Twenty-Six Years of Traveling Around the World

Apparently, I like to travel. I don't know if it's in my genes, or else my jeans or what but there was some sort of adventurous spirit in me from an early age. I first started hitchhiking when I was just seven or eight or nine, somewhere around there. I lived up a dirt road in northern California with my parents and younger brother. The school bus dropped me off at the bottom of the dirt road, and then it was a mile-and-a-half walk from there to our big cabin in the woods. At some point, I got the idea in my head to just kick back in the shade and read a book instead of walking, and catch rides with neighbors.

My global adventures began a decade or so later, when the day after I turned eighteen I hopped on a plane with an oversized, multi-pocketed bright red backpack bound for London, England and a summer of exploring Europe. I put my hitchhiking skills to the test by hitching from London to the southernmost extreme of England at Land's End (where one can gaze wistfully westward across the Atlantic and imagine all the previous, much more adventurous explorers who set out across that ocean, with high hopes of finding a better life in the land I'd just departed).

From that far end of England's land I turned back north and hitched all the way to the top of Scotland at John'O'Groats. I made my way across northwestern Scotland to the ferry and hopped over to Northern Ireland; hitched to the other side of Ireland; and then back again to Dublin, where I started using a Eurail train pass that would get me around the rest of Europe for another three months.

Gabriel Morris in Greece at age 18

In the course of that trip I would sleep on the beaches of Greece, walk from the Aegean Sea to the peak of Mt. Olympus, hike through the Swiss Alps, experience my first traveling romance, sleep out on the streets of Paris and stay in a local's barn for the night in the Pyrenees of southern France. My trip ended with the theft of my backpack while sleeping on the historic Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, in which I lost almost everything I'd traveled with the past 4 months, other than, fortunately, my passport, flight ticket and enough cash to just barely get me back home. I'd never imagined I would be going through U.S. Customs with only a small day pack, wearing a pair of shorts and my Greek sandals. But it is, of course, the #1 rule of travel that you don't do it if you expect everything to go as planned.

I wouldn't leave the country again until another decade later, other than a couple quick jaunts through Canada (place of my birth so it doesn't count as international traveling in my case). However, that's not to say I settled down and lived a normal life during that time. I gave it an honest try a few times, in my own way at least, but was ultimately destined to be a vagabond it seemed.

The one college I'd applied to before leaving for that summer in Europe was, of all places, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. When I got back to California, I remember telling my Dad that I wanted to continue with my travels around the U.S. This despite the fact I had no money left, summer was over and I didn't even have a backpack at that point. But I'd been accepted to the university in Alaska and, almost certainly for the best, my Dad convinced me to go back to college. (I'd attended one semester the previous fall at a local community college, got bored and had started making my travel plans.)

Alaska was a trip and an adventure of its own. Fairbanks is in the center of the state, bitter cold most of the year (ever been in a deep freezer? It's that cold.). The landscapes there are more stark than you might imagine, gently rolling hills scattered with deciduous trees. But I could see the hulking white peak of Mt. Denali just barely on clear days, south of Fairbanks in Denali National Park, right from my dorm room. I made friends with an astronomer and along with some other friends we would go out into the nearby forest with his telescope in the forty-below-zero temperatures and peer into the night sky (since it was mostly dark during the winter, you might as well spend some time looking at the stars). We would go running up and down the dorm stairs for exercise. I'd also brought a pair of cross country skis with me, so I would ski down to the cafeteria for meals, and into the woods beyond campus. When things finally warmed up in the spring to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, people were walking around in shorts.

I got a job working as a housekeeper for a hotel in Denali Park that summer. The following year I transferred with a friend down to the university in Juneau, and then went back to Denali again the next summer. That was 1992. After finishing the spring semester, I took the ferry from Juneau up the panhandle of Alaska to Haines. I then hitchhiked from there up through Canada and to the main part of Alaska to start my job in Denali.

