Sharing Travel Experiences

Around the World in Two Laps with Bob Riel

by Andy Hayes

Today’s guest is famed travel author Bob Riel.  As you’ll see below, Bob’s been a busy guy, especially since his book, Two Laps Around the World: Tales and Insights from a Life Sabbatical, has been published.

Here’s the links to get your own copy (dollars on left, pounds on right) – and I suggest you should!  Go ahead and read though and I think you’ll be convinced that Bob’s tales should join you on your next journey.

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Why don’t we start with a bit of a brief introduction?

I’m Bob, a native New Englander (born in Rhode Island, lived 12 years in Boston) now living in Tucson, Arizona, with my wife and 22-month-old son. These days, my identity and income mostly derives from work as a freelance writer, though what I do is somewhat varied. I write about travel as much as possible, both through freelance articles and an Examiner.com column. I also have a background in cross-cultural consulting and so I still do contract work writing about cross-cultural subjects for a business audience. It’s actually a nice complement to travel writing, as it enables me to delve into the cultures of different regions of the world. Finally, I pick up whatever business writing I can, since it pays much better (unfortunately) than travel writing does.

I actually started my career as a journalist for a daily newspaper in Rhode Island, and I also have a master’s degree in political science from Boston College. So in another life I could have easily ended up as a political journalist. But, like most of your readers, I’m sure, I just couldn’t get away from travel once it got into my blood.

If you’re interested, you can also learn more about me through my website, or follow me on Twitter.

You started your world-wide travels with (and I quote) “deciding to take a chance in life”. Could you give us a little background into that decision-making process?

Well, my wife and I were both over 30-years-old and entrenched in our work lives when we decided to take our first round-the-world trip. Frankly, we weren’t sure we were ready to stop everything in order to do this and then re-start our lives when the trip was over. We also had to get over the normal doubts over how others would perceive our decision. In the end, though, we also didn’t want to go through life knowing we had passed up an opportunity to have an adventure together and to do some long-term travel.

The way we dealt with it was for my wife to ask for a leave of absence from work. Her employer was gracious in granting her the leave and keeping her job open. Since I was already making a transition to being self-employed, it was easier for me to manage the time off. Of course, by not stopping work completely we didn’t have as much time available to travel as we could have had by simply quitting altogether. Our trips were measured in months, rather than years. I have to say, if Twitter had been around a few years earlier and I’d been introduced to all of these other amazing people who were managing long-term travel between jobs, then our outlook might have been different.

Still, it was a good compromise given where we were in our lives. And it did have an unseen benefit, in that we began looking at our travels in a particular way – not as an open-ended adventure, but rather as a sabbatical that would be limited in time but that would have a lasting influence on our lives.

Your book is called Two Laps Around the World. Why two laps? And how did you decide where to go?

The second lap was not at all planned from the beginning. We truly expected to go home after the first trip to buy a home and start a family. We’d certainly continue to travel, but not in the same way. However, the home and family didn’t happen as quickly as expected and three years later we found ourselves facing the possibility of a cross-country move for job and family reasons. Throughout those three years, meanwhile, although we did some shorter trips, we were constantly daydreaming about all the countries we still wanted to visit. So we decided to arrange our lives and our move to Arizona around a second round-the-world trip.

As far as deciding where to go, our primary rule was simply to avoid the West as much as possible and to experience regions and cultures that were different from our past travel experiences. As a result, much of our time was spent in Asia and the Middle East, with shorter forays into Africa and a few select Western countries (such as Greece) that we hadn’t yet visited. I wish that we’d spent more time in Africa, but time was not limitless and we had to make choices. The logistics made it difficult to include South America on our particular itineraries, but we did make it a point to visit several South American countries after our round-the-world journeys (and, as a bonus, with frequent flyer miles that we’d accumulated during our longer trips).

You also refer to the term “life sabbatical.” What does that phrase mean to you?

As I mentioned earlier, the fact that our trips were not open-ended encouraged us to view the experience as a sabbatical. Academic sabbaticals stem from the notion that there is value in taking time away from the everyday rigors of a job in order to rest, reflect or conduct research. The goal is to return to work with renewed energy and ideas. And the word sabbatical derives from the word Sabbath, with every seventh day meant to be devoted to family time and contemplation.

