Rebellious Kids Just Grow Up and Get Passports
I have a theory that rebellious teenagers should grow up to become solo travelers.
The same personality traits that made us terrible at following rules make us surprisingly good at navigating foreign countries with no plan.
If you knew me between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, you know I was an absolute menace. Everyone has an era of moronic behavior — but wow did I push the envelope.
For legal and reputational reasons, several stories from this time will not be included in this essay. The people who know about the police chase and my brief experience with the juvenile justice system already know. And well, it’s funnier when I tell it in person anyway.
In hindsight I’m grateful this phase came early enough not to ruin my adult life, but late enough to be formative in learning a few lessons that probably needed to be learned. Being a terrible teenager actually takes a certain level of bravery and audacity that I think is admirable. The number of times I found myself in a potentially life-threatening situation very far away from where my parents thought I was is… a little alarming.
But hey. At least I can say I didn’t chicken out and call home.
Ironically, I’m starting to realize I didn’t really grow out of this.
I just got a passport.
Rules only matter if you can’t get away with breaking them
I remember my parents once taking my bedroom door off the hinges and bolting my window shut to prevent me from sneaking out when I was fourteen.
What did I do about this?
Well, I found a drill and took the screws out of the window myself.
After that I cut a lock of my hair off and put it on my pillow so the lumps under my blanket would look more realistically like I was sleeping there. Looking back, the dedication to the bit was impressive.
I’ve always had a deeply rooted philosophical belief that rules are more like suggestions.
Curfews? Suggestions.
School attendance? Flexible guidelines as long as the grades stayed good.
Take the bus straight home? Well if I take the bus to someone else’s house, then technically my parents have no other choice to come pick me up… right?
Grounding me also proved to be surprisingly ineffective.
Whenever my phone got taken away I would simply ask around until I found a friend with an old phone they weren’t using. If that didn’t work, I’d dig up an old iPod Touch and sneak onto Snapchat and Instagram after 10 pm once everyone thought I was asleep.
At the time this behavior was called “being a difficult teenager.”
In hindsight, I think it was really just creative problem solving.
Turns Out Those Skills Translate
The same stubborn resourcefulness that helped me evade parental supervision also turns out to be very useful while traveling.
For example: if I had been the kind of person who listened to rules and fear-mongering, I probably wouldn’t have gone paramotoring alone with a random pilot in Laos for $30 before the government shut the whole thing down.
And if I hadn’t spent my teenage years solving problems creatively, I probably wouldn’t have survived three weeks in Thailand without a phone after mine got stolen at the Full Moon Party. Instead I simply made friends that would let me use their phone for necessities, and traveled thirteen hours back to the Phuket airport (where my luggage was stored) to retrieve the backup phone I had asked my mom to bring when she came to visit.
Are you starting to see the parallels?
The Adult Version of Sneaking Out
Don’t even get me started on when I started learning to drive.
The number of times I stole my mom’s car from the driveway, in the middle of the night, just to go on joyrides down random backroads while my friends hung out the windows pretending we were in a music video is… not something I should probably admit publicly.
But here’s the funny thing.
At twenty-four I’m driving through rural Indonesia with music blasting in my ears doing the exact same thing. That same audacity is the reason I’ve rented motorbikes that I absolutely should not have been trusted with, taught myself how to ride them, and then used them to go on road trips across islands I had never even heard of six months earlier.
The only real difference is the visa stamp.
A Very Normal Travel Style (Apparently)
Now it’s completely normal for me to show up in a new country with no eSIM downloaded, no local currency, and only a vague idea of where my hostel is. Come to think of it, I actually haven’t had a debit card to withdraw cash from ATMs in 4 months. I mostly just hope the city has Western Union — otherwise I’ll make a friend with a debit card.
This feeling of semi-controlled chaos feels sort of the same as when my friends and I used to tell our parents we were staying the night at each other’s houses then quite literally just seeing where the night would take us, which usually meant pulling an all-nighter house party hopping and hanging out at gas stations at ungodly hours of the early morning.
As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a random family-owned Thai coffee shop that I wandered into. I arrived in Bangkok this morning on an overnight bus from Chiang Mai after a night of very questionable sleep and absolutely zero cellular data. After about twenty minutes of wandering around aimlessly, a coffee from 7-Eleven, and some enthusiastic haggling with a group of random men for a motorbike taxi, I somehow ended up exactly where I needed to be, just like the end of a “sleepover”.
My patience for chaos and unpredictability has reached an all-time high, but it also feels vaguely familiar.
The Plan is No plan
Three days ago I randomly decided I wanted to go to Cambodia.
Not for any particularly well-researched reason. I just remembered that Cambodia has one of the largest and oldest temple complexes in the world and some kind of heroic rats, which sounds either extremely fun or extremely questionable. I’m hoping that if I can see these rats they will save me from my extremely unsuccessful love life, but I think really they can just sniff out bombs or something.
So I applied for a visa. It got approved yesterday. I’m leaving tomorrow.
I currently know almost nothing about Cambodia, which historically has never stopped me before. I did look up the rats though, and it turns out they actually detect land mines not bombs. I don’t think they can fix my love life, but I’m going anyway.
Who knows if I would have ended up in Cambodia if it weren’t my creative problem solving, tolerance for chaos, or most importantly a healthy dose of audacity.