How and why travel transforms you by Francis Tapon at TEDxFillmore

[Applause] [Music] how would you rate your life on a 1 to 10 scale overall how would you rate your life that was a question I asked myself back in the year 2000 I gave myself a seven I thought my life is pretty good I've got a warm bed I've got shelter I've got a good job I have everything I even have an electric toothbrush I I had everything I needed to take care of myself so and yet I was wondering what do I need to do in order to get to let's say an eight or

nine or a 10 and I wasn't sure I have a degree in religion and I was thinking well maybe I need to go back to the books and maybe I can get some answers there and I was thinking about what Moses did he went to get his answers he went up Mount Si up high in the mountain to to get some of uh the Ten Commandments Muhammad went to mount Hira to get the first revelation of the Holy Quran and even the Buddha went into the Wilderness to get his first Enlightenment and so I was

thinking hm and what about Jesus Jesus also had his most spiritual intense experience in the desert when he confronted the devil and that was one of the most momentous parts of his life so what are the prophets teaching us the prophets are teaching us that perhaps some of the answers to Life's most profound questions lie in the wilderness that's where you can find some of the answers to that you seek so I was like oh that's interesting what what else does religion teach us it's that pilgrimages are also another way to find the truth if

you look at El Camino Santiago which acrosses Northern Spain it's a it's a route that people still do today and it's very popular among Christian pilgrims and that's not the only pilgrimage you have the Hajj which is what Muslims do they go to Mecca and then they go around the cabba this is what is considered the fifth pillar of being a Muslim it's such a transformative Journey it in fact for many Muslim they may become Muslims once they've completed that fifth pillar of Islam and so for me there's interesting parallels of pilgrimages as well as

Wilderness but it's not just in the religious tradition look at the secular tradition you have John M who went you know John M went into the Sierra Nevada to to immune with nature and you also have Walden written by Henry David thorough that was also a pilgrimage into nature and so I thought well why not combine these two ideas of wilderness and pilgrimage into one idea to maybe get the answers of what I need to do in order to bring my life to a seven 8 nine and above to a 10 so I thought about

the Appalachian Trail and that's what I decided to do it's about 2,200 M long about 3500 km and it stretches between Maine and Georgia now most people go North on the Appalachian Trail it takes about 6 months of of hiking to do and so uh basically you're going from uh main to Georgia covering all these miles in my case I decided to go the opposite way about only 10% of the people who were going south and I started at Mount Kaden which is the tallest mountain in Maine and then I realized you know what after

just a few days of hiking I thought this is probably the dumbest idea of getting Wilderness you know wisdom from the Wilderness this if you look at Lisa's back it's covered in mosquito bites and and she's pulling herself up in the roots of by the roots of trees to complete the trail this was hard this was difficult this how do you how do you think Deep Thoughts in nature when all a sudden you hear the sound of in your ear Non-Stop and you're swatting yourself all the time if you look at the attrition on the

trail it's incredible roughly about 10% drop out just in the first week so they tell their their significant other honey I'm going to be gone for like six months six days well I'm back already and it's it's because it's so difficult and the the trail is is a lot harder than they expected in fact by the end 80% have dropped out of the Appalachian Trail and so if you think about that uh that's yet Perhaps the reason why we're so that you get such deep thoughts on the trail maybe that is what separates those who

do it and those who don't they come away with lessons and perhaps because it's difficult and so we were able to get to Georgia and one of the lessons I learned was to hike your own hike and the idea of hike your own hike is that a lot of people will say hey you're wearing the wrong shoes there oh no no that backpack is too heavy you're doing too many miles per day people will give you all sorts of advice on the trail and you have to think well actually you should hike your own hike

in other words listen to your bliss do what makes you happy and so that was one of the key lessons I learned from the trail itself is to hike my own hike and to not be obsessed about what other people think there were seven other lessons seven lessons in total that I learned from the trail but that was what I felt was The Core lesson now there was another thing I was thinking about on the trail I was I went to Harvard Business School and at Harvard Business School we talked about how to make a

billion dollars how to make a billion dollar company raise a billion dollar and we spend a lot of times obsessing about this issue now in my case I was asking myself a totally different question I think a much more profound and interesting question on the trail is what would you do with your time your time if you had a billion dollars how would you spend your days you wake up in the morning and you do what whatever the answer to that question is is that's probably your passion that's what you love to do that's what

you would do for free and so I thought myself well for me what I would really love doing is to just travel the world that's what I would do I don't have a billion dollars and I only have a million dollars but that's what I would do and so I would just wander and explore and learn from from others and learn from nature so I said well why not just re quit my job my corporate job that I had at the time and then do that restructure my life I'll I'll take a big pay cut

