If you know anything about me, or have read a few things of what general gibberish I post on tis blog, you probably know that one of the things that I love and do with significant regularity is travel. This is not a post about why I love traveling, or even in praise of the general awesomeness of getting out there and ridding your brain of the rust that is a result of “that which you do not know”, I am not going to tell you how great it is to get to know another culture, experience different customs, interact with different people, learn a new language, etc..all of that stuff is wonderful but you know that already. Put shortly, you’ll never know unless you go, and if you don’t go or don’t want to go because you’re too cocooned in your own little comfort zone, well, I feel sorry for you. This post is, however, a sort of a mind dump about the different kinds of travel I had the good fortune of engaging in, and my experiences in each.

I work as a student recruiter, and that generally entails a good deal of travel for the sake of meeting with students, parents and college counselors in different countries and tell them about my school. That was my first full-time job out of college and I’ve had great fun over the past three years country-hopping on the job. Sometimes I travel in a small or large group of fellow recruiters or colleagues, other times I go alone. A tour I go on to participate in recruitment fairs has been likened to a traveling circus: we hop from country to country, setting up our tables in schools and hotel banquets, meet with prospective students, do our thing then pack up and head to the next destination where we do it all over again. Things happen along the way; run-ins with Murphy’s Law (which was invented in airports), unexpected delays, missed flights, cancellations, broken-down transportation…things that inevitably happen when you do thins kind of thing with any degree of regularity, but somehow everything works itself back from such hair-pulling entropy into a zen-like harmony with the world. I have met and continue to meet many good people on these trips, some of whom are now good friends and among my favorite people. Some even have good blogs that you should go and check out, but only after you’re done reading this post.

One of the nice things about this kind of travel is that I almost never have to buy soap and shampoo for the rest of the year. I get to stay in all these nice hotels, and in them I am a man on a mission: snag all the free shit I can and fill every nook and cranny of my luggage with hotel room swag. Yes, I am a cheap bastard, for good reason though. Always be ready!! For what, you ask? For many picnics, nuclear fallout, going camping…I don’t know, just be ready with free shit, dammit!. (okay, just kidding…but I do take the little shampoo bottles and the fluffy white flip flops)

The other type of travel that I do is what I like to call Autonomous Limited-Resource Solo Voyaging (works great when you’re conversing with “experimental travelers”, or elitist traveling @$$holes), aka backpacking on a shoe string (and a pretty worn and mud-stained shoe string at that). I try to go on a month-long trip somewhere every year or two. “Tight budget” would grossly overestimate the funds I usually have available for such trips, but apart from tuition money, I usually can’t think of anything better to blow my measly savings on (ok, maybe new gadgets too). Again, I am not going to go into a cliched rhetoric about the merits and virtues of travel. If you have read that far, you probably already know.

In the few trips I have taken of that kind, I went solo. It was a choice rather than lack of willing companionship. Don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-social, on the contrary. I just found out that sometimes, when you’re going on such trips, the only luxury that you can have is that of lean and quick decision making that you can only have when you’re going solo (with exceptions of very like-minded people, a rarity in my experience). Had enough seeing a certain place/city/country? Grab your pack and go. No one to stall your momentum and weigh you down, no one who still has to pack, no one who has a different idea of the next destination. Just you and your alter ego. It sounds selfish, I know. More often than I like to admit somewhere along the trail of those trips I found myself lonely and forlorn. End or mid of trip blues set in and you (briefly) long for the familiar. Other times, I have moments when I am just glad I am alone and don’t care if anyone else was there to share it with. Company is great, but its also mental overhead that I appreciate not having to carry every once in a while.

Backpacking is the yang to my on-th-job travel yin. Its also where I get to use all that free shampoo and soap (remember, always be ready!). For me, they complement each other in certain ways that I consider myself to have been very fortunate to experience, and the downtime in between gives me a more than adequate chance to reflect on both, and build up the drive to go out there again. Saving some cash also helps.