This is a bit more of a sartorial topic than what I usually write about, although not the first time I’ve discussed clothing for travel. Yes, it’s been quite some time since I’ve written anything on my blog, but this is the topic that came to mind to discuss.
It’s been a few months since my last trip, however I have been doing a lot more business travel post-pandemic than I had been prior, when most of my travel as a digital nomad was to destinations I chose purely for personal reasons. As such, my travel wardrobe has gone through quite a bit of change, as I need to be presentable when giving talks at conferences, meeting with customers, or attending other business functions. That means no more flannel shirts and hiking pants made with technical fabrics, which while durable and great for travel are far too casual for my purposes now. For those of you who have spent some time with me, you also know I prefer to travel very light while not compromising in any way on quality, I truly want the best of everything.
My name is
Tyler Duzan, or more formally
Mr. Tyler T. Duzan.
My nickname is
tristor.
This site you're on, entitled
Wandering in Wondering, is my personal website as part of the
IndieWeb
If you need to contact me, please encrypt your messages using
my public key.
I am many things, but perhaps most of all I am a life-long learner. I aspire to become a renaissance man, although I see the journey ahead as being long (and a whole lot of fun). My interests are fairly broad, and I tend to pick up new hobbies and interests often, delve deeply into them, and then file them away to make room for the next.
Many of my fellow remotes have already written something about their experiences during the year and come to some conclusion about the meaning of it all. The honest truth for me though is that I don’t know what it means to me yet. My experience was very different from most of the people in our group, and yet I can’t help but see that some of the things I’m slowly coming to conclude align pretty strongly with others. I wasn’t at any of these epic parties mentioned in so many other posts, I’m absent from almost every group photograph, I even ended up missing the last day and the big farewell event. Yet, at the same time, I never felt like I was missing out. No FOMO at all. I explored the cities and countries we were in, met locals, broke far out of my comfort zone, and left with a bevy of stories which I will carefully hold to myself.
Happy New Years!
First of all, welcome to 2017. 2016 was an interesting year for me in many ways and a really positive experience, I hope the same can be said for all of my readers. I’m writing this from my apartment in Bogota, Colombia as I begin Month #8 of Remote Year - Darién.
When I think about last year and what sort of theme it represented in my life, I can only categorize it with the term “Discovery”. This last year I had started a new job, I had started remote working full-time for the first time, I had learned a new programming language, operating environment, and industry. In that mix, I also decided it’d be the perfect time to travel the world and meet a whole bunch of new people in places I’d never been before. In short, last year was largely about discovering the world, seeing things in a new light, and through that lens also discovering things about myself.
Where Have I Been?
It’s been awhile since I’ve last written anything here and I apologize for that. I’ve had a few people ask me when I was going to post something again. The truth is, I’ve been spending a lot of time working. When I haven’t been working I’ve been reading and sometimes thinking, although reading quite a bit more than thinking. I’ve thought a lot about the experiences I’ve been having on my journey and what it means to me as a person, what it means to us as a group. Long story short though, I haven’t found it in myself to put much of these thoughts down and share them with the world. Today’s post will be short and to the point, but hopefully will reassure my readers that I haven’t completely disappeared from this Earth yet.
Hello all! I’d greet you in Serbian, but the fact is I haven’t really learned any in my journey yet. The people in Belgrade speak English very well and start learning English in the equivalent of kindergarten, so it’s not really an issue here.
This is going to be a short introduction for a rather long post and then I’m going to get right into it. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks writing with pen and paper or sometimes with my phone or laptop whenever the mood strikes me. Some of this I’ve posted elsewhere before (mostly on Facebook), but it is now all collected here with annotations added at points and perhaps reworded or updated.
Dobrý den once again readers.
When I set out on this journey I originally intended to write at least one blog post a week. It seems its more difficult to keep with that schedule than I thought it was going to be. For those of you waiting for my next update, I apologize for the delay. Right now my schedule as I travel is pretty much filled with work during the week and I use the evenings in the weekend to write.
Dobrý den once again readers.
This post is going to be a bit different from my last. I’ve had a lot of different things go through my mind in the last 10 days. I would say that in general for everyone in my Remote Year group that this first month is a period of discovery. We’re learning more about who we are, what our tolerances are, and what we really care about in life. We’re also learning about each other and forming new relationships. This is exciting but can also be somewhat troubling. In this post I plan to cover some of these things as a series of short thought-blurbs/essays, but I also don’t want to make it too serious so I’ll be sharing some more photos I took around Prague. To head it off before someone takes my comments the wrong way, I don’t mean my thoughts below to be taken as a negative of my experience. I just think it’s important to be honest with myself and the world about who I am and maybe I will help put to words something that others in my group are feeling too.
Dobrý den readers.
It’s been a whirlwind the past 4 days, but also very cool. I’ve met and forgotten the names of so many people over the last 4 days. If you’re reading this and you’re one of the people I’ve met, I am apologizing heavily in advance for my bad memory for names. I’m sure I’ll ask your name many times during this first couple of months. I am going to heavily compress my stories, but I have a few surprising or interesting things I wanted to share that I thought were worth telling, and a handful of pictures. I hope everyone reading enjoys. :)
Super short update. Tomorrow is the big day I fly out. Between flight time, layovers, and time zone changes I will be traveling for 26 hours straight. Leaving 8AM from San Antonio, Texas, USA to arrive in Prague, Czech Republic at 10:30AM (or thereabouts) local time. 7 hour layover in JFK, 8 hours to time zones, and the rest is in the air.