I'll make no income for a while but that was my idea so I decided to go on the Pacific Crest Trail this was about 5 years after the Appalachian Trail now the Pacific Crest Trail uh is 25% longer than the Appalachian Trail it stretches between Mexico and Canada now most people go north I went South so I started up in Canada and went through Washington State Oregon State through the Cascade mountain range and then through the Sierra Nevada in California and then finally finished in the Mexican border it's about 2,700 miles about 4,200 km and

it took about four months of hiking and sleeping out in the woods um this is a picture of me right at the beginning of the trail uh in Canada and I didn't go Al on this I went with Mayu Risman she's an Estonian and she had never been on such a big Journey nor and uh this was kind of shocking in fact after the first week she quit um because there was just non-stop snow in Washington state it was just covered in snow you couldn't see the trail it was very hard but she after taking

about a week off she decided to reather her strength and then go out there again and complete the trail and she was very uh strong about it in fact if you look at her feet on the trail at one point in the trail they were completely destroyed um and yet she got up and was able to persevere and went on till the end and one of the things that motivated us of course is the views it's the solitude it's that ability to be away from cell phones from the internet and from all these distractions and

it's a luxury that doesn't cost much money in fact it's you're just you're sleeping outside and so you're just paying for your food effectively that's all you need to do and so finally when we got to the end of the trail we were able to uh celebrate at the Mexican border and having completed that journey and that's when I told Mayu you know what I'm going to go to Estonia and live in uh Estonia and then we're going to travel around Eastern Europe and I'll write a book about that and so that's what I told

her that I would do on the trail uh in the end what I ended up doing was not that and in fact those plans went arai and and to explain why that plan didn't work I have to tell you the story about my father my dad was born in France France and he lived there until he was 18 years old and he then moved to Argentina at the age of 18 and he lived there for seven years he was kind of an adventurer he he liked his motorcycle and he liked to travel around and uh

and eventually he immigrated to United States to San Francisco in fact my mom is from Santiago Chile and she left Chile and met my father in San Francisco They fell in love and uh eventually got married and few years after that they had us children uh my my brother and I and uh I would say that our family was you know pretty good uh we had uh we just maybe I would get scolded in three different languages that was the main difference but uh overall I think I was blessed we weren't perfect like no family

is but but I would say that I was uh pretty fortunate and uh eventually my parents did get old and my dad um got cancer in his leg and they had to remove the cancer and he uh the doctor suggested because he was diabetic and he was 76 years old that they would graft a piece of his lower back onto his leg and that would help accelerate the healing process um but he wasn't too keen on this idea um because of the fact that it would cause pain in both places and so about a week

before the I was going to go to Estonia uh to this had just happened right after I finished the Pacific Crest Trail he sat me down and he said to me Francis if I were to commit suicide would you think of me as a coward and I said no dad I think it takes a lot of courage to commit suicide I don't have the balls to do that I I couldn't do that but I don't think you should and he said yeah well I'm a burden to your mom and I said my mom loves to

take care of you you know that's what that gives her a lot of purpose that's what she enjoys doing and he's like yeah I understand but so that conversation kind of ended there and I had to go to Estonia I was going to be catching my flight and uh the day after I arrived in Estonia I received a phone call from my mom and she said Papa which means your dad is gone and I had to fly back to United States he had taken a gun and he had shot himself in the head and unfortunately

the tragic thing is that he didn't even die at that instant he he his heart was beating his lungs were still working but his brain was basically dead so my mom had the unpleasant decision of having to pull the plug this meant that I had to go spend time back home and leave my dreams of Estonia behind but I thought about after spending months with my mom what my dad would want me to do would he want me to feel sorry for myself or or mourn this whole issue no he would want me to pursue

my dreams he would want me to go off and continue doing what I love to do and the reason my purpose in life is to go out there and travel so I decided to go and do something more ambitious and give myself more time to think and that was to do a round trip on the Continental Divide Trail it was about 9,000 kmers or about 5,600 miles I would start at the Mexican border and I walked through New Mexico Colorado Wyoming Idaho Montana and I got to Glacier National Park in Canada at which point I

turned and walked I would walk all the way back uh this is something that never had been done before and I knew that I would be having to walk about 35 miles a day in the wilderness alone and sleeping outside when I told that to the Border guard he said you'll never make it I was there at Mile zero and he said you'll never make it and in fact when I was going through Colorado uh walking knee deep in snow I had to go through about a th000 km of snow I started doubting my ability

