Photo is actually from Surfer's Paradise, like 12 hours north of Sydney... but you get the gist.

“So what’s on the menu tonight Rich,” I asked.

“Take a guess,” he said.

“Well, let’s see now,” I took a second to scan the various ingredients sprawled out over the speckled counter top and made a deep thoughtful face. “Hmmm…Roasted duck l’orange with haricot verts, fingerling potatoes and a balsamic vinegar reduction?”

“That’s the one,” he said.

Then we both almost fell to the floor with laughter, as I knew full well what he would be having for dinner, as he knew full well what I’d be having too. Rich would be having stir fry as I would be having noodle soup. The cabinet was full of strange and exotic Asian spices. Something had stayed with Rich through all these years since his big travels through South East Asia and Europe so many years ago. These daily, if not ritualistic meals were indicative of more than just the flavours their ingredients imbued. These were glimpses back in to the past, back into the golden memories of dusty streets and roadside vendors, of wild nights, and pints, and stories of people whose names you can’t quite remember. This was our daily bread. A reminder. Of greater lessons learned which we couldn’t acquire in the western world. It gets in you sometimes. Grabbing hold of something deep and sincere and never letting go. Touching on some rare indescribable place in your heart, where everything is real and nothing is held back.

Rich and I sat on the tall concrete steps staring out at Maroubra’s choppy waters. We had just been sitting there like that for a while. Staring. At what in particular, I didn’t quite know. It was clear that Rich was looking at something, that much was sure. Scanning the waves, reading the surf, checking the rips, noting the breaks. But what had I been staring at? Without a lifetime of his knowledge, I had really just been staring at waves. One after another. Crashing into the sea floor. With no other significance than that. I was curious though. To know more about the ocean and how it works, about swells, and riptides, and the liquid machine that churns our great planet with the forces of the moon. Rich, of course, was more than happy to explain it all. Why the surf breaks where it does. How the wind conditions help shape a wave. We looked into the heaving mass as Rich decanted his wisdom into my half empty glass.

Tamarama Beach. Mid-day. This is the stuff dreams are made of. A heavy sea mist rolls off the oceans tongue like smoke into a sandy snifter. Already, we’ve heard of the young swimmer who had drowned, lost in the thick fog only hours ago. “This is unreal,” I thought. “It’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen.” It was like a slow motion scene composed by the best cinematographer.

Through the sea mist charged fit light-footed young men carrying featherweight boards. Over the sand dunes and between the tall grassy greens reeds they emerged, charging like young stallions over the dunes, their manes trailing behind in visual echo of the feet below.

We paused for a moment on the edge of the water, but it was brief. Only enough time to fix the velcro strap to my leg and conjure a shallow reflection of everything that had been going on. No time to think, just go. This was typical of Rich. There was a flow, a process to the whole thing. We had just been slowly circling from the outside, building up momentum, driving a crescendo, to arrive at this very moment. Dig your fingers into the wet sand, let them curl tight around a shape that has taken generations to perfect. Draw breath, and kick sand into the past, let your periphery be filled with only the future.

The ocean trying it’s hardest to spit us back out onto the solid ground to which our terrestrian legs called home. We paddle harder. Hand over head, head over board, board over water. In the distance, Rich disappeared, enveloped in soft folds of liquid and smoke he drifted away like a ghostly apparition into the undulating seas. Surf’s up.

For real! Let uncle Sam do the heavy lifting in your quest to chill with penguins or smoke with the natives or dive with great whites or whatever the hell it is you decide to do with your travels. If you havent already blown it on the new Playstation IX or that pair of Manolo Blahnik’s, consider jumpstarting your travels with free money from the government. Oh wait a second, that’s your money isn’t it. What the hell was Uncle Sam doing with it in the first place?

‘What is it that I really enjoy doing? What is it that brings me the most happiness? And how do incorporate that into my travels.’

Personal inventory beckons and it’s returns may be as eye opening and discovery laden as the road it takes you down.

The Downfall of Planning
I left the house in a dazed state. Stressed beyond belief at the infinite possibilities that rose with every step and the decisions that I will ultimately have to make. Within a week of arriving here in Australia I had been constructing plans for the next trip abroad.

“Let’s go to Europe,” my buddy said.

