Independence

OK, so I missed the 4^th of July in the States. While I was at it, I also missed the last 3 months of writing any blog posts. All I can do is apologize for my laziness and negligence. (The apology covers my lack of writing, not my lack of 4^th of July BBQ’s and fireworks.) It’s hardly my first miss on that holiday, and unlikely to be my last, because early July happens to be a great time to be in Europe as well as North America.

In spite of this big miss, I’m doing incredibly well this year on Independence Day celebrations nonetheless. I just finished my third, and it was the second of the year conducted in the Portuguese language. That’s gotta’ be worth something.

My first independence day of the year was back on April 25^th in Portugal, which is known as Freedom Day, commemorating 1974’s Carnation Revolution. The Revolution was a peaceful military coup that overthrew the longstanding and oppressive Estado Novo dictatorship. The name comes from the fact that soldiers didn’t use their guns but instead put carnations in the barrels to signify the peaceful transition.

I was in Lisbon that lovely spring day, during my first stint in Portugal this year, wandering the streets full of people with carnations, and even some of the heroes from that day 45 years earlier. It wasn’t quite a 4^th of July level party, instead having a certain measure of solemnity. I’d venture to say that the recency of the event causes the people to feel more intimately connected to the actual meaning behind the holiday. Let’s face it, in the States just about every holiday commemorating anything has come to mean only one thing: a day off from work or school, and possibly an excuse to drink a lot.

The famous Golden Gate Bridge replica in Lisbon is named in honor of the Carnation Revolution, the “25^th of April Bridge.” In what is certainly no coincidence, the bridge was re-named to this moniker from its original name, Salazar Bridge, which was in “honor” of the hated dictator who instituted the unpopular regime several decades earlier.

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When I wrote my last post while on my way back to Lisbon, I had just experienced my second consecutive year of Luxembourg Day, the annual celebration of Luxembourg. As I noted there, it’s not really a celebration of anything besides “Luxembourg being Luxembourg,” which I take to be basically a copy of the 4^th of July, including the fireworks. So even though it’s not an actual celebration of an independence-related event in Luxembourg, I think it’s legit for me to interpret the national day of an independent nation as an independence day. The resemblance to America’s 4^th of July independence celebration adds further credence to my stance on the issue.

That brings us to today, just more than a week on the heels of my Independence Day Part 3. (Isn’t there a Hollywood movie series with this name?) I mentioned that two of my celebrations were in the Portuguese language, and while there are a lot of Portuguese immigrants in Luxembourg, that was not the second one. This time around it was in Brazil. And my experience of Brazilian Independence Day came on the beach in Rio de Janeiro.

If it seems like everything happens on the beach in Rio, that’s because I think might actually be true. Certainly when it comes to that traditionally independence-related activity of fireworks, the greatest display I have ever seen was on the beach in Rio, when I was there for new year’s eve over 8 and a half years ago. Ironically, there were no fireworks for Brazilian independence day. In fact, the only discernable difference from any other day at the beach in Rio was the fact that the classes at my yoga studio were cancelled.

The date is September 7^th, and the day is called Sete de Setembro. It commemorates the date in 1822 when Brazil became independent of Portugal. I was told in advance by people in Rio that the day would not be a big deal, and after experiencing it I can only agree with them. In fact, the only real takeaway for me is that I’m still disappointed to have missed the 2 or 3 yoga classes I would have done that day.

In any case, at least I can check off 2019 as a year of 3 independence days – and there are still 3 and a half months left, so maybe I’ll chalk up another one or two before it’s all said and done.

Around the World in 11 Days

Being in Rio was quite a delight. I hadn’t been to South America since the first leg of my nearly 10-year (and counting) vagabonding journey, back in 2010-11. I liked it a lot then, and I liked it even more this time around. The weather was perfect, the people friendly, the beach beautiful, and the yoga very solid. But why would I be down there after so many years, especially when it’s still technically summer in the northern hemisphere?

