The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel

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I’m having an Indian coffee in the Churchgate section of Mumbai, roughly 15 hours after my arrival here. Since then, I’ve come in from the airport, crashed at a sad hotel, changed hotels, changed money, and tried to begin the process of acclimation to a culture that is new to me.

Mumbai is not a good place to show up without a room reservation. I knew this from reading the guides, but despite a few late night Skype calls and two email attempts, I have no reservation.

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First, a brief warning: this trip report, and the forthcoming ones about this trip and others, may be more detailed than some readers prefer. My regular essays on Life, Work, and Travel will continue to be posted on the usual schedule, so you can choose to read what you enjoy and skip what you don’t.

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I left Seattle on March 13th, and I’ll be back in early April. This trip focuses on India, but I’ll also be in Bangladesh and Hong Kong. I had a 6:00 a.m. flight to L.A. from Sea-Tac, and I’ll pick up the story on my Singapore Airlines flight to Tokyo after a few hours of transit time in LAX airport.

SQ 011 LAX-NRT

Miss Ling is visiting each passenger in the upper deck of the 747 and confirming their lunch order. She stops in front of 14H, where I’m reading the L.A. Times, and looks down at the passenger manifest for at least twenty seconds.

“Mr. Guillebeau?” she finally asks, terribly mispronouncing my name in the way most speakers of Asian languages tend to do.

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Until a few months ago, the last time I visited a Wal-Mart store was more than four years ago. There are no Wal-Marts in Africa (yet), nor are there any in central Seattle where I live now.

Last Christmas, however, I received a gift that I didn’t really have a use for. Attached to the gift was the original store receipt from Wal-Mart, so I decided to break my four-year unofficial boycott of America’s low-price leader.

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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing…
Alexander Pope, 1709
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Thanks to the use of Frequent Flyer Miles, I flew back to New York City from Bucharest last year in Delta’s nice BusinessElite cabin. Hanging out in the airline lounge before the flight, I met up with another traveler, a professional musician from New York named Hannah Chang.

Hannah was the only person I had ever met that was carrying tickets for two confirmed BusinessElite seats all to herself. Technically, she didn’t use both of them for herself—instead, one was for her and one was for her cello, which traveled with her wherever she went.

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Traveling between Budapest and Prague in the summer of 2004, I suddenly realized how comfortable I felt with the process of moving from place to place. I was 26 years old and beginning to travel independently. It no longer felt strange to fly between continents or change currencies three times in a week.

Adding up my adventures up to that point, I found that I had been to about 35 countries. Nearly a third of them were in Africa, and I knew I’d be going to at least 5 more over the next year.

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