Three Years a Nomad
February 26, 2023 marked three full years on the road as a nomadic world traveler. That’s 11.18% of all the time I’ve been here on earth spent traipsing from one continent to the next, seeking out new experiences and knowledge about the world. If you would have asked me three years ago where I would be in three years time, I would have simply said that I hoped to be doing really cool shit. I wouldn’t have had a better answer for you because imagining that far in the future was the same kind of mental challenge as imagining what my potential grandkids will be doing for work in 100 years. My idea was to go seek out that which set my soul on fire, and do those things.
Fast forward three years and the journey has been just that. Unbelievable. I feel like I have lived a million dreams since February 2020.
I set out to travel the world, and I can’t say I’ve completed that goal in three years (the earth is HUGE, ya know), but my Polar Steps app tells me that after 25 countries visited, I’ve traveled 109,599 miles (176,384 km) around the earth so far. So I’d say I’m getting there. Shweya shweya (little by little, as they say in Arabic)!
And now it’s 2023 and in a way, it’s kind of sad because I’m now the future. Those days of being a lost little spirit, floating around the earth unnoticed and unsuspected, tethered to nothing, are gone. I love that I’ve grown up and that I’ve gained so much knowledge, but the fact of the matter is that I’ll never be that fresh backpacker again. I’ll never be able to remember what it was like to not know what it was like to have never slept in a hostel. I’ll never have the entire world waiting at my door, still a stranger before a blind date.
Luckily, this nostalgia reminds me to take a moment to be proud of myself to have built a way to continue living this kind of life, even though that means I now have responsibilities and shit. I may never have a stack of money in the bank (albeit small) and no job or responsibility in that way again, but now I have direction and stability and most importantly, the power to make my future dreams become reality.
So with the inevitable ending of this chapter, I think it’s finally time to start sharing my stories. Like actually start sharing them. In ways I never got out of my head enough to do before.
It’s a bit overwhelming, to be honest. How do you pick out an H20 molecule in a cup of water? To start somewhere, I thought I’d just start writing a few short stories and see where I ended up. The following stories are what came up. In no particular order or level of importance, here they are. (Sorry if they’re a little depressing to start).
Disclaimer: They didn’t end up being very short, so feel free to read some and come back to read more at another time. I know we all have busy lives. ?
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2021
For about 10 days during our 2.5 months backpacking in Eastern Europe, we visited Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. We did all of the touristy things, like taking a walking tour, hiking in the 1984 Winter Olympics, abandoning bobsledding tracks, went to museums, and experienced the food and nightlife. We also did some fun things, like watched a few films at the annual Sarajevo film festival (completely unplanned), drank a lot of happy hour Bloody Maries at what became our “local”, and got to know the many good spots to sit around the city. We also ate real Turkish food (the only place I’ve ever found CigKofte^1 outside of Turkey)!
My time in Sarajevo sticks out to me now because I really felt the Yugoslavian war here. It’s one of the only places I’ve been so far (besides Medellin, Colombia and Dachau Concentration Camp) that you could physically sense the danger that once plagued the streets. During the walking tours, they point out bullet and shrapnel damage on buildings, and explain how the bright red resin you see on sidewalks all around town are points where more than three human lives were taken by mortar shells, which left lacerations in the concrete. The Crimes Against Humanity museum explicitly shows you just that— brutal crimes that humans inflicted on their neighbors. A billboard blatantly portrays prejudice, meant to “artistically” spread awareness that prejudice once existed and still does today.
On top of all this, real fear struck me when a group of us from the hostel went to watch a beautiful sunset up a hill. When we got there, I found out that it was the same location that snipers once perched, murdering thousands of Bosnians during the 4-year Siege of Sarajevo. Even without a telescope, you could easily see the pedestrians walking in the streets, weaving between the buildings below. (It didn’t help that I also watched videos in the Crimes Against Humanity Museum of what the shelling looked like from street level, so it was then that I had a more 4 dimensional understanding of the situation). I had to leave before the good part of the sunset.
When we walked all the way back to the city from Trebevic Peak (a designated hiking area) we knew not to step off the path, not because of wild animals like I’m used to, but in case an unexploded land mine was lurking around. (Don’t worry too much, they’re mostly gone now— but the threat still exists in various areas of the hills).
All of this showed me that the recent war was still very present and overwhelming at times. But I think that’s the point— they don’t want people to forget it. Because once you forget, it’s easy for it to be repeated.
Although the war was still so present, Sarajevo is one of my favorite capital cities I’ve visited. We met a great group of people, stayed in a wonderful hostel, and got to know the city quite well. It was beautiful; sitting snuggly in a valley surrounded by abundant greenery. The Slavic culture blended with eastern Islamic influences in a beautifully mixed and noncompetitive way. The city was small enough to feel local and comfortable, but big enough that it wasn’t cramped or repetitive. It was artsy, not overly touristy, there were plenty of young people around, and there was a lot of really tasty, inexpensive food. I also felt a lot of warmth from the friendly, welcoming, and giving locals. For example, late one night, the waiters at the bar bought our entire table (of more than 8 people!) a round of beers just because they were happy we were there. Maybe this was a post covid benefit, or a result of the film festival which must have incentivized tourists to come. Either way, there was a buzz in the air.
