Wanderers
Wanderers Talk
The idea that I’d like to share with you today is simple. “The world is for everyone”.
But before that, let me tell you my story.
I write for a living. I write about traveling, people, culture, and experiences. You know, the usual travel and lifestyle blogger stuff.
I’ve been to 120 countries around the world and visited almost 400 cities. I have met and known countless people of different nationalities, races, colors with different beliefs and religion.
I’ve made a lot of friends in those people, many of whom I’m still in touch with today. I’ve had arguments with others too, naturally.
I’ve had numerous experiences varying from simply doing fun activities I’ve never tried before to life-changing events I never thought I’d ever have in my lifetime. Let me show you some of them.
Let me start with the fun. These are not uncommon and you probably have seen these before on Youtube or a friend’s post, but hey.
This was me dancing with indigenous people in the aboriginal regions of Australia.
This was me helping nurse a newborn baby brown bear in Madagascar. I also saw a lion for the very first time in my life.
This was me throwing tomatoes at Spanish provincial folks at the La Tomatina Festival.
I also rode tuktuks in Thailand, ate raw fish with the Japanese, and showered in watercolor with young kids in India.
I had an incredible time doing all these. I can’t urge anyone more to travel and experience all sorts of fun.
But now let’s proceed to some of the serious ones. The ones that changed my values and beliefs, and in a way, my life for that matter.
This was me. I mean, I’m in this picture, somewhere. I’m the third guy from the left in the middle row. For exactly 73 days, I’ve lived with Monks and eventually became one, in the Himalayas in Nepal. In there, I’ve learned and practiced the virtues of living minimally and focusing on what’s truly important to me. This experience was eye-opening.
In Beira, Mozambique, I lived with a native family for 28 days. This family has accommodated me without expecting anything in return. They gave me ample space to sleep on under their roof. As long as I worked with them catching fish for my own meal, they said I was welcome. I will never forget this family and the time that I lived with them.
This is where I fully realized how blessed I am not to worry about food and shelter my entire life.
Last but not least, this is a picture of me after I took a beating from several guys in a dark alleyway in Venezuela. One of them had a knife to my stomach at one point. That was the closest I’ve ever been to death.
Up to now, I still don’t know why they had to beat me up or why they let me live. All I know is that I will be forever thankful I’m still alive today.
I wasWanderers Talk never born and never have been rich by any standard. However, I consider myself extremely blessed that I was able to travel the world.
Whenever I tell these stories about my travels, people would always ask me how I did it. How was it possible. After all, I had no stable job while I roamed around, and again, I wasn’t rich.
For me, answering these logistical questions were easy. I honestly wanted to tell everyone that asked me how I was able to support myself while traveling to “google it”.
Traveling is quite the rage nowadays. Vagabonding is now all but mainstream. In fact, there were several TED talks about long-term travel from way back 2013 and
Long-term, round-the-world travels aren’t unheard of anymore. Soon it will probably become the norm. Thanks to all the trailblazers that let the world know how simple it is to see the world.
However, there’s one problem.
When I first discovered the possibility of me seeing the world with my very own eyes, I was ecstatic. Traveling the world is my generation’s American dream and it’s all within my reach. All I had to do was prepare for it for a couple of years and I’d be set and ready to go.
First, I figured that I had to save up a carefully calculated amount of money. Even though I’d be spending the least amount possible in all of my travels because I’d be following the tips of all those that went before me, I still needed to cover expenses for airfare, insurance, and emergency funds for any unprecedented outlays.
Of course, I had to set aside some cushion for when I come back home, abruptly or not. I started saving up for all of this in 2015 and after two years, I was confident I won’t run out of cash in the middle of my travel. I was ready to quit my job.
While working in a nine to five job saving up every penny I could, I was planning my logistics. Sometime after I decided I wanted to see the world, I took out a world map and began to ponder what my route would look like. Which countries will I visit and in what order?
Figuring this was vital. Not only it will allow me to avoid unnecessary expensive airfare, my sabbatical will also have direction. So I knew I had to do this.
