Re-Entry

From Cusco to Lima to Atlanta to San Francisco then the airport shuttle back to San Jose and finally I'm home. The pets are not dead. The TV is not stolen. And I don't have a family of possums living in my dishwasher. However, something smells a little funky in the refrigerator. I should have thrown away that Brie before I left.

I'm sitting here at the computer, the dogs are asleep on the floor next to me and I'm drinking a beer. It's amazing how fast you settle back into your old routines. In a way it feels like I never left. But in another way, I can't believe I'm already home.

One of the strange things about travel is how it plays with your sense of time -- and not just through jet lag. Any trip I've ever taken of any appreciable length seems to fly past at high speed, but stretch out behind me in slow motion. This trip was no exception. I can't believe five weeks have gone by already, but when I look back, it seems like it's been a year since I left.

As I write this, I'm downloading 602 pictures from my digital camera to my computer. Like the camera, I still have a lot to process. It's beyond a cliche to say that travel changes you, but the reason it's become a cliche is because it's true, and so people say it a lot. It's only been five weeks but I do feel changed.

More important than anything else I've learned on this trip, I've learned that being born in a Westernized, first-world country is like winning a sort of Universal Lottery. I've seen enough shantytowns, one-armed children begging on street corners and open sewers for me to realize how good I really have it.

I read recently that 2% of the population of the world holds more than half its wealth, and that almost all of that 2% live in Europe and North America. Those numbers sound impressive but they start to hit home even more when a five-year-old kid rows up to your tour boat in a bowl and asks you for a dollar.

My trip was always fascinating, but really, it wasn't always fun. Sometimes, it was painful.

I had an amazing opportunity, and I was incredibly lucky to have the time and money to take a trip like this. I met wonderful people, ate some truly, truly disgusting food and saw more eye-popping wonders than one person has the right to expect to see in an entire lifetime. But I've come away from this experience with the realization that the world, while beautiful, is also an incredibly hard and unfair place.

Often on my trip, I felt like I was slumming. It's easy to take an air-conditioned cab to a spectacular temple ruin, snap a few photos, and then ride back to your air-conditioned hotel so you can take a nice shower and go have dinner. When you get tired of the heat and the bugs, when the government collapses in yet another coup, or when the monsoons flood the town, you can just go home. On the other hand, the kids who should be in school but instead spend their days trying to sell postcards to people like you are stuck there, and so are their families. And largely, nobody on the planet cares if they make it, or if they don't, because 98% of the planet is too busy themselves trying to survive.

Despite what I wrote before I left about happily embracing all the pre-packaged cleanliness of modern tourism, now I'm not so sure. I wonder if it's a good thing to travel to these places, happily snapping pictures and buying Angkor Wat paperweights, then flying away again, or if it's like going to some kind of zoo where the exhibits are people.

I can now see the appeal of eco-tourism, where before I felt like it was something hippie wannabes did. I think I would feel better about visiting a place if I were going to help dig a well or build a school in ADDITION to sightseeing and buying souvenirs. It's great to have come up a winner in the Universal Lottery, but I think there has got to be some responsibility that comes with it.

Still, another part of me thinks (hopes) that at least by visiting a place and spending some money there, I've at least done something positive. Maybe, in a teeny, tiny way, I've helped re-distribute the world's wealth just a little.

So, my trip is over, but the thinking has just started. I'm grateful to be home, I'm grateful to have a home to go back to in a country where stable (if inept) government, potable water and electricity are the norm, and I'm grateful to be among that vanishingly small percentage of the population of the world that has the luxury of engaging in tourism. I've learned something important. Now I just have to decide what to do with the information.

But no matter what I do, I know I need to do something differently.

So, it's true that travel changes a person. This trip has changed me. I'm just not sure how, yet.