to do it but I persevered and I even went uh you know I had no cooked food the whole time I was just eating energy bars trail mix that kind of stuff uh I went through nine pairs of shoes in seven months and I got to Canada celebrated for about 10 minutes 15 minutes then turned around and started walking back to Mexico my dad had been in 1956 curiously at The Parting of the waters where the where the Continental Divide in South America where it divides the Pacific Ocean the at attic ocean and there I

was 41 years later at this parting of the waters in North America uh and celebrating a river the only part in North America where a river actually gets diverted both to the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean right on the Continental Divide I went through fires and I even went through at one point I I was just surviving on chocolate alone uh it was I had run out of all my other food which really got old fast um it was fun for a while but eventually it got old but uh from there I eventually persevered

and got to the Mexican border where I celebrated um at that point my relationship though with Mayu had ended and uh but I still hadn't I didn't feel like I was done traveling I I felt that I wanted to then pursue some more Trails after that so I decided to walk across Spain twice the Pyrenees Mountain is the mountain range that divides France and Spain and I walked across the spine of that mountain from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean it was an amazing trip and yet it only took about 25 days uh after

that I walked across Spain again through El Camino Santiago um the point is is that a lot of people say I know Francis I don't have five six months to take off I can't do that I can't go on these long tracks well this took about 3 four weeks and so it's a much shorter journey and yet can be equally as transformative and eye openening uh for you and and have a an intense spiritual experience a deep profound and life-changing experience you might say well I'm an American I don't have two weeks three weeks vacation

I can't afford to even take that well how about a weekend even just taking a weekend for example in my case I went up M Blan which took 48 hours I went alone and in trail Runners which I don't recommend doing because you'll eventually get altitude sickness once you get up over 15,000 ft but I was able to get to the summit of the tallest mountain in Western Europe and that just those 48 Hours really challenged my brain and really put me in a in a new way of looking at things uh that I had

done something I'd never been able to do before you know the theme of this Ted conference is passing the Baton so what do you have to do in order to pass a baton first you have to of course receive a baton right and where do you get batons they're all over the Wilderness that's where you go off and get them but then I realized it's not just in the wilderness you can also find batons in strange foreign lands you can find them all over the place and your obligation is once you find these batons to

pass it on to others and then to have other people learn from these your travel experiences and so I thought well I spent a lot of time in the wilderness now I need to spend time in Civilization and learn and pick up batons out there so I decided to spend three years the last three years traveling all 25 countries in Eastern Europe and I want to learn what Eastern Europeans could teach us it wasn't as expensive as you think because I did a lot of couch surfing I lived amongst them and the cost of living

was lower than that of the United States and so I was able to go travel all over uh Eastern Europe for those and trying to gather the lessons what do Eastern Europeans do better than us what can we learn from them and I compiled all those lessons into my second book where I tried to capture those lessons and so for a lot of people they're wondering you know what's next my next big goal is to go to Africa Africa and see all 54 countries in Africa and I will starting in 2013 to about 2016 and

the idea is to start in Cairo in Egypt go south into Sudan and then from there go across to irraa and then Madagascar and the SEL islands and then go to South Africa and then go up the west side of Africa across Northern Africa and see all 54 countries in between I'm surely I I believe and I'm sure that Africans do things better than Americans in many cases and I want to capture those lessons and pass that baton on later down the road hope to go to the Middle East and to Asia now a lot

of people wonder like how can you afford to do this you know are you a millionaire not at all it costs a lot more so first of all you want to live below your means a lot of us do the opposite we live beyond our means and so learn to cut back on lots of things learn to live simply that will make a big difference in order to pay off your debt and then to accumulate savings the second thing is to travel below your means don't necessarily go always to Paris and London think about other

places don't always stay at the fanciest hotel you can stay at maybe do some couch surfing and you'll find ways to travel more simply uh buy food at grocery stores instead of staying at fancy restaurants when you go travel that will allow you to travel for months going to a third world country is a lot more affordable than traveling in Western Europe and so and yet you'll be able to have a more profound experience so here's what I want to leave you with is that if you have a trouble you've lost something in your life

whether it's your job a husband or uh a relationship of some kind anything that is important to you or you're at a life where you're a point in your life where you want to figure out how can I bring it up to the next level how can I have an inflection point I think if you go travel to some place that's exotic some place that's different some place that is completely foreign whether it be in the wilderness or some Far country that doesn't where you don't even speak the language that will change you as a

person and that will transform you because you'll fire neurons in your brain that you've never fired before and you will become a better person thank you