogs” yet… “fast enough to circle around and bypass aggressive children as needed.”
2. This one section of the road where I fell. Alas, I took a fall when descending the Transfagarasan Highway (the road below with the crazy switchbacks). It sucked. I was letting a bus pass me, pulled into a turn-out, hit the brakes, slid on some gravel, and boom. I was very bloodied up. Doing better now!

Enjoy!

The seed of energy motivating this trip was planted in the summer after tenth grade when my mother sent me to France for two weeks for a language-immersion program. There, for the first time, was I really surrounded by people from all over the world (or so it felt; in hindsight, it might have just been Europeans). And for whatever reason, I truly felt alive. I felt like my mundane answers to the questions I was asked—where I was from, what I liked to do, what excited me about the French language—were actually interesting to my peers. I felt, for perhaps the first time, that I was an individual, a baseball card with value in a stack of other baseball cards with value, where all players are from different teams with different jerseys, positions, and strengths, as opposed to previously, where I felt more like a member of a deck where, though all cards were different, the player was always the same. This was the first time where I felt like my own person, and that the things about my person were worth sharing publicly, worth being proud of privately, worth trying to find in others as points of connection and potential friendship.

And so it was. And so I wanted more.

During my junior year of college, while studying abroad in Australia, I met countless European high-school grads taking a year off to travel in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific before beginning University. There was my example.

And finally, there was poker: from age 15 to 20, I was, what I now proudly call, a “semi-professional internet poker player.” More so than providing the financial resources for this trip, poker instilled in me a few foundational, priceless beliefs:

1. You can become, roughly, the best in the world at what you do, from your bedroom, in your underwear. In this pursuit, or in any other pursuit in life, there is nothing stopping you.
2. There is nothing immoral about “going big.” If you want to, and you can, do it. Start now, inspire others, go.

My final semester of college was filled with tepid career fairs advertising jobs I found so perversely suffocating and uninteresting that it left me genuinely confused, as if their sole mission was to look me in the eye, acknowledge my general creativity and desire to do great, technical work, then coldly pour a small dustbin’s worth of dark-grey dirt and glistening-brown worms on the whole party, and wait for me to succumb.

Fundamentally, I didn’t understand. I’m 21 years old. I want to move, to sweat, to be in the sun, to thump my head to rap music out the window of shoddy transport and below the 10th-and-onward palm trees I’d ever seen in my life.

And you want me to what? To wear a collared shirt and khakis, to sit behind a smudgy Lenovo laptop and make spreadsheets in Excel? Are my classmates feigning their own interest? Really, what is going on?

My mind was elsewhere. Reading blogs and maps. Preparing for this trip in the only way I know how to attack things that are important to me: thoroughly. I had a vision in mind of a mobile, photo-journalist-meets-writer-meets-lay-philosopher; my backpack needed to be perfectly packed, my plans needed to be maximally “pushing it.” I needed to be this person. When I liquidated investment funds to buy my first few flights, I remember thinking these small stacks of virtual money were soldiers I was moving into battle. This was me. This was something I cared about doing well, doing completely, doing my way. It was my beautiful project. I would not dare to leave a single stone unturned.

And this was just the beginning.

I remember when my mother drove off at the Philadelphia airport after a firm hug with watery eyes. It had started. That moment was one of being at the peak of a rollercoaster, having paid your fare, validated your height, waited in throngs of sweaty, mindless, errant theme-park-goers with tall sodas and soft-pretzels, then queued for this ride, arrived at the front, strapped myself in, negotiated a churning stomach and last-minute “Devil’s apathy” of “do I actually like rollercoasters as much as I think, or is this just some thought that I got carried away with, and haven’t actually stopped to think about since I began to prepare for its realization?” Now, all there was to do was show my passport, walk through the gate, and let the greatest ride of my life propel itself forward by its own inertia.

One part of my initial fantasy was being “in the middle” of this trip. Having time, and taking time. Staying somewhere for two weeks because I met nice people, or because I simply felt “tired.” I wanted to be living on the road! In those first few weeks, I would long for the fourth month, wherein I would have been “doing it for a while.” I craved that feeling of permanence in transition.

And so it began. Philadelphia to Newark. Newark to Zurich. Zurich to, wait, a man naked in the bathroom in the Zurich airport—the world is weird, and I can’t wait!—to Nairobi. And how cool was the Departures screen! Flying to Malaysia! And Abu Dhabi! And Johannesburg! And Kigali! And Delhi. But us—we’re going to Nairobi.