Little did I know at the time that I was following in the hitchhiking footsteps of Chris McCandless, from the book and movie “Into the Wild”, who had hitched up the same highway just a couple months before me. While he was fighting for his very survival that summer just a few dozen miles away north of the park, I was working in a hotel once again and spending the weekends backpacking with friends. I hitchhiked many times from the same tiny town where Chris would have been dropped off for the last time, before hiking into the wilderness.

The rest of my travels during the 1990s would require a book or two to relate properly (so I went ahead and wrote them: “Following My Thumb” and “Kundalini and the Art of Being”). At the end of the summer of '92 I moved back to California, went to one semester of community college there and then moved to Eugene, Oregon (where a friend from Alaska lived) with plans to finish my college education at the University of Oregon. Plans changed however (or rather I changed them, I guess I should concede), and after a year-and-a-half I left Eugene on another hitchhiking adventure that would turn into six years of living mostly on the road.

I attended Rainbow Gathering festivals, worked on farms, briefly visited a strange New Age cult, hitchhiked through every Western state, slept on the side of the road more times than I could possibly remember, backpacked alone in the wilderness, went back to Alaska for another summer in Denali, camped in the redwoods through part of a rainy winter, lived out of an old station wagon that had been given to me and camped for months on the beaches of Hawaii. It was while working on a farm in Hawaii that I met a guy who had been to India, and inspired me to go there.

In October of 1999 I journeyed to India for five months. I remember sitting on the plane, almost there, thinking to myself, “Holy shit, I am about to step foot in India. Am I even ready for this?” I'd experienced pretty bad culture shock my first day in London almost a decade before. Yet I knew that India was going to be a whole different dimension of unknown. And it was.

Delhi has changed a lot since 1999. At the time there were no raised freeways within the city, that I recall anyway. The drive from the airport into the center of the city was all on surface streets, through scenes that felt like a surreal, murky concoction of the Middle Ages crossed with the 1950s and Tomb Raider. Cows were lying in the street, monkeys swung from trees overhead, beggar children weaved through the sluggish river of chaotic traffic imploring for a rupee or two, many of the neighborhoods consisted of dirt huts and ramshackle shacks littered with garbage, ox-drawn carts lumbered down the road along with 1950s era white Ambassador vehicles. If there were any working traffic signals, they were very few and far between.

Gabriel with a sadhu in Rishikesh, India

I spent five months exploring the fascinating, insane, heart-wrenching, deeply inspiring Hindustani (Land of Hindus), from the Ganges River to the Taj Mahal, the deserts of Rajasthan to the beaches of the Arabian Sea to the slums of Mumbai. I returned back home to California once again, mind and soul forever altered, and with no idea what I was doing next and no money left to do it with. My Dad told me he would help cover the cost of tuition if I decided to go back to college and get my degree. I took him up on the offer.

Two years later I graduated from Humboldt State University with a B.A. in Religious Studies. I moved to Portland, Oregon and settled into a normal life in the city for the next four years. Eventually the travel bug reered its inquisitive head, and I started making plans for a return trip to India.

I landed in Chennai, South India at 11:30pm on December 31^st, 2005, just in time to see New Year's celebrations in the streets from the taxi on the way to my hotel. That began the next phase of my world adventures, in which over the next decade I would travel abroad every year, going on nine extended international trips to nineteen countries, including five times to India, four times to Thailand and three times to Nepal, spending about 3 ½ years in total traveling abroad.

I funded my trips during much of that time by working in Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada (taking advantage of my dual citizenship due to being born in Vancouver). That was also where I bought my first digital camera, in fall of 2008, and also when I created my Youtube travel channel (with no conception whatsoever at the time that it would turn into my future career).

I started posting video clips onto Youtube for no particular reason, other than it was the latest internet thing and so I might as well mess around with it. It was a long, slow, bumbling process of figuring out how to be somewhat sucessful as a videographer. But eight years later I've posted more than 1,400 videos to Youtube, with 5 million total video views and more than 25,000 subscribers to my channel, and am now funding my travels from the videos I make as I journey from one country to the next.

I guess the moral of the story is to follow your passion. Just be prepared for a long, strange and winding road, because that seems to be the route that passions tend to take you.