Where To Next?

Travel blog of a small elephant and his person, featuring their travels to the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, South Africa, India, Nepal, Thailand, and across the USA — someday to be resurrected.

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For the new travel story of Elephant Abroad, head to instagram.com/timvhay

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There are...hmmm.

There are so many songs that I want to use to end this blog. I want to give you sad and yet hopeful, something like Apparat’s “Goodbye” or Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship” or Colin Hay’s “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You.” I want to give you something that is quintessentially my music, like Dave Matthews Band’s “You Never Know” or The Fray’s “Happiness” or The Head and the Heart’s “Another Story.” I encourage you to listen to all of those other songs.

But we must end with this. It’s a song that lingers a little longer. That builds and fades. That is long enough for you to close your eyes and remember all that we’ve done together, all the places we’ve seen, all the people we’ve met, but just a little too short to grasp any of them. It’s quiet enough to allow you to remember all the other songs and sounds we’ve experienced for the past many months together but loud enough to drown out the present. It is Jónsi & Alex’s “Happiness.” It is my happiness.

I first heard this song off an album called Dark Was the Night. That title perfectly encapsulates where we are right now: dark is the night, cold is the ground. There is much that has been left undecided and unsaid. But there will be time for all those other songs I mentioned above, there will be more adventures and stories to come. 

Dark the night may be, but bright the dawn will always break.

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Ludwig, 7. Tiny elephant, tiny friend.

Signing off.

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Tim, 22. Student, world traveler.

Signing off.

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Day 120: And so it ends as it began: two tiny elephants and one approximately normal-sized human, bags and trunks packed, together but alone, traveling to yet another place to call home— it’s just, this time, that’s where they’re going to stay. At least, until adventure calls them again. Where to next?

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Visit Original Link

A goodbye message from me, Jon Stewart, and Bruce Springsteen.

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Janet, 55, Katie, 25, and Michael, 55. Family.

“Parents are the same the world over,” Mama Vanda told us way back in South Africa, in Langa. But these ones seem pretty special.

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Goodnight, Travel Well.

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This is the only time that a song has ever appeared on ElephantAbroad more than once. The first time was in August 2014. I was on a train in Amsterdam, quietly getting lost and desperately hoping to find my way to a hostel all by myself. Same big backpack that I brought on this trip.

“May be long to get me there, feels like I’ve been everywhere, but someday I’ll be coming home,” John sings. That someday has come and gone-- I’m home now.

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I feel all of our slow returns to U.S. soil are what's really making America great again.

Rina, in a chat we had once I got back home. She was showing her mom this blog at the time. Some of my proudest moments have been hearing about how other people read the blog. Chris and Emma’s referencing it. Karabo’s saying she laughed aloud reading stories on here that she herself was involved in at the time. Meredith’s threatening to read it aloud to the class one morning. Joseph’s sending it to his mother. Calvin’s saying he appreciated my perspective on things. Nancy’s telling me that she planned to simply send her family members to ElephantAbroad when they asked her questions about her travels. My own grandfather’s telling me after reading it during the Netherlands trip that he felt he was meeting me for the first time. My grandmother’s telling me that, after I’d come home from Switzerland, she’d put down her iPad and wept because she, too, felt like it was the end of a long trip. Well, now it’s the end of another.

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Customs Conversation

Customs Official: Where're you coming from?

Tim: London.

CO: Were you there for business?

Tim: Nope, just had a layover there from Thailand.

CO: Have you visited any other countries since leaving the US?

Tim: Uh, yeah, India. South Africa. Brazil, Nepal.

CO: Oh my god what were you doing in all those places?

Tim: Studying abroad.

CO: Oh my god you studied abroad in all those places?

Tim: Sure, yeah.

CO: What were you studying?

Tim: Urban planning.

CO: Oh my god how long were you there for?

Tim: It's been almost five months.

CO: Well, welcome home.

Tim: Am I all set?

CO: You're all set.

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I love this video.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one collecting little bits of memories every day. Amani, who’s been featured on this blog a few times, was making a one-second video every day. And, now that she’s put it all together, it’s amazing. Truly.

