In March 1992 I bought a one-way ticket to Karachi, Pakistan to start my epic journey.
Remember, this were the pre-internet times, so I actually went to a travel agent in my town, who was known for cheap tickets and got it there. Another possibility in those days was checking certain magazines where the agents with cheap tickets advertised, calling them, ordering the ticket from them, receiving the invoice, transfering the money, then getting the ticket per mail. Oh the joys of the anolog age!
I had managed to save 40,000 DM at that time by working in construction. I figured that would last for about four years and had planned my trip meticulously, writing down which places I would visit, how long I would stay there, activities to do there, etc.
Did I mention I am German? 😉
I took 10,000 DM and bought DM and US$ traveller cheques with it to last me through my first year. The plan was to exchange either DM or US$ depending on which currency got the better exchange rate in a country in relation to my initial US$ rate. This way I protected my travel kitty against a strong depreciation of the DM against the dollar. This actually happened a bit and so I was spending only US$ in the first year.
I put the remaining 30,000 DM into a fixed deposit account with Deutsche Bank because they had international offices in different Asian countries. So the deposit was fixed for a year and after a year the funds would be transfered to my checking account and I would call them with instructions on how to proceed further.
So the way it would work was, I would go to the office of Deutsche Bank in a certain country, tell them I wanted to have 10,000 DM transfered to them from my German account, then call the German office with instructions and after a few days the money would be there for me to collect at the foreign branch. I forgot how much the wire fees, etc. were, probably quite some amount, but in those days you also had a one percent fee on the purchase of your traveller cheques, so not too bad, I guess.
The real drawback was, that the Deutsche Bank office would give me the money in local cash. That is the reason why I did my transfer business always in Singapore, so I would get Singapore $ in cash. Already in the 90s S$ was a very strong currency, about at par with DM, so much stronger than the other SEA currencies. I went to DBS, opened a savings account with them, those were the days when you would get an actual physical balance booklet where deposits and withdrawals would be written in (I still have that booklet) and put my S$ cash in there.
So I felt like an international finance wizzard with all those transactions, nobody in my family had ever travelled as far as me and nobody had a bank account in another country.
In the end I came back to Germany in October 1997, so after five and a half years and still had my 40,000 DM, so the trip did not cost me anything.
How did I do that?
Well, after about two years into my trip, I started to get tired of being a tourist, though I considered myself to be a bit better than that and called myself a traveller, because tourists are stupid and pay too much. 😜
If you travel for some time, you get beached and templed out, you see the most beautiful stuff, but it´s just another day in paradise. So I felt a certain emptiness and wanted to be a part of the places I was visiting, wanted to have a purpose, a connection, so I thought about how to accomplish that and came up with two possibilities, teaching English or German, or teaching scuba diving.
If you wanted to make money teaching languages, you had to be in big cities like Bangkok or Jakarta, which I did not want to stay in for longer anyway, because of the pollution, the crowds, the traffic. Also, by talking to people wo were actually doing this teacher gig, I figured out, that it was just some other form of rat race, albeit with a tropical setting, with the occasional rip-off by unscrupelous schools or agencies.
So I thought, working in scuba diving would be the thing for me, because you are out in nature, at and in the sea, fun in the sun.
When I was on Gili Trawangan, Indonesia I met an instructor there who was a diving machine, but also a very good teacher, so I continued my dive education with him, did my rescue diver, a two months dive master internship and then instructor.
Once I was an instructor I just basically travelled from job to job.
From what I´ve read online, it has become much more difficult to work in those countries without a work permit nowadays, but in those days I did just fine.
So now I have basically done the overture, giving you the big picture about my five and a half years journey, with a heavy emphasis on finances.
Next time I will write about my adventures in the first country of that epic odyssee, wild and wonderful Pakistan.
Stay tuned!
Pictures are from Flickr, labeled for reuse
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