Requiem For Megatrip

I despise the phrase “adventure of a lifetime”. Immediately conjuring images of study abroad juniors about to switch majors to art history after 8 weeks in Florence, it’s about as bearable as other all-time classics: “Don’t be a tourist”, “Barthhhelona” and “I’m starting a travel blog!”. But there’s a deeper, existential resentment I have, not just toward “adventure of a lifetime”, but toward what it ultimately implies. To me, and I recognize this is an unrepentant language nerd reading way too much into what is meant as an offhand comment, it smacks of resignation. Complacency. Why settle for X trip (or X anything) being the best of your lifetime? When the trip ends, does that mean that’s as adventurous as your life is going to get? Also, and most importantly, who says a lifetime can only have one defining adventure?

And so now that the sun has descended on The Megatrip (or at least this iteration of it), I refuse to say that’s what the past several months have been for us. And while I had these opinions on “adventure of a lifetime” prior to our journey, now that it’s over I also don’t think the phrase, dramatic as it is, is quite encompassing enough to accurately describe what happened here.

This journey contained multitudes. It had sickness and health, riches and poverty. It had fights and disagreements. It had sweat, blood, sweat, tears, and sweat. It had sublimity, peace, and love beyond description. It had momentary enemies, and eternal friends, and more timeless weirdos than can ever be written about. It was delirium. It was chaos. It was a constant state of dehydration. It was never once being less than elated to wake up in the morning.

It was a reclamation of life, one that for 30 years often felt, correctly or incorrectly, as if it had been running on a somewhat predetermined course, but that four and a half glorious months was ours and ours alone, completely sovereign from and unconcerned with what was expected or dictated or societally implied for us. It was the terrifying thrill of choice with no context. Of agency with no agenda. Of a decision that was completely, irrefutably, and permanently ours. It was accepting ownership of that decision and all the consequences that came with it, while simultaneously doing everything in our capacity to make it worth it. It was James Van Der Beek throwing a football in the face of that pesky paradigm, forever dislodging the Lone Star can of possibility from its lofty inertial perch.

It was so. Damn. Stupid. Just the worst most irresponsible thing we could think of dong. A self-created pothole that will without a doubt skew our alignment, weaken our tires, and bless us with unidentifiable glovebox rattles for miles and miles to come. It was ill conceived. It was ill advised. It was premature. It was too late. It was both overpacked and underfunded. Overthought and underplanned. Overblown and underestimated. Over too soon and most likely, at least during its time, underappreciated.

It was travel. Wonderful, butterfly-inducing, consciousness-shifting travel. It was seeing things we’d dreamt of since childhood positively dwarf our expectations. It was learning new words. It was pointing to order. It was asking for WiFi passwords. It was bottled water. It was points redemption. It was malfunctioning ticket kiosks. It was getting from A to B. It was forgetting about B and jumping straight to R, or realizing that A.5 is even better. It was delays and missed connections and wrong turns and sunsets and live music and viewpoints and inside jokes I’m not sure we even understand anymore. It was the near-nightly, torso-warming sensation of being pleasantly overwhelmed with appreciation for everything you absorbed since waking up. It was the equally torso-warming sensation of nearly shitting yourself in a very public place.

It was delicious. It was laab. It was bun cha. It was babi guling. It was hawker stands and Turkish coffee. It was stuffed pigeon and grilled zebra. It was tajine and stewed rabbit. It was arrabiata and amatriciana. It was burgers both ham and octopus. It was soups, so, so many soups. It was wine straight from the barrel. It was beer straight from the monastery. It was a cold sandwich eaten on the floor of a Malaysian airport. It was hot lamb cooked under the sands of the Jordanian desert.

It had planes. It had trains. It had tuktuks and helicopters. It had motorcycle ride shares. It had off-road buggies. It had dingys, electric boats, kayaks, ferries, safari cruises, boat taxis, longboats, slow boats, tour boats, and show boats. It had roads less traveled, roads very traveled, and roads that probably shouldn’t be traveled. It had a driver who took us on a 40 minute detour in the middle of Vietnam so that he could buy cigarettes. It had a landslide in the Laotian mountains that stranded us on the side of the road for several rubble-clearing hours. It had multiple inflatable rafts, which were almost always pink and were very often donuts.

It had places. An endless stream of astounding places. It had antiquity and modernity. It had mountains and lakes and oceans and deserts. It had villages. It had countries. It had continents. It had brand new places. It had old favorite places. It had pristine places. It had filthy places. It had finite places whose borders you could touch, and boundless places that seemed to extend into ether.

It had starts, finishes, false starts, surprise endings. It had suspense, character arcs, callbacks to previous episodes, and obligatory clip shows. It had childhood, adolescence, midlife crisis, and old age. It had a story. It had mythology. It had Sara. It had David. And it had a planet at our disposal. It had more experience in just a few months than in a decade of normality. It was our creation. It was our master. It was our home and our reality. It was Megatrip. It was a lifetime of an adventure.