Every soul travels for a different goal. Some people just want a white sand beach, a handful of palm trees, and an endless ribbon of turquoise ocean in which to melt their mind. Some travel to say they have done Vegas or Prague or indeed Dallas, blandly ticking off major landmarks as they plod through it all. And some, freaks of nature, want to simply gobble the world up whole. To see every museum, climb every glacier, rattle through every flea market, and eat the most extreme examples of local cuisine. Two such restless explorers raised me; young parents who thought the most important possessions in the world were a passport, a pocketknife, and a map. “Let’s sell everything and go!” was my mother’s war cry after seven hard years in New York, as she literally rolled up rugs, flogged the furniture, and hauled us off to Thailand for six months. “Jump in the car and leave your homework behind!” was my Dad’s rather ominous command when loading up the canvas-topped army jeep to drive onto the back roads of far north Queensland a few years later. What would begin as a Sunday drive would turn into a gritty three-week odyssey, and we often slept on piles of blankets in the back as the jeep hurtled down unpaved roads through the red-dust ghost towns of Ravenswood and the cane-cutting centers of Ipswich and Charters Towers.
Outback Australia in the seventies had a menacing grace. Once, leaning against the truck drinking a lemonade in Tully, Queensland, I saw a man run into a pub with a sawed-off shotgun in his hand. We hit the road in minutes. Another time, in the golden triangle in northern Thailand, our family was trekking up a mountain road with a Buddhist monk when we were stopped by a Laotian bandit with a mouthful of blackened teeth and a large machete. He was a refugee living in the forest, perhaps headed for work in the opium fields beneath the mountain where we stood. The monk intervened and we walked back down the hill in peace. On the same trip, in Bangkok at the age of eleven, my father dared me to eat fried snake in red sauce. “It won’t kill you, it’s cooked after all.” I remember begging my teachers to let me write essays entitled “My Holidays,” but we were so often out of school I just kept quiet about this other life of other roads.
Adventure is a first cousin to sacrifice, security being the first on the list to topple. And not security in the modern sense of terrorist threats and danger zones, but material security of home and hearth. My parents’ friends bought houses, their children flourished and grew popular in a single school—and many of these families grew rich. We just traveled. City to city, school to school, beach to mountain. At the twilight of the seventies, after two years of trekking through Asia and Queensland, we settled in Sydney, but the restless desire for the world kept leaking into our clapboard house. One night I came home and found two Aboriginal elders from the central Arnhem Land having dinner with my parents on the living room floor in front of a roaring fire as if the house were just another camp in the vast central desert. Sometimes my father would jump into the exhausted, rattling jeep and disappear for many days. Gone bush. We hated it. We understood it. Who, honestly, could live properly in the stable perpetuity of suburbia?
We never questioned our parents’ sense of direction or asked when we were stopping. The days of travel before the Internet honed human instinct. Once, pulling up into a neon-lit yard with a chained dog and a sign blinking VACANCY, my mother said, “I don’t like the feeling of that motel” and we drove on into the night till dawn, escaping some nameless danger that might have just been banality. Needless to say, we rarely ate in restaurants, went to amusement parks, family resorts, or hotels.
I never knew that we did so many of these elaborate things to save a dollar. I thought everybody stuffed their pockets with pastries at the breakfast buffet and then had them for lunch. Once, in a hotel in Bangkok, I had to swim in my underwear because I didn’t have a bathing suit. The other children splashing with my brother and me pointed and laughed at me. I left the pool and walked to a bank of trees and a tall fence that divided the hotel pool from an alley. In the alley more children were playing. As I peeked through the slats in the fence I saw, quite clearly, that these kids were barefoot and dressed in rags. My moment of shame for being “poor” dissolved, pretty much forever. And now if I see a cool, clean body of water I’ll still swim in my underpants. Shamelessly.
Perhaps I have spent every voyage since my childhood trying to get back to that spirit of risk and simplicity and improvised integrity. Eating fried chicken at a truck stop near Edzná on the Yucatán Peninsula, buying lilies in a market in Ubud on the Indonesian island of Bali, or showing my son how to pull a root vegetable from the earth in Taos, New Mexico. But I’m well aware that the romance of shoestring adventure and the reality of a tightly sewn, heavily packaged travel industry are at serious odds.
The random, rambling, intuitive way my parents traveled can hardly work today in a world where massive populations are on the move. The modern vagabond, instead, has to make the very best of Web travel: tracking cheap tickets, traveling off-off season while looking out for hurricanes, heading to slightly unfashionable destinations, and staying alert to tumultuous global politics. Yet, no matter how well planned your itinerary, instinct always plays a powerful role in great travel. I remember my mother once saying in grave tones, “Never mind the starched tablecloths, how does a restaurant smell? Never mind the beach and the palm trees, how does a town feel? If it’s not right keep moving, keep searching.” And she was so right because free-spirited travel means being able to sense and being able to choose. And then, when you have no choice left, finding the strength to surrender and stay right where you are, in the thick of it all. That’s the priceless bit of a true adventure.
