Knackpacker was born out of ennui.
My life was, in the elegant words of Larry David, pretty, pretty good. I lived it up with my government owned housing, state sanctioned marriage and two adopted cats. I worked a job that paid relatively well for silly work, had decent hours and required minimal effort. I had a bunch of chums that I met regularly enough to say that we were chummy. You really couldn’t ask for much more.
Unfortunately, ennui set in.
Ennui…it’s such an incredibly pretentious word isn’t it. You’re probably wondering why I couldn’t just have used the word ‘boredom’. Ennui has that mildly philosophical undertone to it that makes it seem all kinds of jackassy. And you can’t get as much mileage out of it too. Ennuied out of my mind doesn’t really have the same ring to it.
But I digress.
Ennui set in. You don’t want to be stuck in a situation where the world is your oyster and you’ve run out of lemon juice. It struck me that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life dispensing the same work platitudes over and over on a daily basis. For lack of a better cliche, I wanted to travel the world while I was still young enough to appreciate it.
I had to battle some initial wishy-washiness before I finally bit the bullet and quit my job. The practical, Asian side of me wanted to continue working, save 70% of my income and invest in real estate while the National Geographic side of me wanted to visit the Galapagos Islands. Fortunately, my wife watches National Geographic as well and truth be told, she was the one who planted the seeds of traveling in me in the first place.
As of today, we are exploring the great unknown, never knowing where the fork in the road will lead us. Well, right now we’re actually in Barcelona, Spain but the metro system down here is really a lot more complicated than it looks…
