Gabriel Morris - Following My Thumb

I took a break from traveling over the next several years. I arrived back in the United States from India in the spring of 2000, flat broke and, no big surprise, with little idea of what exactly I was doing next. After some concerted pondering, I decided to head in a completely different direction and go back to school to complete my pursuit of a B.A., which Id abandoned in the mid-90s, when I left Oregon for a life on the road. Two years later, spring of 2002, I received my B.A. in World Religions from Humboldt State University in northern California.

I moved to Portland, Oregon, where I had some friends from living previously in Oregon, as well as an assortment of family members. I attended a few Rainbow Gatherings during the summers, but didnt do any major trips. I worked for a local delivery service, hiked in the beautiful Cascade mountains, went to hot springs, swam in mountain streams, biked around the city and skied on the side of picturesque Mt. Hood.

Five years after coming back from India, I was ready for more adventure. I made plans to head back to India again for the following winter, for three months. I decided to explore just the south this time, since I would be there through the winter months. I landed in Chennai (formerly Madras), the largest city in Tamil Nadu state, at 11:30 pm on December 31st, 2005, just in time to experience another Indian New Year. This would become an ongoing tradition of sorts over subsequent trips.

Following that trip, I went back to Portland and my old job, and started saving up for something bigger. A year-and-a-half later, I left Portland for an eight-month adventure that would take me to Hawaii, Thailand, India and Nepal. I stopped in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, both on the way to Asia and on the way back, and both times hiked out to the Kalapani Valley. I spent two-and-a-half months in Thailand, another three months in India, and two weeks in Nepal trekking through the Himalaya to the spectacular Annapurna Base Camp at the base of Mt. Annapurna, tenth highest mountain in the world.

Upon returning from that trip, I decided not to go back to my old job as a delivery driver battling against the frenzied rush hour traffic of the city. Instead, I decided to take advantage of my Canadian heritage. I went on a solo road trip, first to attend the 2008 U.S. national Rainbow Gathering in Wyoming, which happened to be where my first major Rainbow Gathering had been back in 1994. From there I continued driving north into Canada, where I eventually ended up in Jasper National Park, in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, and found a job working as a gardener for one of the local hotel chains in the small town of Jasper at the center of the park.

After spending the summer in Canada, I decided to head back to Portland, take the old job back and save up some more for another trip. Eight months later, I was stepping onto that big ol jet airliner once again, this time back to Greece. I took a mountain bike with me, and spent three months exploring Greece, especially the Greek islands, by bike. I met a Greek woman, Dianna, in the course of the trip, who I ended up traveling with for much of the time; and she introduced me to some of the more beautiful Greek islands that most tourists dont make it to, where you could camp on gorgeous beaches for free and enjoy the sand, sun and sea with hardly anyone else around.

I then flew from Greece across the Mediterranean to Egypt for three weeks, where I visited the Great Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings, floated down the Nile and ventured into the vast, desolate deserts of western Egypt. I then flew back to Greece, met up with Dianna and we flew to Turkey for three weeks together.

The highlight of Turkey was, without a doubt, Cappadocia, one of the strangest and most fascinating places Ive seen in all of my travels. Bizarre rock formations and fairy chimneys (a natural geological phenomenon that looks like massive upside-down ice cream cones) cover a huge area of central Turkey that makes for amazing hiking and exploring. And adding to the intrigue of the region, the area was inhabited for thousands of years by people who carved cave dwellings into the fairy chimneys and cliffs, and even built entire cities completely underground, up to twelve stories deep that could house up to 30,000 people. You can actually take a tour down into one of these underground cities, a complex network of caves and tunnels that feels like something previously inhabited by trolls and goblins, straight out of Lord of the Rings .

Following my four months in the Mediterranean, I was back to work in Jasper, Canada, saving up for another trip. Eight months later, in the fall of 2010, I was off yet again, on a five-month trip, this time to the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and India for the fourth time (and my fourth Indian New Years celebration). I went back to Rishikesh on the Ganges, visited the Taj Mahal again, revisited Gokarna where this time I spent two weeks on Om Beach, the beach that Id visited briefly while searching for the Rainbow Gathering; and I also visited tons of new places, since theres always lots more to see in India. Despite having spent more than fifteen months now traveling around India, I still have a long list of places to see on my next visit.

As for the future, who knows? Im still living life a day at a time, following the wind, my heart, my gut, my thumb to see what or where Im meant to explore and experience next. I have a long list of new places Id love to visit: Spain, where Id like to walk the Road to Santiago, a popular spiritual pilgrimage route; as well as Australia and New Zealand, Iceland, Mongolia, Mexico, Belize, Peru and Brazil. I hope to go back to Greece to visit other islands that I heard about when I was there, but didnt make it to. And Ive also wanted to go back to Egypt, where there is lots more to explore, as well as other parts of the Middle East and North Africa such as Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Syria and Israel. But of course, thats very much up in the air for the time being, as political turbulence rocks that part of the world. These days, with so much change going on, you never know where the next revolution or other upheaval is going to spring up.

Life continues to be an adventure in the unknown. I certainly could have planned things out better, put my hard-earned money to more practical things like a down payment on a house. But I dont regret how Ive lived my life in the slightest. When its all said and done, life is simply a series of experiences, which you can grow through and learn something from, if youre lucky. There are a million different ways to approach life, and they each have their own pros and cons, challenges and opportunities. Im grateful for the chance to have seen some sliver of the rest of the world, how other people live, and to have been challenged by such a wide variety of strange and remarkable experiences. Ive missed out on some other valuable experiences in the process. But anytime you make choices, you step through doors as other doors close behind you. So it goes. Perhaps my next two decades wont be quite as exciting and adventurous as the previous twenty years. But Im happy knowing that I managed to pack a lifetime, or perhaps two, into those years already.

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I landed in London, England two days after my eighteenth birthday for a summer abroad; and soon found myself hit by an undeniable wave of culture shock. Other than having lived in Vancouver, Canada for the first year-and-a-half of my life Id never been outside of the U.S. Now, in a mere matter of hours I was rather abruptly dumped six thousand miles away from everyone and everything familiar to me. It was not unlike stepping into an elevator, and then stepping out of it onto a different planet.