Why we travel
While our remote travels – to places such as Sulawesi, Papua, Mongolia and Xinjiang -- really took off in June 2022, our mental journey may well have begun on a Grab ride in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, a month before that. Our driver had remarked, “Oh, you’re so lucky, born in Singapore”.
Yes, admittedly, we did strike the birth lottery. We’ve always appreciated the stability and creature comforts that the world’s most expensive city affords, but working and living here for over 3 decades, we found we started losing parts of ourselves. It’s easy to be swept up in a tsunami of corporate pursuits, where promotions, money and possessions become front and centre. Trying constantly to get a leg up in life, with its oftentimes concomitant moral compromises, just didn’t feel meaningful enough.
So here we are, a pair of recovering office-bound corporates turned semi-nomadic travelers - oh, and we might add, much to the chagrin of our family and (some) friends, who have, on more than one occasion, said the following:
1. Why are you doing this with your life?
2. If you don’t work full time, how can you survive financially?
3. Doing this is such a waste of your abilities/talents/time.
4. Aren’t you worried about your future retirement?
5. If everyone is like you, what will happen to Singapore?
Truth be told, some of these were our concerns when we first started our new lives. No, we don’t have fat bank accounts, wealthy parents or some esoteric and lucrative talent. We are, by most counts, pretty average Singaporeans who live in public HDB flats and spent most of our growing years in Singapore. If anything sets us apart, it’s that we’ve somehow always had a heart for the voiceless, and yearned to tell the stories of those who live on the fringes of (and beyond) the hyper-modern urban sprawls across the world.
While on the remote island of Tanegashima off the southern coast of Kagoshima in Japan in the spring of 2023, we met a salt farmer who graciously showed us around his salt farm perched atop a soaring cliff. He explained how he painstakingly extracted salt from sea water below and sold it to shops on the island. His one-man cottage industry helped him raise his family of 5.
To thank him for opening his life to us, we cooked up a batch of Singapore-style Sesame Oil Chicken and sent it to his home the following evening.
Despite us having made casual dinner plans that night, we could not refuse Seki-san’s kind insistence for us to join his wife and him for dinner. We ended up being the recipients of a gorgeous home-cooked seafood tempura meal prepared with condiments that the elderly couple had made such as homemade “koji”, the special mould that goes in shoyu (soy sauce), beer and cooking sake!
Marvelling at how wonderful a life they now led in their tranquil island, Seki-san gestured to us: “Life is about ups and downs, peaks and troughs”. Despite our language barriers, he was able to express that life isn’t all peaches all the time, and that they had weathered more than a few troughs of their own.
When parting (for the second time) that night, he reached out to hug both of us in a manner unconventional for Japanese men of his generation. “You know, I was a backpacker once too; good luck on your journey,” he said.
This is a story we still remember and speak about fondly today - our 3-month sojourn in Japan. This is also why we travel – to learn about the stories of others, and to connect with people we never would have, had we not taken a leap to explore this massive world in places so remote many have not heard of.
We’ve finally sorted out our travel photos from the past two years, and look forward to sharing more about our journey with you! :)
