Minimalists in a mad world - part 2: How adventure travel kills conspicuous consumption

Making new friends at Lake Baringo, Kenya.

When I talk to people about our life-changing 14-month journey around the world - whether at my REI travel seminars or in casual conversation - the two most popular questions people ask early on are:

- How much did your trip cost?
- How in the world do you pack for a trip like that?

These are key points that I’m more than happy to address. I’m not modest, and I also believe that full disclosure empowers people to make more educated decisions. But I do find it a bit sad that the first things that often come to mind when dishing on extended travel are money and clothing. In other words, material goods. Commodities. Possessions. Where’s the spirit of adventure?

(Click here for Part 1 of this story.)

I don’t say this to make light of the financial undertaking involved in around-the-world travel, nor to poke fun at people befuddled by packing. A trip like ours - and certainly for the way we did it - makes a serious dent in your bank account. If that’s not scary enough, deciding what to bring or leave behind can definitely be nerve-wracking, especially when you have to consider things to guard your health and safety. But it’s all about choices. And especially when it comes to money.

We’re not trust fund babies, nor are we people who made a killing during the dot-com heyday. Our parents paid for our college educations, for which we’re grateful. We don’t have debt, which also helps. We don’t own a lot of fancy “toys.“ We don’t have kids or pets. Since leaving the nest almost 20 years ago, we’ve worked hard in a variety of jobs.

In 2006 we were two late-30-somethings planning to buy a house, have a baby, adopt a dog, and settle down in our quaint version of the American Dream. It didn’t happen. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t land the house that we’d saved up for so long to buy. Worse yet, leaving my sunny home state of California and relocating to the gray confines of Seattle in search of a more affordable life plummeted me into a midlife crisis (there would be more to follow). When the bidding wars became unbearable, we took another look at our savings and saw a pretty hefty sum. At that moment, we decided to do something daring with that money, moving our lives in a dramatically different direction.

Playing cricket in Varanasi, India.

Several days before we departed on our global journey, a friend’s husband, gushing with enthusiasm, rushed me into his garage for a surprise. The first thought that came to my dog-loving mind? They’d gotten a puppy. But instead of greeting a tiny fur ball, I met a shiny new Mercedes. I’m not really into cars, and I have no judgment toward those who are. But when the next thing out of this person’s mouth was “So how can you guys afford to take a trip like this?” I had to shake my head in disbelief. My reply came without hesitation. “David and I are traveling around the world in 14 months for less money than you just spent on that car.” That left him scratching his head in confusion. Maybe that Mercedes wasn’t looking so good anymore.

And now back at home, while we’re committed to living a simpler life, it’s often a lonely road. Most of our old friends don’t understand our travel yearnings, our foreign obsessions, our confused cultural identities. And that’s okay. But at the very least, it would be nice if they could respect them. Their lack of interest in our travels, coupled with their unwillingness to comprehend how we could possibly live without a lot of “stuff,” makes us wonder if perhaps they’re secretly - or maybe subliminally -  jealous. Many of them are tied down to huge homes, failing mortgages, two car payments, several kids, and lifestyles that require a lot of time and energy to maintain. It’s hardly our idea of fun, but to each his own.

In the extended travel arena, you hear all too often about how relationships change when you come back to your home country. And living that reality is a lot harder than we imagined. Blank stares greet us when we impart how amazing it was (albeit frightening) to get lost hiking for seven hours in a remote pristine valley in southern China. Judgment clouds the air when we describe the 18-hour cockroach-laden, mouse-infested train that delivered us to the Taj Mahal. Disgust rears its ugly head when we talk about eye-opening afternoons wandering amid the squalor of Addis Ababa. Fear creeps in when expound with joy about rubbing elbows with Egyptian Muslims packed into a Cairo basement café at lunchtime.

We get the sense that many people have no desire to follow in our footsteps, even if the opportunities presented themselves. As ardent adventure travelers, we find that shocking, if not a tad narrow-minded and depressing. How we long to share the awesome freedom you gain by breaking with conventions and diving into something wilder and woollier! Fear of the unknown probably stops many of us from taking the plunge into world travel.

Which leads back to the focus on materialism. People really want to know how I fought the urge to buy myself a multitude of gifts in the 27 countries we visited. For the most part, it was easy. Sure, I fell in love with Nepal’s endless shelves of colorful pashminas, but I bought one for me and two for gifts. Yes, we shipped home a pair of wood carvings, a small bronze Buddha statue, and a few sarongs from Bali, but the box was pretty small. And maybe I secretly did want to buy every silk weaving that nice man displayed in his crude shop in Varanasi (they do have gorgeous textiles in that part of India). But I refrained.

Biking in Bali, Indonesia.

And yes, we splurged every once in a while, but typically on experiential treats. It’s nice, not to mention needed, to indulge in a Western buffet, sleep under a thick down comforter, and settle back in an airplane seat after you’ve eaten fried rice for a month, shared your bed with cockroaches, and endured nine-hour bus rides across Kenya.

I didn’t need to corner the market on Prada knockoffs, Chang beer t-shirts, or Chinese fortune cats to validate my experience. After about four months overseas - particularly if you hit Africa early on - your focus begins shifting to a place where you forget about souvenirs. You stop acting like a tourist and start behaving more like a regular old human being.

You dig into the daily lives of the locals and get to know them a little better, no matter how awkward it feels at the time. You sample their food. Drink from their common cups. Explore their modest homes. Hold their dirty babies. Take their primary modes of transportation. Follow their customs. Learn a few words of their languages. By doing so, you help break down the barriers that geography - and years of history, good and bad - have put between us all.

Connecting with others who truly value the simply things in life - often by default because that’s all they have - is a gift. And it becomes the goal of every one of your adventures, big or small. By venturing outside your comfort zone, you discover strange similarities with foreigners, and are forced to examine your life in the context of a bigger world out there. While that scrutiny often proves uncomfortable in a way, it’s where you learn the deepest truths, and also discover the most rewarding - and perhaps only - guarantee of adventure travel: It changes you.

In general, we were pretty frugal with our money and felt we spent it wisely. We encountered exotic cultures, made new friends, saw the world, enjoyed many amazing experiences, and returned home with enough in the bank to survive for a few months, find jobs, and hopefully do it all over again. Once you start exploring, you get hooked, whether you tour Africa on a two-week safari, spend a month volunteering in Vietnam, or throw in the towel for good and relocate permanently to Indonesia. (We’re hard at work on that last one).

This type of deeper discovery - particularly in third-world countries - provides enrichment in ways we can‘t even begin to describe. Our travels have made us better people and have given us a sense of global community, which is something money could never buy.

(Click here for Part 1 of this story.)

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