“Maybe one day I’ll have a travel agency.”
19 years after, here I am!
I started travelling on my own in the 90’s. The internet was not that common then. We didn’t have smartphones. While I traveled in Europe I managed to stay in touch with phone calls to my loved ones from very analogical phone boots. Then I left for my first one year trip away and I was finding it hard to stay in touch. It was way before we even had Facebook.
Determined to stay in touch, and very much wanting to share my travel experience, 23 years ago, when I was traveling South America, I started writing long emails home to friends and family, telling travel stories, sharing some of my reflections about what I was learning on the road, and how the world was expanding who I was. Every now and then I'd share a dream.
On one such email in 2004, after my first trip to Tibet which finished with me traveling overland to Kathmandu for my first trip to Nepal, I found myself sharing a big dream. I said “Maybe one day I'll have my travel agency.”
I had gotten myself to the Tibetan border by hitchhiking on many vehicles. The last one was a tourist bus with a group of Check people. The travel leader was super nice, and we discovered we had a lot in common. He asked for my help handling a few travel things. At the end of the looong bus ride, he told me "You should do what I do." I made a mental note, and rushed to get myself across the border before it got dark.
On the other side of the border, I almost instantaneously hopped on a car that drove me all across the North of Nepal, which was then taken by the maoists. We had checkpoint after checkpoint for around 10 hours. The roads were really bad. There were many guns and I was very sleepy and I remember that trip as a sort of hallucinatory dream. With a mix of excitement for being in Nepal + some fear of being in that car in that occupation scenario in the middle of the night. Surprisingly, it all went as smoothly as possible, and I got to Kathmandu in the early morning ready for some sleep.
I couldn’t sleep due to the adrenalin of the trip, and the buzz of arriving in Kathmandu - a place I had been fantasising with for a long time. I met a German girl at my guesthouse and joined her for breakfast. She led groups of travellers in Nepal. We finished our cinnamon rolls and cappuccinos, and she said: "You should have a travel agency." I took note again. Still delighting on coffee - which I had not seen for over 6 months at that time. Something of that morning still lingers in me today.
Soon after that I sat at one of those memorable internet cafes in Kathmandu, always a bit dark and full of smoke, and I wrote my regular email to friends, in which I wrote “Maybe one day I’ll have a travel agency.”
Fast forward 19 years, I do!!
I trust the power of dreams that speak to us loud & clear. Even if they don’t happen right then, when they want to be born, they do.
Join my agency’s first Trip to Bhutan!! It starts on October 23rd!
