One Year Later


IT WAS EXACTLY ONE YEAR AGO from today, on March 5, 2005, when I had completed a grand sixteen and a half month trip around the world, which took me to across 95,000 miles in thirty-seven countries in South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. To make a long story short, in the past year I have slowly acclimatized back to normal society after being “traveled out” — working, partying, and playing video games — and one year later, I have to say, my life is “normal” again.

This of course means I should probably get back on the road.

One year later, I’ve decided to go on another trip, one perhaps not as long (I’m tied to a year-long lease in New York), but hopefully just as exciting: a trip to Timbuktu, the legendary city that actually exists on the fringe of the Sahara Desert in the African nation of Mali. As of now, two weeks before departure, I don’t have much of a game plan; as always I will pull an Indiana Jones and “make it up as I go.” All I do know is that before I leave I need a visa to get into Mali, which was convenient enough to get as there is a Malian consulate in New York City within lunch hour distance from my permalance design position at an interactive ad agency.

funyeah: did you guys eat yet?

The art director on my current project IM’d me last Tuesday as he often did to see if me and the guys were going out to lunch. I explained to him that I had just eaten a quick cup of ramen noodles to hold me over for I was headed uptown to the Malian Consulate.

funyeah: weird, i’m headed up there too

The jokes continued as I left my desk. “Unless I get kidnapped by African nationals, I’ll be back,” I told my co-worker buddy Bil.

I TRAVELED ON THE 6 TRAIN UP TO 68TH STREET and walked the one block up to the consulate. It was easy enough to find with the big green, gold, and red flag waving above in the brisk breeze of New York winter. The building wasn’t much, more of a residential brownstone labeled with a big plaque outside its front door (picture above) to differentiate it from other houses. Inside the public space was nothing more than a little living room area sectioned into two parts by a bulletproof booth window like at a bank. Inside were two women, one portly, dark and middle-aged; the other younger, more slender and with coffee-colored skin tones like myself. The two talked and talked like old gossiping friends in French with African accents — which wasn’t a surprise since I had done enough research enough to know that Mali was a former French colony during the European scramble of Africa in the 19th century that had been independent since 1960.

The two woman switched over to English with a Malian accent when they spoke to me. “This is you?” the older woman questioned me, holding up the two recent photos of myself clipped to my visa application.

“Yes. That’s me,” I replied. “Should I take my glasses off?” I took them off but she still wasn’t convinced.

“Let me see,” the other said, glancing at the picture. Why it wouldn’t be me, I don’t know; I looked the same, had the same haircut, and was wearing the same black jacket with The Global Trip pin on the lapel. “Yeah, that’s him.”

I sighed in relief; this wasn’t the first time I’d had a case of mistaken identity.

The two went at it in French again — too fast for me to comprehend it all with my high school French — but it was still exciting to hear. I felt like I had my feet back in the game of adventure travel, which was sort of true because I was technically on Malian soil. The older woman wrote me out a receipt for the $100 fee and took my newly renewed passport.

“You can come back Monday. Same time. Before three,” she instructed me.

“Merci,” I said, trying to get my tongue to get back in the game like my feet. I closed the door behind me and camped out for a couple of minutes in nearby Hunter College where I handwrote out this blog entry, just as I did before on “The Global Trip 2004” every day, obsessively for sixteen months.

I’m back, I thought. Travel and travel blogging, the void in my life since I’d been back home, was starting to be refueled, for the wanderlust never dies…


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This blog entry was originally posted on March 05, 2006 on the blog, "The Global Trip: Trippin' To Timbuktu," hosted by Blogger.com. It is one of eighteen entries that chronicled a trip through the West African nation of Mali in March/April 2006.




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