Sometime after that, I was close to finalizing my path. After a few copies of world maps full of erasures due to revisions, the final one had curly red dotted lines across the countries I planned to visit.
It was beautiful. It was art to me. My finest so far, I was so proud. And so excited. I wanted to hang it on my wall to serve as an inspiration.
But as I was about to pin my work of art for display, I noticed the long stretch of dotted lines darting through the entire expanse of Russia. Yes, Russia. The country that almost never accepts tourists, even the richest of rich Americans. Then it hit me. Like the entire ceiling had crashed all on my head.
I’m a Filipino. And 90% of the countries I wanted to visit require a visa from Philippine passport holders.
A middle-class Filipino with a decent job in the Philippines acquiring Schengen visa to visit Europe would be extremely lucky.
A jobless Filipino who wishes to vagabond his way through the west? And the US? No dice. Ce n’est possible. Impossibile. Night moglich.
I was heartbroken. But of course, through sheer hard work, I was able to do it. But I had to go through some extremely difficult processes that most people that are able to travel the world don’t go through.
I had been rejected a lot of times for reasons I understand, yet, deep inside, don’t really understand. But there’s no need to elaborate that here.
Let me simply ask you this.
As a human being, is seeing the world a privilege, or a right?
I like to believe that every single person deserves to see the world at least once in his or her lifetime. But in the world that we currently live in, we all know that’s not the case.
We are in a time now where traveling is easiest and most accessible, yet, 75% of the human population who are able are simply not allowed to because of our countries’ borders.
When I realized that I am one those who are territorially shunned, I started to envy the people who are able to travel freely from one country to the next. The vagabonds, the trailblazers, the wanderers who showed the world how it wasn’t impossible to circumnavigate the world bringing only a backpack worth of stuff.
Before, whenever I watch a video of well-traveled people, mostly white men, talking about how easy it is to just book a one-way ticket and never look back, I get all fired up. Now, I want to tell them “Must be nice to be you bro, Me, I’ll have to get a visa first”.
I envied the very same people that inspired me to travel in the first place.
All my life, I never cared about my race, my nationality, my social status, or my economic well-being. But at that time, it’s all I could think about.
I thought it was unfair citizens of some countries, had the ability to just waltz in and out of the majority of countries in the world. And if you are white, you can pretty much go anywhere you want.
I asked myself, is that privilege theirs and theirs alone? Are they just lucky that they are born where they’re born, with the color of skin that they have? Am I not allowed to see the world too?
Of course, in my heart, the answer is yes, I should be.
In terms of equality, the world is vastly better than it was a century, a decade, and even three years ago. It’s still getting better. All the socio-political and humanitarian right issues and injustices of the world, from racism to LGBTQ discrimination, all of these are getting torn down slowly but surely thanks to all the human right advocates of the world fighting for equality.
But here I am, proposing that there’s one more inequality that we’re forgetting to address, one more human right that we need to talk about. The human right to experience earth in all of its natural, cultural, and societal glory, the majority, if not the entirety of it.
I’m pretty much aware of the reasons why an ordinary citizen of the Republic Of The Philippines cannot just hitchhike his way across Europe whenever he umm, gets burned out of his job, like most of the people that do that.
But whenever I go back to these, experiences that I had traveling the world, seeing the earth’s beauty with my own eyes, meeting all kinds of people and how all of these helped me become a better person and a better member of the society I belong in, I get sad, but simultaneously hopeful.
I am hopeful that in the years to come, more people like me, an ordinary citizen of a third world country in the far east, can experience these things. I know it would help them too like it helped me.
And who knows, the world may be better for it. If the rest of the world just gave us the chance.
So let me leave you with this.
Wanderers Talk
Like love knows no gender, like freedom knows no race, travel should know no nation.
The world, OUR world, is for everyone. Thank you so very much.
*cue the standing ovation from the TED audience and for Chris Anderson to join the stage for a handshake.
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