In the taxonomy of travel, I have been a road warrior, a tourist (touristus sunworshippus, t. hikerus, and t. culturus, but not t. scenicus driverus), an ex-pat (an Irishman living and working in London and then New York), but never until now a traveller.
Rolf Potts, the Thoreau of Generation X, prefers the term ‘vagabond’ for someone who sets out with no particular destination in mind and no set time limit, with a loaded backpack and an open mind. That seems too kind for those who wander up and down the squalid Khao San road in Bangkok in search of cheap beer, and too rakish for the earnest types that are here looking for a spiritual experience or material for their first novel.
Summer and I are just curious. It’s a big world, we’ve seen very little of it, and as recently as our trip to Turkey in August we were reminded that you can’t learn anything about a country in ten days. Selling Vindigo has given us the time and the money to satisfy some of that curiosity, without having to fret about a daily budget.
So we have packed two carry-on sized bags with everything we need for about nine months (that we can’t easily buy on the road). We have given up our apartments in New York; donated twenty boxes of random stuff to Goodwill; sold more on Craigslist; and put the rest of what we own into storage. We bought two one-way tickets to Bangkok and on to Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam. We know where we are sleeping for the next seven days. Are we now vagabonds?
Posted at N 13 deg 45.553 min E 100 deg. 29.809 min