Goin' Pro

Seattle, WA

What’s up Everybody?

For years now, I have been an amateur goof-off traveler. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked hard on my reputation as being that annoying guy who sends you tropical emails of rum-soaked sunsets and drowsy hammock-filled afternoons that you receive while sitting at your desk in February wondering if you’ll ever get to see the sun again. And true, I’ve worked for Club Med and various cruise lines that have paid me to facilitate a certain brand of fun, but I’ve never had the chance to really run the show, as it were. After all, everybody has a gift and mine seems to be (as many of you can attest) dragging people off their couches and making them think that they wanted to go out and have fun in the first place, when five minutes ago they were looking forward to curling up with a nice book and an early bed time (or whatever it is you people do). Of course, I do realize that many of you consider this not a talent, but a irritating trait, but it is what is and it’s about damn time that I get paid for it.

You would think that since I finally just graduated from college and will be one year away from 30 in two weeks that I would be thinking about a career… and I was, in my own way. My hair-brained scheme (which I still have but will have to wait) was to go back and work on the steamboat, make some money, start my own parasailing business in Central or South America and live happily ever after. Alas, the boat thing wasn’t working out the way I wanted to, so I was looking online and found this site that was hiring. It asked:



Are you an experienced traveler? I thought to myself: why, yes I am.



Have you worked in tourism and do you speak Spanish? Yes and well enough.



Are you hard-working, adventurous and organized? Hmmm, well hey, two out of three ain’t bad.



The job was to be a South American adventure tour guide for an Austalian company named Tucan Travel. To lead 6 to 171 day tours from country to country and adventure to adventure with groups of 12 to 34 people. They seemed to focus on young, budget-minded, active people, so I thought hey why not fill out an application. Then I pretty much forgot about it and went on to other sites and filled out other applications, the whole time thinking that I would still probably end up working on the steamboat, as I had in the past. But the next morning at the butt-crack of dawn (well, it was probably 9am, I was having a lazy summer up to that point) I got a call from a woman from the Tucan Travel office in England. She said that they were interested in hiring me and set up an interview for me in Seattle the very next day. So, I went, had a good interview and after hemming and hawing for a week or so and having a couple of good friends kick me in the ass and tell me that I would be an idiot not to take this job, I said yes.

Therefore, tomorrow morning at 6am (the real butt-crack of dawn) I take off and fly to Cuzco, Peru and then will travel by bus to La Paz, Bolivia (it’s like 300 dollars cheaper to fly to Cuzco, rather than La Paz) to meet the tour on which I will be training for three weeks. This tour ends up in Santiago, Chile, where I will meet my first tour the next day. My first tour on my own as a tour guide is 49 day trip from Santiago down through Patagonia to Tierra del Fuego, back up to Buenos Aires and through the Pantanal and over to Brazil where it will end up in Rio. Hopefully, I’ll like these people, as seven weeks can be a long time with people you don't like. To go from place to place, I will have a cool bus and a bus driver (who they are assuring me is very experienced and will help me out, since I haven’t actually been to any of these places) and the cool thing about this tour is that it’s for young people ages 18-35. Though I was hired through Tucan travel and will be working for them, they also supply the guides for a company named Budget Expeditions, who I will be running this tour for. They are the ones who have an age limit. This is the first tour that I’m running, but not the only one. I’ll be doing different tours all over South America for at least a year. However, if you want to check out this tour go to www.budgetexpeditions.com and you can see the itinerary of it and other fun tours around the world. The address to Tucan Travel is www.tucantravel.com and they have a plethora of tours for just about anybody.

As many of you know, I was scheduled to start this job in late August. Sadly, that’s when tragedy hit my family. My little brother Wil was hanging out with his friends under an overpass in the U-district of Seattle, when he slipped and fell 50 feet to the pavement below. He’s spent almost two months in the Intensive Care Unit with collapsed lungs, a broken pelvis, a broken back and an arm that had to be amputated. It happened about a week before I was scheduled to leave, so obviously I was in no state to facilitate fun for anybody. Fortunately, Tucan Travel was very understanding and let me put off this job for a month and a half to be with my family. Even so, until about a week ago, I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with going. Because of the delicacy of his lung situation, they had kept him unconscious and I wasn’t able to talk to him until last week. It’s been an up and down battle these past months, but thanks to the love and positive energy all of our friends and family, it seems that he is on a solid healing track. He is breathing on his own, is conscious, can talk and just day before yesterday was moved out of the ICU. Now that I’ve been able to talk to him I feel much better about going knowing that he, as well as the rest of my family, fully support and are excited for me to fulfill my schoolboy dreams of being a professional international goof-off. (Note to my employers: I am fully aware that this job carries heavy responsibility and requires hard work).

If you would like to check on Wil’s progress, feel free to visit the website that my father has so diligently kept up at http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/Wil


Much Love, Moe. 10/10/05