I loved that it was Nairobi, not Cancun. I loved the writing on my visa. I loved how I carried my backpack on the plane, and checked only my pocket knife in a small cardboard box, as if it were at all difficult to buy a pocket knife for cutting fruit anywhere in the world.

I remember arriving, hungry. I stopped somewhere for a chicken sandwich. I asked for water, and chose the small bottle instead of the large, a whole 50 cents cheaper, and how excited I was about finally beginning this journey of opposing forces of asceticism and extreme indulgence, which means constant spending, acquisition, activity, and “yes!”, yet realized in the most aggressively lean and economical manner practical, to the point of bumping heads with basic rationality, and obstinance for its own sake. I couldn’t wait to drink it in. I was excited by opting for that small water bottle, thinking “I’ve got to budget for the rest of this trip.”

In my first accommodation, I stayed at a guesthouse run by the company with which I was to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in the following weeks. It was me, and a kid from Colorado my age. My first friend from the road. “I bet he’s cool!”, I thought. He has to be. Nay, he already is—he’s out here, and he’s the first character in my story.

I remember eating ugali with my hands. The world is weird, I thought. I’ve never done this before. But I’ll do it in a way that seems normal, that I whole-heartedly intend to let become normal, as one proverbial piece of one pie in one bakery in one corner of the world, and my tongue is hanging out of the side of my mouth, and I am starving.

I remember my first day walking around Nairobi. I left my camera at the homestay because I was told it might be snatched from my hands. I listened. Eva, a woman that worked for the company that owned the guesthouse, took me into town. Nairobi wasn’t that pretty. But I was out there, doing what I so desperately wanted to do. Deeply relaxed in every moment, with the intention of allowing this life to become my life for the seemingly-interminable future, and at the same time almost squeezing my spirit harder, prying my eyes open ever-wider, so as to notice more, intuit more, learn more, make friends, be happy, get lost, be me, outside, in shorts and dirty boots, in January, doing what I wanted to be doing, and only that, in places that lit my imagination on fire, because they weren’t home, they weren’t close, they weren’t commonplace; because they reminded me that I am me, different, and I must do this as beautifully as I can.

And so it continued. And good things happened! On a train to Mombasa, in the dining car, I met a family—Rich, Nina, and Ale, as well as their friends, Lydia and Steve. Ale was my age, and warm, and beautiful. Rich had lived in Kenya and his stories and spirit fascinated me. I drank a tall beer and dined at a rickety metal table sitting atop torn red and white leather cushions as the Kenyan countryside flew by in the warm night. Oh, how cool.

I had a sleeper bunk to myself. After dinner, I slept to the sounds of this feeble train, and the sweet aura and lightness of a group of people excited to be in movement and open to interaction, and acts of camaraderie. I refer here to the mostly-Western travelers in the dining car, yes. But also the Kenyans, who, like most people not from the West, had a way about them opposite of the Western way, which is to say the opposite of “we’re all on this train together, but let’s pretend like we’re all on this train on our own,” and “don’t touch me,” and “try not to look at me,” and “I can’t wait to get out of this vehicle, so yes, I’m grumpy.”

I arrived in Mombasa, and Ale’s family invited me to stay at their house. Free accommodation! Local experiences. How. Cool. See, travel doesn’t have to be expensive nor solitary. I want to go deeper. To do this beautifully, thoroughly, my way.

Truth be told, I was excited to leave that house, because I wanted to start the Hostel Experience. To be with other travelers. To have the normalcies of that life—earplugs in dorms, negotiating discounts for extended stays, small bottles of whiskey around a fire or pool, people to meet and travel with, girls to fall for, stories to listen to and to let seep into my veins as things that I should do myself—to become the normalcies of my life. I spent the following day physically searching for that hostel. This one too expensive, that one booked out, and me walking up and down a highway road near the beach, sweating, with my backpack on my back and my meticulously-researched daypack on my chest, drunk with the activity at hand. This is all I wanted. Every interaction was joyous. Every move a new shade of paint on a grand canvas I kept nailed to a vast basement wall in my subconscious. I was doing it. Finally.

I suppose it was there in Kenya that I realized that places I previously knew nothing about can have nice things. It’s tricky to express, but I feel as if I was conditioned as an American to believe that there is America, and then other things. That America does it best, safest, to standard. The rest are countries of which some pack “wonders of the world” and things to see, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. And still others that, instead of those things, are defined by their imperfections. That Kenya is Al-Shabaab attacks on resorts, economic disparity and malaria. And that’s it!

