Circling Back Toward Home, a Young Traveler Shares Notes From the Journey

When I turned 23, I was living in a shabby apartment and working in a bookstore. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, or how to find out.

Not so with Alicia Dunams, who set out on an eight-month solo trip around the world last August, after graduating from UCLA with a degree in English. When she left L.A., she wanted not only to see the world but to figure out how she should make her place in it. She had an around-the-world airline ticket, $7,200, a backpack and an international e-mail account (which is how I kept track of her).

Since then, I’ve devoted two columns to Alicia’s wanderings through the South Pacific, New Zealand, Australia and Nepal, where she turned 23 during a trek through the Annapurna Sanctuary. There were no complaints about the lack of a birthday cake because Alicia is a trouper. She also is a thinker, spinning her travel experiences into wisdom from the road. Recently I heard from her again. Here are a few of the things she said.

Alicia Dunams: Travel is a completely subjective experience. Your bad time in a country might be someone else’s good time. Some people, who have never been to places like Morocco and India, told me not to go because they’re dangerous. But how do they know? I had positive experiences in both countries. But along with those, I did have negative experiences.

For instance, I met a man who told me he was drugged on a train in India and that when he woke up, his luggage was gone. When I boarded a train there, a boy got extremely interested in me, offering me food and water, which I refused. But the 24-hour train ride turned into a 48-hour ordeal, and I started to get dehydrated.The train stopped at lots of stations, but I was too afraid to get off because I didn’t know when it would leave again, and I didn’t want to get separated from my gear. So for two days I stayed stuck to my seat. For nourishment, I ate the apples the boy gave me, after peeling them with my knife. So I don’t know if I was drugged, but I got really sick and had to force myself to stay awake. It was definitely the train ride from hell. Still, that experience wouldn’t make me tell people not to go to India. In fact, I want to visit the country again.

I can empathize with Alicia. During a trip to India two years ago, I was harassed by a rotund man with a flask of bourbon on an overnight train from the Punjab to New Delhi. But when two nice male schoolteachers joined us in the first-class compartment, I felt protected enough to sleep intermittently, hugging my backpack like a teddy bear. I had some of my scariest travel moments on the subcontinent. Still, I want to go back.

A.D.: Some of my favorite memories from this trip include riding in the back of a pickup truck through the Vanuatu rain forest, looking at the vivid blue sky above and the turquoise sea below. Or seeing the sun rise over the Moroccan Sahara, or taking a boat ride down the Ganges River in Varanasi, spotting a black dolphin emerging from the murky water. Every day is priceless. But the most memorable moments have been those when I felt at peace. I guess you don’t have to travel around the world to see a sunset or a rainbow. But traveling gives you the opportunity to appreciate the things you take for granted at home.

In spite of her own determination to stay free and unattached, Alicia fell in love with a young Londoner named Jason in the South Pacific at the beginning of her journey. He was on his way home when they met, but they planned to see each other again--in England before Alicia returned to the U.S. But as the weeks and months passed, they found they couldn’t wait that long. So they decided to rendezvous in London over Christmas. I know of long, happy marriages that grew out of flings on the road. But I also know that most travel romances aren’t so durable.

A.D.: OK, OK, OK. Travel romances do not work; at least mine didn’t. I thought Jason was the man of my dreams, but what the hot Fijian sun made idyllic, the cold English winter made realistic. In London we found we were on different wavelengths. He is now a jaded Londoner, having traded his shorts and flip-flops for a suit and tie, while I’m still in travel mode, with few responsibilities. We cried during our last night together, not because the relationship was ending but because our expectations had collapsed. And as I was crossing the English Channel on my way to France, the time I spent with him seemed like a dream. I prefer to remember the Jason I met in the Cook Islands and the good times we had in Fiji.

Alicia is on the last leg of her trip now, bumming her way around Europe. And I do mean bumming.

A.D.: I’ve learned that quality of life is not based on how much money you have. I have hardly any money and have never been happier. I went to the ballet at the Paris Opera House. Of course, I wasn’t in the front row, but I was there and that’s all that matters. Yes, I started out with money. But I also could have traveled with a lot less cash and no itineraries. I love the freedom, the nomadic lifestyle, waking up in one country and going to sleep in another. I love meeting people who don’t know your past or your future.

But there are downsides: I met a girl who has been traveling for a couple of years and has no close friends. Some days you don’t know where you are going to sleep. When I was eating tuna with my fingers in a train station in Switzerland, people looked at me like I was crazy. And when I was sleeping completely laid out in front of a train station in Portugal, people walked over my legs like I was a part of the scenery.

At 23, I knew nothing of the Portuguese pavement or the sacred Ganges River. Where will it all lead? Only Alicia knows.