So I took to calling our trip a “life sabbatical” because it seemed to imbue it with more meaning than if I simply looked at it as a travel adventure. It helped us to view our journey as a way to learn about ourselves and the world, while also recharging our energies for the next phase of our lives. I actually think it would be a great thing if more people were able to schedule these “mini-retirements” periodically through life. Not only can we not bank on being able to fulfill all of our travel dreams during the traditional retirement years, but this time away from work really does give us an opportunity to recharge and even re-evaluate where we are in our lives and careers.

What was the most influential experience on your tours?

Wow, interesting question, and so hard to pin down just one experience. But let me tell you one story from India. It sounds more aggravating than compelling at first, but it turns out to be an interesting travel encounter.

As anyone who has been to India can attest, it is the most maddening country in the world to travel in, and at the same time perhaps the most fascinating. Well, after several weeks there, we’d seen incredible sights (the Ganges River at sunrise, Buddhist monks in the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal) and had the usual jaw-dropping Indian experiences (cows in the middle of a highway, legless beggars, men urinating in the street, garbage piled high on sidewalks). Near the end of our time there, we were on our way out of Ladakh, in the Himalayas, when India decided to throw one more bizarre experience at us.

While waiting to check in for a flight back to Delhi, the people right in front of us in line started a fist fight. Before we knew it, a half dozen Indian men had joined in and were pummeling each other and bashing heads against the airline counter. This led soldiers with guns drawn to jump into the fray (Ladakh is not far from Kashmir and so is still a sensitive travel region) and to begin screaming and waving pistols at everyone. All the rest of us backed away as quickly as possible, but since we were in a relatively small room this all unfolded literally feet away from us.

Within about five minutes, things somewhat remarkably calmed down. Strangely, though, not only were these fighters not removed from the airport, every one of them was soon checked in for their flight. Which also happened to be our flight. The airline staff assured us that we were safe – it was just a misunderstanding, they said, and there would be no problems with violence on the plane. Uh, huh. Then, minutes later, more soldiers appeared in the airport lobby and walked through carrying a flag-draped coffin. It was so unreal, it was almost funny. The thing is, though, you almost come to expect these things in India.

Anyway, during the two hours after this that we were confined to another small room awaiting our flight, we met an elderly French woman, Dominique, who ran a foundation to assist Himalayan nomads. She seemingly appeared out of nowhere and began telling us of her meetings with the Dalai Lama. He had told her, she said, that the world was going through a difficult period but that in a few years there would be more peace.

Dominique saw that my wife was still a bit frazzled by the fighting we’d seen. So she looked at her, put a hand on Lisa’s leg, and said, “When you go this country you must take patience. India is a difficult place. But good. This is good knowledge to have when you go back to your home.”

It was a simple but profound statement. In a sense, I came to regard that experience and that meeting with Dominique as a metaphor for our travels. Because it’s true that even the madness of travel is good to remember. Neither travel nor life would be quite right if everything were easy and amazing. It’s the entirety of our experience that shapes us and makes us the people that we are. And, in a funny way, it’s the crazy travel experiences that we end up telling more stories about. The fact that we survive and laugh about these experiences, I think, is part of what makes travel so addicting.

A day of the life in India…

Is there a possibility of Yet-Another-Lap-Around-the-World? What are you going to do with yourselves after all those experiences?

I would absolutely love for there to be another lap (or two) around in the world in our future. I’m sure that everyone who has ever done long-term travel comes away with some of the same convictions: One, that these journeys are possible for anyone with a will to travel. If you set aside some savings beforehand and are willing to travel cheaply, then a long distance trip is within reach of just about anyone. Two, once you have the experience of traveling independently for an extended period of time, you want to keep having these experiences. There is no such thing as a cure for wanderlust!

However, if there is to be a third lap in our future, it likely won’t be for a few years. My wife and I finally did start that family and we have a son now who is not quite two-years-old. He’s already being introduced to travel, but I don’t know that he’s ready just yet for an overnight bus trip in Vietnam or a train through India! But since neither Lisa nor I traveled much until we were older, we are trying to give our son some travel experiences at a younger age. In fact, we just finished a 1,700-mile road trip in the U.S. and he did quite well.

At the very least we know that these experiences changed our lives and we hope to teach him some of the values that independent travelers share. Things like discovery, curiosity, tolerance, self reliance, and cultural understanding. Even if that’s all we can do, then in a sense our travel experiences will be passed on to our child. But of course we’d also love to be able to share some extensive international travel with him and that is certainly part of our plan and hope for the future.

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