My point is not the trivial point of: a country is more than the Western media will lead you to believe. Instead, my point is simply that: beaches are nice, and Kenya has nice beaches! You can go to Kenya for the beaches, or for the food. It doesn’t have to be for a humanitarian mission. It doesn’t have to be with a group. The world is full of people who go on vacation in their home country. It’s full of people who like to relax and enjoy nature. And you can find these things everywhere. You can intuit them and enjoy them through the eyes of their locals. This imaginary moral and geopolitical hierarchy of propriety and place is made up. At least from the perspective of a curious, carefree, individual on vacation.

In other words: in Kenya, I learned to think about the world not as a US-at-the-top, top-down pyramid, but instead as a broad, barely inclined dreamscape of people, the places they were born, the things they like to do, the climate in which they live, the choices that they make, and the places they go to relax and have fun.

Life continued. I road my first few African buses, and delighted in how the entire bus would cackle uproariously when I got off to urinate. I was diligent about catching sunrises. Every day was deliberate, began with a light thump in my chest and the simple awareness that I was making the “weird” my “normal,” and against the recent backdrop of those nauseatingly-dull career fairs, how liberating and invigorating it all was.

I climbed Kilimanjaro—the only activity I had pre-planned. I then went to Zanzibar where I spent, for the first time ever, 3 consecutive nights in a hostel. I met people who had spent more, and yes, oh, how I wanted to be like them.

From there, Rwanda. Rwanda was the first country I went to that I had not previously planned to visit. (Of course, this was to become a theme throughout the rest of the trip.) Oh, Rwanda! Even the name! I delighted in the feeling of being somewhere I had previously thought of as “random.” I delighted in my newfound maturity of assessing this country judiciously as a traveler, which is to say that I acknowledged that the roads were paved, and the motorbike-taxis gave me a helmet to wear, and the lakes were beautiful, and the mountains were numerous and lush green, and that made Rwanda a great place to travel.

Arriving back in Nairobi after a whirlwind 6 weeks, I felt great about what I’d done. I remember sitting on an armchair outside of the guesthouse around 7:00am, as I had arrived early on an overnight bus, and the owners and guests were all still sleeping, and, still having the WiFi password in my computer, I was able to chat with friends back at University with a small bottle of whiskey in my hand, and revel in my adventure in their company, while at the same time trying to involve, if only emotionally, these friends in my journey. This spirit, and the possibility of my friends replicating my experience themselves one day, had to be shared.

Leaving Kenya, I had a 4-day layover in Dubai, where my sense of globe-galavanting-grandeur was reignited. Dubai! Then a direct flight to Rio de Janeiro. The world needs to be seen!

It’s not just fun, not just an opportunity, not just a privilege, but a fundamental imperative to see these places, to walk around, to know the names of the main streets, to have a surface-level understanding of their politics, to be able to discuss their, well, anything, something, with some level of agency. To know how to get there, which is to say what airlines fly there, and where those airlines are based, and roughly how much those flights costs, and which airlines are nicest, and the types of people you meet on those planes. Are they only from the destination country? Are they on layovers? Are there Kenyans traveling to Dubai? Why? Is anyone else going to Brazil? Will you join me on this adventure? The world is small, I tell you! We can ride planes around and around.

This post covers my travels through the following countries. To see what I’ve previously written about each, kindly click on the shaded regions.

Reflecting back (Part 2)

I spent January 3rd, 2012 to March 14th, 2014 traveling around the world. I visited over 40 countries on 6 continents; some by bicycle, the rest with a backpack.

Throughout the trip, I wrote a lot. I wrote about what happened, what I learned, about what lessons, energies, emotions and ways to solve problems I wanted to impart on others.

Naturally, once finished, one would have expected reflections on the trip as a whole. What did it mean to me then? What does it do for me now? Does it need to be repeated? Is there anything I regret?

It’s been almost five years since I returned, and I’ve written nothing. Why?