Those 10 long days in Sarajevo helped me learn a lot about this world. A big lesson I learned was that really bad shit happens in this world, but hope for a better future is something you should always believe in, because better days are real and possible, and Sarajevo is living proof of that.
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2022
Last year, I visited the silver mines of Pitosi, Bolivia. I naively and ignorantly paid to sign my life away, not realizing the intensity of the situation I got myself into. If you, like me, didn’t know that during colonial times, the entire Spanish Kingdom was bankrolled by enslaving local indigenous people that mined the silver from Pitosi for over 200 years, now you do. To this day, almost 500 years since the beginning of that mining, Bolivian men, women, and some children, still head into the depths of the continuously collapsing mountain, through caves dug by hand and dynamite, to scrape out tin (or any last remaining morsels of silver) simply in hopes that it will feed their families each night.
Visiting the mines was life changing for me. I didn’t know what was going on inside, I just knew that I needed to see it. So I followed a guide (a woman who has been working in the mine for many years) down into a deep, dark hell. I, like all others who enter Cerro Rico^2, begged the devil to spare my life. We did this once before we entered, and again inside the mine, by offering cigarettes and 96% alcohol. Inside, I cranked my neck to be sure I could see. I sweat from the hot and heavy air of middle earth. And I participated in the act of mining.
Here’s how it went:
Before you go into the mind, the guides take you to a local shop where you can buy “gifts” for the miners (and for “El Tio”, the devil). They suggest you buy cigarettes and alcohol, along with sticks of TNT, and coca leaves at a minimum. Shovels, batteries, light bulbs and things if you’re extra and rich. Our group stuck to the basics— two sticks of dynamite, a pack of cigarettes each, a few bottles of the alcohol, and two bags of coca leaves.
Deep inside the mine, at the end of one shaft, our guide passed around the components of the explosives: the fuse, the play dough like TNT, and a bag of some type of chemical (ammonia or something) that makes the explosion bigger. Once he had the ingredients back, he measured the fuse with his arm and somehow knew (down to the second) how long we had to run once the fuse was lit. He then stuck the fuse in the play dough, put it in a plastic bag with the ammonia, tied the bag around the long fuse, and lit it. I ran from the sparking fuse first, surprised that he had just done it so quickly and casually.
When I got far enough away, I sat down and held my breath. The first explosion came and I was wholly unprepared. The baritone boom rang deep in my chest. I felt the whoosh of energy blow past my cheeks and make my hair gently whoosh behind my shoulders, while the walls around me shook like an actual cartoon. I listened hard in those following moments, searching the air for any signs of the mountain collapsing on top of me. I felt suffocated just from the thought. I took a deep breath and even smiled because it was over. I survived… so far. I thought that was it. We had two bags, but I guess I just thought they’d detonate together. I was wrong. The second guide said “that’s one”. I froze.
The second boom came nearly identical to the first. It confirmed that the energy did indeed feel like a breeze. Yeah, the sound of explosion is so much deeper of a sound than you could have ever imagined. Yes, the walls really did shake like that. And yeah, you’ve never heard quiet like the silence of a group waiting to know if those were their last moments on this earth.
Obviously, we survived. Some don’t.
After the explosions, we were led back the way we entered this section of the mine, but way before we reached daylight, we turned and were taken down mole holes called shafts where we could no longer walk, but had to inch through the dusty passageway deeper into the dangerous unknown. After roughly 20 minutes of crawling, we ended up at a cliff with a ladder containing only half its originally 6 rungs. We made it to a more open passageway again.
At the end of the longest 1.5 hours of my life, I avoided feeling joy when we first saw the light at the end of the tunnel, just in case demons wanted to pull me back in. It wasn’t until we got close enough to smell the sweet scent of the world— distinctly pineapple, but savory as if it were grilled. Sunshine briefly blinded me when we stepped into the light. I looked back at the hole in the mountain and the relief of safety set in.
I’m a lucky one. I happened to visit the mine on a holiday where miners weren’t actively mining. I didn’t experience having to run from a multi-tonne mining cart uncontrollably barreling towards the outside world. I didn’t get caught in an “accident”. And I don’t ever have to return to that hell on earth.
But other people do. In fact, the majority of occupants in the town make their living from working in these mines. And somehow, these people are among the poorest people in South America.
From this, a heaping lesson about privilege sunk into my bones. I was born in a country where this isn’t a norm. My family doesn’t have to go through this suffering purely because of the ground my consciousness came to existence on. How lucky is that?
I also learned of the inequality of human suffering. It comes in many ways, but this way felt so much more physically and mentally extreme than any other I’ve encountered. Not only is the experience in the mine traumatizing and exhausting. But the long-term effects on the human body are deadly and irreversible. I felt hopelessness for the first time in my life here. I’m afraid there may be no way to close this portal to hell.