We booked tickets almost immediately and I begun the obsessive planning process that seemed to keep me going this whole time. Complex financial tables complete with variable rates of income were designed. Budgets for food, transportation, and every conceivable expenditure were calculated, tested, and re-calculated. Time tables spanning far into our newly spawned year of 2011 mapped out what sounded like good routes to travel. So much time and energy invested into this yet I stand before you truly lost. To say the least, things have gone horribly awry.

This is what it’s all about though. Diving into the deep unknown. Into potentially perilous situations that either eat you alive or see you become the wise world traveled adventurer that you always knew you could become. But let me tell you something, it’s not all flower necklaces and adventure treks out here. There’s a lot of stress and suffering that must be endured in order to keep this kind of thing going on a shoe string budget. Almost always before departure or arrival I experience a breakdown of some sort…and this moment is now.

Catch and Release
I imagine that traveling is a lot like fishing. Having to continually hold tight and let go. This place is amazing, grip tight, wind the reel, and hold on for dear life. You’re leaving in a week, unhook the most beautiful thing you’ve ever caught and let go. This process is repeated over and over again, manifesting itself often and in unpredictable ways. You let go of clothing, mementos, control, pride, and routine. Sometimes forever, sometimes for a newly acquired thing. You hold onto memories, and people, and places, and change. Taking snapshots with your mind so these things, you hope, are never lost.

The Price of Ambition
So far my experience here in Australia has been solely guided by the desire to make money for the next destination. “Every { x } you don’t buy here is an { x } you could have in Europe, becomes the typical rule. Be it a sit-down meal, or a train ticket, the rule remains the same. Don’t spend money unless you have to and try to have as much fun as possible within that one confine. Not that I haven’t been enjoying myself in Sydney, but if I were to leave and never come back, what would I be able to say that I had actually seen? But had there been anything I even wanted to see here in the first place?

Let’s meet in KL
The plan was to meet in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. AirAsia has a killer deal on a newly established route going direct to Orly International in Paris. My buddy would be flying in from South Korea for less than $100usd, while I had mapped out a route to get me there for around 300. Of course the optimism of the journeys success had been based on a high paying job that I would only work for two weeks, as opposed to the 10 weeks that my finely tuned numbers had been based on.

“Sorry mate, we have some boys coming off a job who need the work. Have to look after our full-time employees first.”

My plans crumbled along with the optimism and hope that they were built upon. “How the fuck am I going to pull this off now?” As the weeks tore past I settled into yet another routine. Wake up, eat a bowl of Weet-Bix with honey, wait for the internet cafe to open, apply for jobs, try to scare up some cheap form of entertainment like snorkeling or surfing during the hot part of the day, and return to the internet cafe to see if there was a job waiting for me in my inbox. I had practically given up until a couple of weeks ago when a friend said he knew a tiler who was looking for an assistant.

“The pays pretty crappy,” Dave said. “But it’s work.”

I pulled the rod and reel tight. “Don’t let this one go.” I thought. While simultaneously giving up on all of the planning, and graphs , and tables that led me to falsely believe that I was on track. I had been fighting this battle from the shadows, now it was time to duke it out on the front lines. It was time for grit, and instinct, and a messy struggle with the battle cry, “get there or die trying.”

Monday. Jack hammering tiles off the wall of some poor bloke’s sad gray apartment. Carrying bucket after bucket of cement down from his crappy sixth floor walk-up. Tuesday. Sitting in the back of a pick-up truck on the hottest day of Australian summer. Forty degrees Celsius. One-hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit. Throwing number one of the four-thousand newspapers we had to deliver that day. Wednesday. Roughly one week out from my departure date and I just didn’t have enough money to go there and come back. If I got a one way ticket from Sydney to Malaysia, I could make it to Europe and probably make it back to Malaysia. But then I’d be stuck. Everything began to unravel. I began to unravel. Any plans that I previously had went out the window like Tuesdays paper. “Malaysia’s not so bad,” I thought. The food’s great. The culture’s interesting. The women are pretty. I wonder if I can make enough money there to get back to Sydney. Maybe I can just stay and work in Europe and put my flight to Malaysia on hold. What’s the job market like? Do I need a work visa? Is there anyone I can stay with for free? Or is it simply time for me go home?

…

Sometimes you have to take a step back and ask yourself, “Just what the hell am I doing?”