Writing about this trip is an exercise in forced nostalgia. It is to sit in a chair—after work, tired—or on the weekend, with the whole of NYC seemingly tugging me towards “what’s next”—the next thing to do, the next thing to learn, the next person to meet—and to deliberately attempt to conjure that pure, sweet, vulnerable, insatiable elixir that ran through my veins during those two years of travel—sometimes dormant, sometimes tepid, but always there, always alive, always ready to ignite the core of my being with disbelief, with profound appreciation, with a raging smile after twenty hours on a bus, with a feeling of camaraderie and admiration for those I’d meet, with a momentary view of the map of the world from 10,000 proverbial feet and the glittering circles I was drawing atop.

And why? Why do I need this feeling to write?

Because that’s what this trip deserves. It deserves perfection. It deserves a reflection that captures that feeling. And if I don’t have it, I shouldn’t write—period.

To complicate matters further, that feeling comes when I’m on the move. When I’m staring out the window of a bus, with the energy one has when going somewhere new, only to dissipate as the ride goes on. That feeling brought by the view of thousands of palm trees leaking down the side of a mountain, by the parallels I used to draw between where I was, where I had been, and where I was going—Guinea! Which looks like Colombia! Which looks like Kenya! That beautiful grapefruit sun—by women and babies plastering me up against the window in the backseat of a car that seats 3, and we’re 7, and the fact that I just didn’t care. Push harder, I thought. We are in this together. And I’m having fun.

At those times, staring out those physical windows, I don’t have my computer. I don’t want to pull out my phone and dictate. And then it subsides.

Next, there’s the fear. What if I can’t capture it? What if it’s limp?

To write about one of the greatest experiences of my short life in a way that doesn’t carry its weight, as I know I, as a writer, can, is a genuinely uncomfortable prospect.

And what do I even write about? Do I make an outline before? Do I just sit down and type? Do I describe the trip day by day? Country by country? Pick the highlights?

It was two years of my life, you know. Yes, I had goals. Yes, I worked towards them. At the same time, the point was just to be. To evolve. To change myself and let things change around me. It was to be happy. It was to take the sponge of the world and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze as hard as I could with the most brilliant of smiles, with a heart pounding of warmth, the thirst for a challenge, a love for big ideas and the addiction to making them real.

What about the people? Do I tell you who they are? Would you care? What would their names mean to you?

And the words? Really, what if I don’t get the words right? Shouldn’t I just wait until I know they’re there? Does it matter how long it takes? The memories won’t go away. They are there forever. A part of me. They keep me smiling. They are immovably, indescribably sweet. They water my eyes, and warm my bones like a small stove heating red tea on a crisp, cold morning. They hit me when I’m walking in New York City. They are there. Reminding me how enthralling life can be.

Finally, what about myself today? I’m a different person than I was when I started my trip. I’m different than when I finished. Should I talk about how this trip made me who I am today? Who I’d be without it?

Almost six years ago, I sat down to write a reflection on the first half of my trip. I put on a song by Sigur Rós, sat alone in a darkened bedroom, and penned my thoughts on my iPhone’s Notes. And I did a great job. I’m impressed with myself. I wanted to “bring it”, just like I want to now. I read this post to a friend of mine a few weeks back, and I cried. Sounds about right.

In that post, I wrote:

“But on a late, rainy night, in an apartment bedroom somewhere in the world and 5 years from now, I’ll sit there by myself, music playing softly, maybe a candle lit and certainly no one yelling, thinking back to all of that life in all of those far-off places, and I’ll simply have no choice but to cry. I guess it’s part of the job.”

That day is today. But with a few subtle differences.

It’s not raining. It’s not late! I’m in a crunchy beach town named Varkala, in India. It’s more than 5 years from then. And there are no candles.

There is music, though. It’s Florence and the Machine. She almost scares me, you know! Scares me because I would listen to her at some of the most poignant moments of my trip. Taking off from Newark to Switzerland on my very first flight! Touching down in the Philadelphia airport on March 14th, 2014, with warm tears sliding effortlessly down my cheeks, in the final minutes of the very best thing I had ever done.

So when Florence is on, it’s time to cry. To think back on those moments.

…

Varkala. I put myself here. I rented a private room for 6 days with one mission: to write this blog post. To free up space in my mind to think about what I want my thirties to be. Here in Varkala, I am forcing myself to be nostalgic. And still, something like 10 paragraphs in, I still have no idea what I plan to write. What I want to convey. How I want it structured. The tone I plan to take. Seriously, how do I do this?

…

Since we can’t really write without something to write about, I’ve made a choice. Old blog post by old blog post, album by album. I’ll look. I’ll listen to Florence.

I’ll write. Man, this is hard.