The Plan
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to just pack up and fly to a random destination, not knowing in advance what languages or cultures you'll encounter or even the climate?
Well... here's what that's like...
Four months ago I decided to hit reset and began preparing to challenge the unknown.
I usually spend my holidays isolating myself from society by solo hiking in the Rockies but I’ve been wanting to try something different.
I’ve had this idea for a while and it never seemed practical and just way too risky but, more recently, I just couldn’t shake the idea so I said F it and now here I am. I wanted to attempt an introvert’s worst nightmare and travel to a random country where I’d have to rely on the kindness of strangers to overcome language barriers and to gradually make my way across this planet before global warming destroys it. I haven’t done anything like this before but that’s what makes it so exciting.
So I quit my job in IT, hired a property management company to deal with my condo and sold as much of my belongings as I could and then started scrambling to plan my anonymous adventure. While I will eventually have to return home, I have no intention of living there anymore and likely not even in the country either.
My friend Sabine that I met on a hike in the summer reluctantly agreed to help but she did a fantastic job of verifying I can get all the way to the destination with a Canadian passport, booking the flights, and then controlling the flow of information to me. She is the only person that saw where the dart landed and she was the only one that knew my destination until I got there myself.
My only conditions for the destination while preserving “randomnymity” were:
- Could not be in the US or Canada (need to make it interesting)
- Shouldn’t be to an area in some sort of active conflict.
- Preferably shouldn’t be to an area that is frozen most of the year. So anything warmer than Canada 😉
- If the dart landed on water, I’d rethrow unless it was next to an island
- And most important of all, it had to be a country that doesn’t require a Visa in advance for Canadian passport holdings, which surprisingly doesn’t eliminate very many countries.
Further measures were established from the start to ensure there would be no way of me knowing the destination before the initial flight but, obviously, there was a massive amount of self control and ignorance involved to be able to make it to the final flight without knowing the destination. To be fair, I think I heard the destination airport mentioned by an airport employee in South Korea but I had never heard of the city before so it didn’t make a difference.
Regardless of how things turn out on this journey, I’m going to learn a lot about the world and myself and that is what I’m most excited about.