The war in Vietnam had my parents in a genuine fit of despair about the state of the nation; my father, who is a potter, was thinking he might be able to find a teaching job abroad in a completely different setting, opening a new door for his family of five. My brother was eight when we left California for the South Pacific and my sister was six. I was only three months old, the family wild card. What was it going to be like traveling with an infant? Would I get dangerously sick? Would I be too much of a pain in the butt for a family on the road.
We were not planning a year in Europe; we were going to the southern Pacific and southern and eastern Africa, many places where there was essentially no travel infrastructure. Lonely Planet and Rough Guides did not exist, and I doubt the Blue Guides had a volume on French Polynesia or Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was called in those days) or Kenya. The doctors my parents consulted about the trip did not really think much of the idea of taking an infant to most of the places on our itinerary, but the house was rented, the tickets bought, the trip planned. We could not turn back.
We managed to travel for eleven months in total, before our money ran out and we had to return to California. I did get sick, but not seriously. My mother, on the other hand, contracted viral meningitis in Fiji and nearly died in a hospital in Auckland. She recovered, after days in a dark room, and we got back on the road. My dad did get a job offer, to teach ceramics at the University of Nairobi, but he did not take it. We were a family of naive Californians, to be sure, but my parents certainly could see that we were not going to escape the stain of American neo-imperialism, by moving to the University of Nairobi. The trip was filled mostly with incredible highlights, moments of family transcendence that we have treasured ever since. We had an incredible family adventure, pursuing a path that few of our fellow Americans at that time were willing to investigate.
Obviously, I have no actual memories of the trip; yet, that does not mean it has not played a critical part in the development of my identity. All my life, I have been proud that I went on such a trip: I learned how to walk in Madagascar, a traditional healer fixed up my stomach flu in Tahiti, I spent time alone in a Masai village while the rest of my family went off to look at game. In a sense, I always felt worldly, though I knew I did not exactly deserve the moniker, since I could not remember any of the actual adventures I claimed as my own. While part of my reveled in my adventurous first year of life, part of me was a bit resentful that I had traveled the globe, amassing only photos and no memories of my own. I always wanted to return to these places of family legend, with incredible names like Huahine, Antananarivo, and Mombasa.
I have been so very lucky.
In 1998, two years after we got married, and several months after both of us had reached logical stopping points on our career paths, my wife and I boarded a plane in Los Angeles bound for Papeete. We had decided to take a trip of our own. Inspired by my stories of a year on the road, we had said good bye to friends and family, put our house up for rent and our savings on the line, and bought a string of open-ended tickets that would essentially take us from the South Pacific to Southeast Asia to southern and eastern Africa and all the way home, via a short stop in Europe. That trip offers, of course, a whole new story to tell. Maybe I should save that one for later.
Now, with the addition of two children, we are trying to plan a new and even more audacious adventure. Four of us on the road together. We are not going to circle the globe but the Pacific this time. What an amazing concept.
My next post will be about some of the details involved in planning such a journey.