Like a lot of my travel destinations of late, I was in Rio because I had a small amount of work to do there. It came on the heels of a lot of very long distance travel of late. I’d say the last month has been rather crazy, even by my very distorted standards of craziness. We are all familiar with the book Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne. That’s old-fashioned stuff, of course, in the age of jet travel. I just did it in 11 days – and with a bunch of beach days included in that total.

I started at my parents’ house in Massachusetts, flying west 24 hours (and 12 time zones) through Tokyo to Singapore. I was in Singapore precisely 48 hours for work, and then continued west another 24 hours (11 time zones this time), passing through Dubai on the way to Rio. I had 5 days to relax and catch my breath on the beaches and yoga studios of Rio before having 1 day of work, then flying 20 hours via Bogota, Colombia back up to my parents’ house in Massachusetts, thus completing my circumnavigation of the globe.

I don’t know how many hours that is as the crow flies. I don’t know how bad it is for my body, though I do know that it can really throw me for a loop as it did last year when I pretty much crashed at the end of the year due to similar travel. And this time it happened at the end of a one-month period that began with me flying from Massachusetts to Thailand for a brief bout of work, followed by a week of Thai food and beach time with my longstanding travel buddy Tim, who was on a short trip from Saigon to renew his Vietnamese visa. It was the first time I’d seen Tim since December in Saigon, when I was in the throes of last year’s trying period of long-distance travel burnout.

At the end of our beach week in Thailand, I returned right back to Massachusetts. I would have just stayed in Thailand waiting for my work in nearby Singapore only 10 days later, rather than embarking on an extra 48 hours of flying, but I had a week of work back in Massachusetts in between. So any way you slice it, it was a rough month.

To fill in the time gaps since my last post on the way to Lisbon, I in fact stayed put in that lovely city for a full month. I felt almost like a normal human being, if only for a short time. I stayed directly across the street from an awesome yoga studio (I mean directly – 30 meters between the 2 front doors) and attended an average of 2 yoga classes a day, which was glorious.

I made some friends from among the many expats and digital nomads who populate the city. I went to Toastmasters club meetings, using my many years of experience in that organization to help a really good club find ways to make their meetings even better and more valuable to the members. I went to meetups (whatever those actually are) on various topics. I went to the beach.

I would have stayed longer in Portugal, perhaps venturing back down to the Algarve region in the south, which I also loved back in the spring, but I had some work to do in the States. And so off I went, bound for a few days in Orlando, then Louisville, followed by a few tranquil days at my parents’ house in Massachusetts, playing golf, seeing friends, and enjoying the New England heat while it still existed.

And that brings you up to my departure for Thailand and the start of the past month’s travel craziness. If you actually followed this non-sequential description of events closely enough to be able to lay out the timeline, you have my admiration. I am the one who did all of it, and I’m not even sure what happened when. Of course, the major time zone mixup I’m currently suffering from has a way of rendering the brain somewhat less effective, so perhaps I can be forgiven.

And Now….

What’s next? Well, I’m writing this from New York City, at the home of an old college friend. We spent yesterday sailing his boat in New York Harbor, past the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline, in glorious sunshine. I’m here in New York for a couple of days of work, which will be followed by an immediate departure to Europe and the Austrian Alps for more work, followed by a few days in Vienna for a combination of work and some downtime, and then a return to the States. After that, it’s unclear, though I have something potentially interesting shaping up.

As it happens, the college friend I’m staying with in NYC is the guy with whom I did my first major foreign journey so many years ago. During our junior year we were teammates on a student exchange program in London, where we were effectively doing an extended management consulting project to help the United Kingdom Patent Office solve a business problem it was facing. (We did a solid job and ended up winning a major award at our school for best project of the year.)

