✉️ A Note on the Voyage Journal
The Voyage Journal is a collection of personal reflections written throughout my travels—capturing raw moments, transitions, and experiences as they happened. These entries are less about guides and more about the human side of the journey.
I feel sad. Utterly and completely sad. Not because of something that happened today, and not because of something that happened yesterday. It’s life itself. Life is beautiful, and every day in it is a major blessing. So why do I feel sad sometimes? Because every now and then I step outside of myself, take a grand panoramic view of everything, and remember just how short life really is.
“…being a traveler allows you to realize how short life is in such a big beautiful world.”
Being a traveler has only made that feeling stronger. It allows you to realize how short life is in such a big, beautiful world. Too often people move through their “perfect lives” assuming there will always be more time. More years. More chances. More later. But it is far too common to hear the same words over and over again: time flies and I wish I had done that.
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 Learning to make coffee (+latte art) |
The Life I Once Dreamed Of
That is why I am where I am now. Here in the small port town of Picton, New Zealand, enjoying a cappuccino in a café overlooking the Marlborough Sounds, living a good life with a bartending, serving, and barista job. Learning all of those skills in a hotel so I can take them with me wherever I go, all while having fun and getting paid to do it. Living in a quaint home with a Kiwi flatmate and my dream motorcycle sitting right outside my bedroom window.
The path I chose in life was something I had dreamed about for years, and even now it still feels unreal sometimes. At this point I had already seen 32 countries and many more places in between. Hostels, camping, Couchsurfing, cross-ocean flights, long hitchhiking days, cultural encounters, rough moments, and unforgettable highs. From rupturing my Achilles in Hawaiʻi to being stranded in Albania on the road. From the pleasures of Greece, to snowboarding in Slovenia, to connecting with locals in Cuba, to riding a motorcycle through New Zealand. It all felt like proof that the life I once imagined had somehow become real.
Refreshing swim in the Aegean (Folegandros)
Motorcycle Diaries, New Zealand
There Is Still So Much More to See
And still, even with all of that, I know how much more there is that I want from life. I remember telling someonerecently, while naming countries of the world on a quiz website, that I truly do want to see the world. Not just the usual names people throw around. Not just Bangkok, the Phi Phi islands, Europe’s major capitals, the East Coast of Australia, the pyramids of Giza, or the sands of Waikīkī. I want more than the expected.
I want to see East Timor on the edge of Indonesia. I want to see the faces of people in Tajikistan wondering why a New Yorker is in their country. I want to cross borders through Sudan, Djibouti, and Eritrea just for the hell of it. Dance salsa in Puerto Rico. Get lost in India. See Tuvalu, Nauru, and Kiribati and better understand climate change. Engage with locals in Brazil with my rusty Portuguese. Hitch rides on sailboats through the Eastern Caribbean and South Pacific. Travel the corners of America with my dad. Help improve my mom’s Spanish in Colombia for for a dream Latin America voyage. Learn to become a better bartender, cook, barista, server, tour guide, dance instructor, and just a better person day by day, with travel as my excuse to do all of it.
Te Paki Sand Dunes New Zealand
That is really what I mean when I say travel makes me sad in both a good and bad way. It opens your eyes to how beautiful the world is, but also to how little time there really is to experience everything you want. One minute you are enjoying coffee on a rooftop in Cuba, Bosnian coffee in Sarajevo, iced coffee in Honolulu, or cappuccinos in the Marlborough Sounds while writing a blog like this. One day you are 22, driving through the Florida Keys and beginning to leave a long phase of depression behind. Another day you are approaching 30, traveling across America by rail and living the life you once dreamed of during your darkest days.
Are You Living Yours?
(Ironically, Louis Armstrong is playing….)
What I do know is this: time really does fly. And I could find myself in entirely different corners of the world just as I am, literally, right now. What matters most to me is that whatever time is doing, I am not wasting it away behind a desk for 98 percent of my years. This life was not a mistake. I am living it with zero regrets, and not once have I seriously wanted to return to the life I used to live, the one that often felt like slow suicide. Ten years later, I would look back at this and tell myself “I have always been on the right path”.
I am living this life not later, but now. And I created it in such a way that I can look back and say life did not live me. I lived life.
Now ask yourself, are you living yours?
Ten years later…