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A year of travel, mapped:

By car and bus with friends to Ithaca. By plane with Dad to Houston, then, in another season, with the same company by car to Maine. By cars with the family to Truro. By train alone to New York City. By plane with all sorts of strangers to São Paulo. By bus with some newfound friends to Rio de Janeiro. By plane with some pretty cool kids to Johannesburg, then another plane to Cape Town. Along the Garden Route to Jeffreys Bay with some of the best people I know. By plane to Dubai and then to Ahmedabad with a whole lot of the best people in the world. By bus to Udaipur, along a bumpy road, but happy to bump along because I was surrounded by friends. By plane to Delhi and then onto Agra by bus, with your hand in mine. By plane to Kathmandu with a few of the best that still remained. By plane to Bangkok and then Phuket to find a few more. By plane to Delhi with food poisoning. Then two planes-- one to London, another to Boston-- to come back home for the holidays and to start a new year.

I guess 2016 wasn’t so bad after all. Wonder where 2017′s adventures will take us.

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"I'll see you in the future when we're older And we are full of stories to be told Cross my heart and hope to die I'll see you with your laughter lines.”

I'll see you in the future when we're old. 

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Best Yet: IHPeople

15 plane rides, 4 continents, 6 countries, 12 airports, 4 months, 120 days, 413 blog posts-- including 32 songs, 5 videos, over 67 quotations, and too many photos and stories to count-- 2 traveling faculty, 2 tiny elephants, 102 elephant photos.

But, among all these numbers, there’s one number that stands out: 18 people.

I’m tempted to write something to these people. It would have to be something big, something epic, something to match their intensity and brilliance. But I can’t, at least not at the moment. That’s because this is as much their blog as it is mine or Ludwig’s. Their stories and quotes and photos and music are here. Their emotions and thoughts have influenced mine. But I’ll give you two small stories: the first came in the first week of the program. We had to decide an order for all of us to be Person of the Day. So we played that game where you stand in a circle in silence and shout out numbers one by one but without communicating with each other. If two people say the same number at the same time, the whole group has to start over. Typically, this sort of game takes many tries-- it’s like untying the human knot. But we did it in one try. It was destiny. The second story came in the last week of the program: our Program Director told us that, in her 15 years of working for SIT Study Abroad, she had never seen a group work as well together as ours.

Now go click on the archives of ElephantAbroad and get lost in their adventures. If you’ve read this blog and still don’t know how important these 18 people are to me, you missed the point: this blog was never about my and two tiny elephants’ traveling the world-- it was about those three entities’ making friends along the way.

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Tears

There I am, sitting on the second to last flight of my semester, this one from Delhi to London, watching Slumdog Millionaire, and still feeling a little sick from my Thai food poisoning. But it’s cool-- I’m going home.

Then, in the middle of some scene about a third of the way through Slumdog, I feel a well of emotion starting up inside me. Slumdog Millionaire is a good tear-jerker, it’s a highly emotional movie-watching experience, but something told me this wasn’t a reaction to the movie. It was so strange because my mind and my eyes were totally occupied with watching the movie and yet I realized that I was tearing up because the trip was over. The stress of the past day was over. The friendships and relationships and constant movement and daily new experiences and the joys and the sorrows of four months abroad were over.

I let these thoughts swim around in my head as Jamal and the Police Inspector argued on the seatback in front of me. There are little things in movies set in India that are going to stand out to me now: the head wobble, the constant consumption of chai, the Indian actors whom I’ve now seen on reality television shows and on daytime TV in Ahmedabad. But the little emotional thoughts in my head were coming to a head. I unbuckled my seatbelt and walked to the bathroom.

I locked the door of the bathroom and, under the glaring fluorescence of an airplane bathroom, sobbed my eyes out. The tears just kept coming-- I had no interest or energy left to stop their flowing.

But, at some point, I had a realization: these were tears of joy, not sadness. I looked in the mirror and saw that this plane ride wasn’t the end of the journey-- it was just the end of the beginning. But it is still the beginning of twenty new friendships, of new resolutions and ways of communicating, just barely the beginning of world travels and hikes and backpacking trips and train rides across states and countries and continents. It’s the beginning. It’s twenty new beginnings. It’s resolutions beginning. It’s clarity and being in tune with yourself beginning. It’s relationships beginning

I also looked in that mirror and realized that I have green eyes. I’d always thought that they were brown. Maybe they’ve changed too.

I dried my eyes, washed my face, plugged in my music, and walked up and down the aisles of the plane just like old times. Every plane we’ve been on this semester-- fifteen in total-- I’ve taken a little walk down the aisles, jamming to my tunes. It’s just, this time, there’s a tinge of sadness because there’s no little friends for me to spot sleeping or make eye contact with and wave to.

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“Can life really be so astoundingly beautiful?” I once asked on this blog. Turns out the answer was always yes.