Many paths to the same goal

There is a lot of talk of New Year’s resolutions lately and on how to make them effective. Reading them reminded me of the following incident.

I was waiting in line for a movie screening at the Max Mueller bhawan in the Kala Goda area in downtown Mumbai. The man standing in front of me was telling his friend the story of how he gave up smoking, and since I was standing right next to them I heard it too.

Apparently the man was a heavy smoker. He used to smoke around 20 cigarettes a day, buying them one at a time from the small kiosk right in front of his office. This was many years ago, when each cigarette cost one rupee.

One day, he went to the kiosk and the boy said the cost was Rs. 1.25 per cigarette.
“Abhey, I have been buying for years from this shop. Even yesterday I paid just one rupee. So give it to me for one rupee,” the man said.
But the boy at the kiosk wouldn’t budge and wanted Rs. 1.25. The man refused to pay that, and right there he stopped and had never smoked a single cigarette after that.

Top 5 Takeaways from attending the Adventure Travel Expo 2009 in Chicago

This past Saturday, in spite of excessive snow and unplowed roads Rupal and I drove to the Rosemont Convention Center. We didn’t want to miss the Adventure Travel Expo. It’s an annual event and whenever we’ve managed to go we've been inspired wandering the booths and listening to the presenters who are authors of travel books, personalities from The Travel Channel and the National Geographic Adventure magazine.

Here are my top takeaways from this year's visit:

1. It’s happening in Africa: Africa seems to be poised to enter mainstream tourism for 2009. For this crowd of travelers Bangkok’s Kao San Road has become very passe. We saw a number of talks and booths around the travel opportunities in Africa. For those looking for something beyond Morocco and South Africa, this might be the year that Gabon, Rwanda and Niger become real possibilities.

2. Experiential Travel: Fewer and fewer people seem to be opting for the "let’s sack-out-on-the-condo-by-the-beach” type of vacations. Increasingly, people want their travel to also be meaningful experiences, usually by adding a volunteering or a social benefit component to their vacations.

3. Visit just one place, but slowly: Given our limited travel time and the ever-increasing list of places still to be seen, it is natural to rush around checking off places. This crowd is advocating a slower pace of travel. (More depth versus breadth.)

4. Green is a given now: The adventure travel bunch was eco-friendly long before the rest of us even heard of the term. This is an interesting bunch of people, who live in tents for weeks, spend as little for food as they can and yet they have loads of cutting-edge electronic gadgets with solar-powered battery chargers.

5. You make it happen: A paid gig at National Geographic is the poster-child for dream jobs everywhere. Listening to a number of National Geographic writers and presenters, I see that these guys made it happen with the right combination of talent, ambition, gumption and unrelenting perseverance. (I read somewhere that Food Channel personality Rachel Ray, before she broke through, used to regularly make 25- and 50- mile trips in her local area for her cooking shows which barely 3 women attended.) These people are travel writers and photographers because they were working at it while the rest of us ventured no further than wishful thinking.

Related Post: About the expo

Why Chichen Itza and not someplace else?

Back in 1996, the framed poster of the huge terraced pyramid with staircases running down the center of each side was one that had caught my eye. I had just joined as an employee of a major US airline and for the first few weeks I was walking around in intimidation and awe. That framed poster used to hang right in front of our credit union. All airlines have clever posters that make people want to visit destinations. I soon realized that the posters worked just as effectively on employees like me.

The poster was untitled, and so it took me a few weeks to figure out what it was. The Web was very much around in ’96, but it wasn’t as easy to search for things in it. Eventually, I learned that it was of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.

My desire to go visit this place was born directly as a result of looking at that poster whenever I went to deposit a check at our employee credit union. Of late, and for reasons I haven’t yet fully understood, I am enamored by one particular aspect of wanderlust: when do we first decide to go visit a place and why? (I posted about this re. Kazakhstan as well.)

Chichen Itza is now one of the New Seven wonders of the world. That would be reason enough to go see it, but I didn’t know that until I was in Yucatan. My wife and I made several plans to go visit Chichen Itza, but they never panned out. So it took me twelve years to go visit the grand pyramid (El Castillo).

It was educational, it was great, and yes, it was crowded. It would be easy for me to say that I ended up disappointed. But these days, we are all post-modern travelers. We expect to be disappointed in marquee sights like the Eiffel, the Taj or Machu Pichu. The reality of viewing them can never match our unrealistic expectations nurtured over decades.

But this letdown is not always a bad thing. On its flip side is something quite positive. In places and towns where we don’t know enough to look forward to anything, we are almost always pleasantly surprised.