Scraps and Sentiments from Solo Travel

1/10/2025

Places are defined by people, who are in turn defined by stories and conversations. Real conversations. The ones you have when you’re invited to cook with locals in Morocco. The post-midnight ones at hostel bars surrounded by Egyptians, Germans, and Taiwanese backpackers. The stories that define peoples’ sporadic trajectories, that by some miracle, led them to be sitting across from you. The value of presence, of truly listening, was never proved clearer to me than it was my freshman summer, when I undertook an 85 day journey of solo travel. My trip brought me across 5 continents, 18 countries, 32 cities, and hundreds of conversations during which I was not a Yale student nor a math major, but a human being sitting next to another one.

I spent months trying to quantify my growth from that trip, with, perhaps unsurprisingly, no real avail. What I did take away from my constellation of unique conversations was the ability to listen, and to do it really, really well. There is no such thing as a person who does not wish to be head, or whose eyes and posture and hand movements don’t all tell stories of their own; who’s journey is not a meaningful lesson and data point in your own life.

Below are some raw, unedited segments from my journal, almost entirely from my portion backpacking across Peru:

To be filled summer 2023 — “Go do big things”

"¿Cuándo fue la última vez que hiciste algo por primera vez?" — a Peruvian proverb that translates literally to "when was the last time you did something for the first time?"

You've seen firsthand how the people around you affect you, in a good or bad way. Thats why im not content “working a few years” with bad people — b/c it’ll kill that drive and curiosity i have.

The importance of outstanding communication. Everyone wishes they could say “what they really mean”...and come off smart while doing it. It takes very few words to make an impression on someone, and the same way you practice math you need to practice talking, even when the reception is bad. “You are not your thoughts, you are how you communicate your thoughts” very much how “you are not your words you are your actions”. “You are not your goals you are your systems”, and “you are not your idols, you are your friends”.

A good life, according to Incan culture, is one with good work, good love, good learning. Good work requires productivity & thinking ahead. Good love requires presence & living only in the now. Good education requires a mixture of the two—an intention—regarding when to think in the moment and when to plan ahead.

YOLO means you should spend each and every moment intentionally working towards some direction. Surround yourself with people who make that end goal beam clearer.

“The difference between the warrior and the ordinary man is that the warrior sees everything as a challenge, while the ordinary man sees everything as a blessing or a curse."

Look what you did in 80 days. One year has four times that many. If I have 80 years ahead, that is 320 times over what I did this summer. The length of one's life is not some looming, undefined constant. It is a malleable measure of how one actually lived.