Hi Everyone,
As you all know I don’t often do group mails, there is something often horrible and impersonal about them. Hence my writing one, hehe. Many of you I have not spoken to in years, many of you perhaps even forget as much as I do who exactly I am. I figure this must be natural over time? Maybe it’s because I’m turning 30 soon (in August) or because it’s been a rather rough three years that I feel the need to write this.
I left home when I was 16; hard to believe that’s fourteen years ago now! I started travelling when I was 18, moving first to London, a place that has become more of a home to me than anywhere I know. London brought to me (over time) a place I could feel comfortable in, a place with friends, and equally as importantly a place of love. Can it really be that I met some of you twelve years ago! “Tony” the man who first convinced me to try a joint, that was in 1998 at the now long defunct Social Club. That was also as a result the first time I properly inhaled, hence bring my odd flirtation with cigarettes into a new light, and into a many year love affair at a pack a day! Sadly I’ve since stopped; perhaps many of us have, regrettably!
My travels then were not what they are today. I moved to London an American, I moved there wanting of all things to open an American Bar. Somehow I felt that London would need one and that I could do well in such an industry. Now of course I wouldn’t dream of opening such a place and only with reluctance do I admit my true nationality. I had very little money and knew nobody but this never seemed to stop me.
For years I would travel without money. My habit seemed to run along the line of a thousand dollars in the bank and a thousand dollar plane ticket on the MasterCard! I never was one with any money, perhaps some of you noticed as I never took part in any diving or rock climbing or river rafting or much of anything except smoking and drinking copious amounts of Coca-Cola!
In 1999 I met a man at work. A Bangladeshi busboy that seemed very nice if not extremely patriotic, (sadly he will not be receiving this mail). At this point I’d just come back from living in Puerto Rico and although I didn’t know what I wanted to do I knew that I somehow wanted to do something. I had been a few places and it wasn’t so much a love of travel as it was a question. What do I do with my life? What is my purpose? I’ve stopped asking such questions now; I simply don’t know the answer, hehe! What I did know was that I was not happy in New York and definitely not interested in living with my mother in California. I met Paul at this moment in my life; an outlandish black gay Jamaican who fancied straight white American boys. I was perfect, and lonely, and where I most certainly enjoyed his company and found humour in his never ending advances he was at least a friend. (It’s amazing to think how now, in 2009 he is the only person I still know in New York that’s not family).
I had just turned twenty and there were a few things about myself I did know. I knew I would never be a scholar, having quit High School at sixteen and then only doing the briefest of stints at a number of Colleges I didn’t fit the academic mould. I was still a Capitalist but my travelling was starting to change all that. It was this boy, this Bangladeshi man, which would introduce real changes without even knowing it.
I’ve already said he was Nationalistic. He loved Bangladesh and loved telling me about how amazing it was. I of course knew nothing about it, perhaps didn’t even know where it was on the map, but I enjoyed listening and daydreaming about it. Eventually I gave in! I can’t say when I brought the ticket, I remember going to the dingy office that represented Bangladesh Airlines in Manhattan, it was that orange colour so common in the seventies, and in McDonalds, except the walls were stained a darker colour, that from years of smoking, clearly still going on after hours, the nicotine was imbedded in the walls. The ticket was one thousand two hundred and sixty dollars. I put it on my American Express Optimum (means you don’t have to pay monthly) card as usual. I then went to see a doctor, it seems one should get shots before going to such places!
The doctors office was a private one, one of my customers must have given me the info, for it was fancy and on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, nothing is cheap on the Upper East Side! My bill came to seven hundred dollars, which included a variety of shots, malaria tablets and constipation pills; I think they were meant to give you constipation in case you had diarrhoea, a funny paradox! I always have been of the belief that if it wants to get out, let it out!! On my last day my flatmate, Carrie-Ann gave me a Zippo lighter, I still carry it around despite not using it. She also gave me a travel umbrella, I no longer have it.
For some unknown reason when I left New York I told people I would be gone a year and a half. I don’t know where this figure or notion came from but that’s what I said. I’d spent yet more money on Lonely Planet Guide Books, buying one for Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma and Thailand. God only knows why. The Bangladesh guild turned out to be four years old and of no use at all. My early plans for heading overland from Bangladesh to Thailand were thwarted by the simple truth that land boarders between these three countries don’t exist. As for Bhutan, I clearly didn’t do my homework, ten years on and I could still only get in via a thousand dollar one week tour!
***
I don’t intend to go though ten years of travel here, that would take up far too much time and too many blank pages would be murdered. I suppose I simply wanted to illustrate that travel was never my intention; it was not a dream or a wish. As a young man the only place I really wanted to go was Australia. I would eventually get there, in 2007. I stayed a month with IT Boy, (finally someone that will get this letter). It was nice but again I was broke and sadly never really left Sydney. Back then I didn’t know about Couch Surfing and that almost definitely would have changed things. I never did buy another Lonely Planet, still don’t see the need as every person you meet has one and better to glance at theirs in order to find out where not to go! These days I stay as far away from the backpackers track as possible.