After lots of adventures in London and around the United Kingdom during the months we were there, he and I and a couple of the other guys from our school headed off to the continent for a month-long whistle-stop tour using Eurail passes to ride, and often sleep, on trains. We covered the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, and Greece. This was old-school travel, with no internet, no cell phones, and no easy contact with family and friends back home. You just got on a train, showed up somewhere, and figured it out. If you didn’t figure it out, you slept on a sidewalk, which we definitely did one very chilly night in Paris.

It’s actually hard to believe how different world travel is now compared to 30 years ago. I can’t really say I’d want to go back in time, because the conveniences of the internet make my current lifestyle so much easier. But at the same time, there’s a very big part of me that misses the LACK of connectedness that foreign travel used to represent. You really were going on an adventure, and you were on your own.

Nowadays I head off to the far corners of the world on a moment’s notice, and if I don’t want to, I never have to lose contact with any of my friends or family, regardless of where in the world they happen to be. You never really “get away.” There’s a certain sense of romance that is lost with today’s brand of travel. Of course we all crave some level of certainty, especially when doing unfamiliar things. Yet it is exactly the UNcertainty of not knowing everything in advance that makes travel fun and exciting.

I’m not saying the internet makes it possible to ensure that everything goes as smoothly in, say, Indonesia, as it does in the United States. No matter how many advance internet bookings you make, the fact is that Indonesia is Indonesia, and many times things don’t go the way they are promised, regardless of what Booking.com says, and regardless of the fact that you’re paying for that promise. But still, it’s not like the old analog days of my youth.

We pay for the transition from analog to digital in other ways too, and none more prevalent than the overexposure of any place that’s even remotely enjoyable. Once one person finds a place that’s cool, interesting, beautiful, inexpensive, or whatever else makes a place good, it’s immediately known to everyone, thanks to Instagram, Facebook, and even blogs (sort of like mine, but not really.) There aren’t many hidden secrets left. Overexposure leads to over-tourism, which typically leads to environmental destruction, crowding, higher prices, and loss of the charm that made a place desirable in the first place.

We longtime travelers, especially those of us who are beyond the age of about 35, find ourselves constantly bemoaning this trend. We can’t stop the hordes of western millennials and Chinese middle class who have jumped (uninvited!) onto the travel trail in the past few years, ruining what used to be our private fun. When we find a relatively undiscovered gem, we are clear that we had better enjoy it now, because most likely in just a short time it won’t be undiscovered any longer…and it won’t be anywhere near as nice or cheap or uncrowded.

It’s just a fact of life on a planet with 7.5 billion people and a false sense of prosperity due to central bank manipulations that have created specious economic growth (and stock market gains) for the past 10 years. It’s kind of funny that the “recovery” that has put money back into people’s pockets since the 2008 financial crisis almost perfectly overlaps my 9 and a half years of living this vagabond lifestyle. I don’t expect the prosperity to last, because the Fed and the ECB can only fool Mother Nature for so long. But I’ve been surprised for a long time that they’ve been able to kick the can down the road this far, so what do I know? They just may be able to do it for a lot longer.

What I can say for sure is that the trend of over-tourism and overexposure has become noticeably worse during my years of vagabonding. It’s not like the internet wasn’t a huge part of people’s lives back in February 2010 when I started this journey, but it has become much more over the top since then. I might find myself reminiscing and longing for the days of my first European journey as a college kid back in the dark ages of 1989, but in reality I would happily settle for a trip back to 2010 in order to get some relief from the craziness that modern communication technology has continued to pile on with every passing 6 months.

Let’s suffice to say that it’s not a good trend, and it’s having an impact on everyone from the longtime travelers to the newcomers whom we old-timers arrogantly consider to be the problem. We are all part of the problem, and I don’t know if I believe there is a solution. As long as we have far too many people on earth, we are going to have crowding. Especially in desirable places. I see a direct analogy with Darwin’s theories of selective adaptation and competition, which are a fundamental part of both Mother Nature and human nature. And that’s a hard combination to beat.

So if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Get out and travel somewhere. But please do it somewhere I’m not going to be, if that’s not too much to ask. Until next time, have a great trip.