2020
In the first year of my travels, I started experimenting with psychedelics. I took a very scientific approach to it; microdosing psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms) was just enough to learn and understand what there was to learn from these things, in a stable environment in which I felt very safe. I’ve experimented in many capacities throughout my travels since then and have had very profound experiences with each one, but this one moment during that first experiment seems right to talk about at this time.
I walked up the first hill in Hampstead Heath to the viewpoint at the top. When I arrived, instead of being amazed by the giant city in front of me, I was transfixed by the way the sun was shining through breaks in the thick pillowy clouds in the sky. At that moment, I was staring up at the gates of heaven while the modern world around me melted away. Suddenly, I was a prehistoric Homo Sapien seeing where the gods step into and out of the mortal world. At that moment, I felt the goodness in this world. I grasped the simplicity of the animal kingdom and I understood on a very deep level how our ancestors navigated this world.
The amount of time I spent looking up at the sky while feeling completely connected to my human roots is unknown. But as I stood there calm, collected, and like anyone else on the hill that day, I contemplated immortality of consciousness through countless human lineages. And it fueled my curious mind to keep trying to figure out what knowledge those ancestors hold.
See footnote ^3
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2020
For 6-weeks, we followed along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey from Antalya to Izmir, visiting over 15 cities and countless ruins. One of the ruins we came across was of an amphitheater in Patara, once used as the meeting place for the leaders of Lycia, a nation state that thrived for 1000 years. These are the humans who we have to thank for the creation of stamped coins (well them and the Chinese, who also invented the coin independently around the same time). Here I was at the place where the idea of standardizing currency popped into somebody’s head.
That’s when I really felt time squish and stretch at the same time. Our modern way of life has come about so freakin’ fast. The idea of money is so simple to us now, but back then it was profound. You trade the goods you’ve created for a little piece of metal, which you can use to buy anything you want, rather than make 5 trades before you get the item you want/ need.
Yet, humans have been anatomically the same— and therefore assumed mentally the same— to us for 200,000 years at least. And somehow only in the last 3,000 years, have we gone from trading chickens for bread for pottery for a chair (etc) to trading ungodly amounts of imagined bills in exchange for things like hand-sized touch screen computers, which we use to communicate with people across the globe at speeds almost as fast as light.
{I know it’s possible that we’ve had multiple civilizations with even more advanced technologies back in the day that we have no idea about since history has been erased during many cataclysmic events throughout time. But that’s a conversation for another day.}
Anyway, I love visiting ruins and thinking about what life was like when the ruin was modern.
These stories are only the tip of the iceberg of experiences and lessons from my travels. Knowing where to begin and where to end is near impossible, so I will just leave it at four stories and end this by telling you that this world is a special place. {You may already know this}.
I’ve come to understand that human life is a playground for the soul. It’s where we come to experience every possibility of life, enjoy the amazing things this world has to offer, to learn hard lessons, and to understand the many layers of joy and suffering.
If you’ve been following my journey the whole time, I want to say thank you. Thank you for being curious about what I’m up to and for continuing to follow me despite my continuous and serious learning curves I’ve had to face, which I know have made me look like a fool. You’ve helped inspire me to keep going. I’ve learned and I’ve learned and I’ve learned in these three years, but all that I’ve really come to find is that I used to know not a goddamn thing, and now I still only know very little. Luckily, I’m young and have plenty of time to keep learning more, and I want to share that experience with people like you who want to hear about it.
If you’re new, welcome aboard. Hope you brought a seat belt, it’s a bumpy ride.
-Bailey
Foot notes:
1: The most delicious vegan dish made from bulgar and spices. Check out this CigKofte food porn.
2: Cerró Rico means rich mountain. Called this both because it contained riches, but also because it’s the mountain that “eats” men (in Spanish, rico (rich) is a word often used to describe delicious food).
3: I realize that some people that read this story might still see psychedelics as “illicit drugs”. I understand why this is, based on the fact that they have been scheduled drugs in the United States (and the rest of the world) since the 1960s. I’m not going to preach about why this is nonsense and how it’s a government’s ploy to control the public here and now (even though that’s kind of what I believe), instead, if you feel strongly enough about this subject and judge my explorations or opinions, I encourage you to educate yourself on plant medicines. Throughout the long history of the human species, mind altering substances have been used as ways to do exactly what I did in this story, connect to ancestors and spirits, and maybe even form what we know of as consciousness. For more information on what psychedelics are really all about, check out the popular book “How to Change Your Mind” by Michael Pollan, his more recent book “This is Your Mind on Plants”, or even his Netflix series “How to Change Your Mind” if you don’t have time to read. There are many other authors like Carl Hart who wrote the book “Drug Use for Grown Ups” if you want to dive in even deeper to the politics and current social orders, but Michael Pollan is a great place to start. I will probably be writing more about my experiences in the future, so you can always come back to read them if you’re curious to know more.
4: Yes, I know these could have probably all been their own posts. But after not posting for such a long time, I felt like I owed it to my readers to finally give them something to read!