Illness Update
I’ve basically fully recovered at this point. I do have a bit of lingering congestion and an occasional throat clearing or cough, but I’m doing pretty well. My ENT has prescribed me additional round of anti-fungals so that I can definitively get rid of the infection. I’ll probably try to find an ENT in Prague and follow-up while I’m there just to confirm that the infection is gone.
This is going to be short, just a quick update on how things are going.
Illness Update
The medication I am taking has caused some bad side effects. I’ll spare the details, but I think I may have it under control. I am following up on Monday with the ENT specialist to check everything out, and then I am going to get my Hepatitis B booster this week assuming I am safe to do so. My illness hopefully is coming to an end, because I’m about to hop on a plane.
So, it’s almost time to depart. Just 10 days left in the US, and I’ll be on way for my trip and off to meet 74 strangers (hopefully soon to be some friends) to gallivant around Europe and South America. It’s a bit daunting at this point and definitely feels real. Honestly, I don’t feel like I have enough time left to do all the things I need to do so my anxiety is in overdrive. Nonetheless, the time has come.
This will be pretty brief, but as many of you know I was in New York City last week on business all week. It was all around a blast. Just wanted to share a few brief photos from my week. Sorry about the quality, I took these with my phone rather than bringing my real camera along. Long story short while this was my 8th time in New York City, it was my first time visiting Brooklyn and it was my first time getting a chance to check out some of the city. Brooklyn had an epic food scene and was pretty awesome. All-around, I loved that after dark the city seemed to relax without losing even a little bit of its energy.
Introduction
Why Bother?
As should be abundantly clear from my prior writings I am about to leave on a trip for a year. During that time I’ll likely be making use of numerous public Wi-Fi access points, not to mention whatever dodgy cellular providers are available in each location I travel to. As part of my overall stance on privacy, its essential I take steps to secure my communication while traveling, the primary of which is using a VPN for basically everything on both my laptop and my phone. To do this, I’m using a droplet from DigitalOcean that’s just $5/mo and doesn’t have to be shared with anyone else (from an IP/network perspective anyway).
Howdy all. This will be a mixed post today. The first part will cover a quick update to all the things I previously had in flight preparing for my trip, and the second part will be a summary of the intensive research I’ve done on insect and mosquito repellents and other precautions. Several folks on the RY Facebook groups have been asking questions about what to do for mosquitos while in South America, and I have also fielded some direct questions from folks about the Permethrin-embedded clothing that I bought. In addition, I’ve now agreed to join a hike of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu while we’re in Peru, which means I need to step up my research game and be definitively sure of my choices before I leave. But first, the update.
I apologize for how belated this trip report is. Several people have been clamoring for a more complete write-up of the trip than I gave on Facebook. We’ll start with the beer and end with some interesting photos and a story about one forlorn Camaro and a fragmented wild turkey.
Beer
During the course of my trip, myself and my buddy Jon Kelley managed to hit several breweries and get t-shirts from the tourism folks in Grand Rapids, which apparently styles itself as “Beer City”.
I apologize I haven’t posted the later parts of my Macbook setup instructions yet. I ran into the chicken-and-egg problem of wanting to use my new Macbook to write my posts. I am happy to report that I am now writing this post on my new Macbook and it’s to a point where I can start writing the rest of the article. I will do that later on. First though, a quick update regarding trip preparations.
Itinerary Update
First, before I get into the rest of what I’ve got sorted out this week
for my trip, the itinerary has changed for Darién. The Remote Year
staff reached out to everyone who has been accepted to Darién to notify
us of the change earlier this week, citing safety concerns about Turkey
and Bolivia. The new itinerary
is below:
- Prague, Czech Republic
- Belgrade, Serbia
- London, UK
- Lisbon, Portugal
- Rabat, Morocco
- Valencia, Spain
- Mexico City, Mexico
- Bogotá, Colombia
- Medellin, Colombia
- Lima, Peru
- Córdoba, Argentina
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
Preparing to Travel
When I left you last week I was still figuring out insurance, waiting on
my US Passport to be sent to me from renewal, and considering my options
for some other essential items for travel.
I’m in!
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been accepted to join Remote Year as part of the Darién cohort starting on June 1st, 2016 in Prague, Czech Republic, and returning to the US in June of 2017. I’ve been looking forward to doing international travel and participating in the digital nomad lifestyle for many years, and since I now work remotely its presented the opportunity to make that dream a reality. I’m overjoyed to be part of what is surely going to be an epic experience.
In October 2014 I moved from Texas to Longmont, CO in order to
experience the amazing beer culture in Colorado. While there, I fell in
love with the mountains and natural beauty of the state and rekindled my
interest in photography. These are just five of my favorite photos I
took while in Colorado. I hope you enjoy.
1. Reflections of a Mountain Morning
This photo was taken in Longmont, CO near at Golden Ponds Park and
Nature Area around 10AM one weekend morning. I had just received my
300mm f/4D telephoto lens and was trying to capture some photos of waterfowl
when I stumbled across this landscape reflection in the water. The
light seemed perfect, so I quickly swapped over to my 50mm f/1.8D and
took several exposures. When I felt like I had captured it right, I
took a nine exposure bracket which was later combined in Photoshop and
tonemapped in Photomatix Pro.