In every place there are people who live their environment. There are urban cyclists in NYC, mountaineers in Switzerland, and barflies in Boston. I’m always excited to meet and make friends with these people where ever I go. People who have a deep connection with the land and an intimate knowledge of its workings. In Australia 85 percent of the population lives within 50 kilometers of the coastline. The ocean is their environment.
Growing up in the woods of the deep south I know virtually nothing of the ocean. I can tell you the names of common birds and which plants are which in my native Georgian forest, but standing here on the edge of choppy waters with this snorkel strapped to my head, I can’t tell you shit. Not about the potential dangers that lurk beneath or how to spot rip currents by looking at the water’s surface. Of these things I am an ignorant child, luckily though, this is my buddy Dickson’s playground, and he’s agreed to show me the water’s way.
Dickson, or Dicko as he’s affectionately referred to by friends, is a tall lanky character, an internet dating phenomenon, and at times (particularly when I’m not in the room) the hardest drinker around. On New Years, Dicko, two his best friends (a couple of lifelong surfers), and I sat on their front porch drinking beers, and waiting for the rumored stampede of hot chicks to come drunkenly sloshing by. We had been discussing exercise when Dicko decided to mention his daily snorkeling routine.

“Snorkeling isn’t exercise. You don’t even use fins Dicko,” chimed one of the surfers. Seems to me like it might be more work without fins than with them, but what do I know? I’m from Stone Mountain, Georgia.

“Do you know how to snorkel? Have you ever done this before?” Dicko asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “My old man took me snorkeling when I was a kid………..once.”

Off into the drink we went. Dicko takes to the water as if born to it. While I, at least for the first 10 minutes am a complete catastrophe. The water’s getting in my goggles. When I try to adjust them my snorkel fills with water. Forgetting that I can just blow the water out, I’m thrashing about swallowing mouthful after mouthful of saltwater. At some point I look up and Dicko is so far away that I can’t even see him. Then I realize that I’m really alone out here and how deep the water is. Panic begins to set in not only because I don’t want to die out here, but because safe footing really isn’t that far away. As the only black guy in probably all of Australia(at least it feels like it sometimes), I hoped that people weren’t looking at me saying to themselves, “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”
Eventually, I too grew gills and the psychological threat of dying was placed at bay. Turns out the water really wasn’t that deep at all. *cough* When you look at the surface of the water all you see is water, but underneath lies a whole new world. Strange, thinking of this as wilderness. To me trees and forest and spiders and snakes is the wilderness, and the ocean is really just another word for the beach. Well, that’s I thought before anyway.

It’s wild down there.

They say that the ocean is the last unexplored frontier on Earth and now I understand why. Beneath the glistening oscillations of the water’s smooth surface is an environment in which we are foreigners. Perhaps it was that I had expected there to be only sand, that I was surprised to find such dramaticism and diversity of terrain. Ginormous boulders jutted from the sea floor proudly overlooking the vast expansiveness which conceals two-thirds of our amazing planet. Aquatic plants cling to anything they can get a hold of like wind swept trees on the side of a mountain. Vegetation is everywhere, and if this was above sea level, this would definitely be the back country.

Potentially awkward on land, you could tell that Dicko was champion of this environment. He dove amazingly deep, propelling himself further from the surface by hurling himself from big boulders. Seriously, the guy was like Johnny Fucking Quest out there, tapping rocks together to call large swarms of fish, flipping over flat rocks to feed this 5 feet iridecent blue one. It’s just cool when you get a chance to see people excercise massive stores of knowledge of something you know nothing about. Hopefully I get to learn a thing or two about the ocean while I’m here.

On my culinary tour I was not the only one to enjoy fine, elegant and delicious meals.  Here you can see a GIANT PILE OF HUGE BUNNIES EATING THINGS.

I think you’ll enjoy it.

P.S.

nom nom nom nomnomNOMnomNomnom

One journey ends, and new stories begin in the long awaited conclusion to Season 6, Quito.

This has been a fantastic season for us and a story we feel incredible lucky to have gotten to tell.

We wish the best of luck to Freddie, Jenna, Laurene and Ryan on all their new journeys and adventures, wherever they may lead.

They have ostriches running around on the beach here. Not that safe, but so cool.