I’ve met some wonderful people over the past ten years: Darrell, living in India with his family fancying himself as a bit of a guru, perhaps it could have come true if he’d not moved back to America. Bo, a kind woman that let me touch her bum one night, hehe! She’s been on the road as long as I have and hopefully one day we’ll accidentally run into each other once again! How could I forget Bryn, the Welshman that would forever change my life by introducing me to football and LFC. The Argentinean girls in Guatemala! Hopefully I’ll be meeting up with them in December when I fly to Buenos Aires…
The list goes on, it could go on for pages and it’s been amazing. I’ve somehow managed to spend the entirety of my adult life playing more than working, travelling more than stressing and talking, talking to so many great people in so many different places. I can’t help but love the time when on Bali in Indonesia I spent so much time with a thick accented Frenchman that one morning at breakfast an Australian couple commented on how good OUR English was! That was classic! I wouldn’t give it up for the world, and I wouldn’t change a thing either.
After all this time I still don’t have a University Diploma (except for the one from New York University that I brought in 2001 for eighty-five dollars); I don’t have a proper job or a proper profession and yet I’m starting along this new road, this new decade with confidence.
When I was about to turn twenty-six I was told by numerous people that for men the time between twenty-six and thirty were the hardest to handle. I have long been a self aware fairly spiritual man and I thought I was prepared for this time, if the challenges were to come. They did. I have to say that the past three years of my life have been difficult. Not in the traditional since of having to work eighty hour weeks for a pittance of money, you know I wouldn’t do that! It was more mental. In the past three years I’ve lost more friends than I’ve made, I’ve worked more than I had in the previous eight and I’ve had my heart broken. Perhaps that last one was a good thing!
I turned twenty-six and didn’t have any particular plans as usual and eventually found myself back in London. I spent nine months there, and they were good months but not enjoyable exactly. For the first time grey hairs started to appear. I felt that I should live somewhere, should be able to stay still if not only to prove it to myself. It didn’t really work.
I eventually flew to New York. I told my mother I’d work with her for five months, I don’t know what came next, but that was my idea. By this point I had become positively anti-American. To this day I know very few of them and spend very little time with them, it’s nothing personal you see, it’s simply that I don’t feel any connection and therefore see little reason to associate with them. I didn’t enjoy my months in New York. I tried, I wanted to like it but I didn’t. Ultimately I went back to Asia, back to my old stomping ground. It seems to me that the past three years have been more than anything different. I didn’t travel so much and I kept trying to settle myself down, the only problem is that where people expect me to settle down I just don’t want to! It’s like when you stop smoking, all the people in the world can tell you it’s bad for you, or that you shouldn’t do it and it makes no difference, I love smoking, I would smoke today if I could, but I know the health of my body can’t handle it. I love travelling, so why should I stop, my body can handle it!
I’ve been with an English woman for a year and a half now. We live together, we travel together, we laugh together, it’s nice, and it’s great. She doesn’t want to change me, she didn’t fall in love with one man and expect another, for this she was the first and I’m happy. We talk about settling down, in the future, we talk about kids and all that, perhaps it’s because she’s 23 and I’m 29 that I know I have a few years left before the inevitable happens! Let’s hope that then I’ll be prepared!!
I’m wondering if I should read through what I’ve just written to you all? Often I would not, I would let it sit as it stands and hope for the best. My gut tells me to do this once again. I live in Laos now, for another week at least! We have been here in the capital city of Vientiane for nine months. I was still on this wave of settling instead of travelling. We talked about travelling somewhere and I said no, I want to sit; I want to stay and make a life somewhere. My best friend lives and works here so it seemed like an easy logical option. For myself it’s been a tough ride, just like the past three years where I’ve spent my time trying to settle somewhere! I’m done with all that. For Jeanie it’s been a great experience and has possibly lead to a way where we can travel and live and maybe even have a family one day while not being entirely tied to one place, but I won’t go into all that!
Soon enough I head over the boarder to Thailand where I’ll do a meditation course before on the 17th we fly off to India! I look forward to the return and Jeanie looks forward to her first trip there. I’ve now been to some 51 countries (slightly higher if you include some former countries) and Jeanie’s been to 25, most of them we have not seen together. I’ve found myself a travelling woman and a way to look forward to my next decade, my next set of chapters.
I don’t know what my future will bring. Oddly enough I know some of the locations in the near future, and for now at least I know some of the players. I never would have guessed at the age of sixteen when I first arrived in New York that I’d be turning thirty in India. I suppose I thought I would have all my birthdays in New York, and before that I thought I’d have all my birthdays in San Francisco; and the beautiful thing is: if Jeanie doesn’t like India then I don’t even know where I’ll have my 30th!
I want to thank you all for making it this far into my letter. Except of course for those of you who just skipped to the end hehe! It’s been such an amazing ten years, such an amazing experience with all of you and I really do hope this finds you happy and healthy. Some of you already have a family, kids, mortgages and the whole lot. I’ve still not gone down that road, but it somehow feels closer, and I somehow feel just a little bit less lost!
Love,
Jeffrey D. Loucks
Vientiane, 28.5.200
