How was it to adapt to “normal” life after vagabonding / vanlife? by Paul Fenn
By Paul Fenn
For me, a year of unalloyed hell.
As I’ve shared on this site probably too many times, between the ages of 28 and 33, I had the luxury of taking five years off to travel and not work — other than when I wanted to break the terrible monotony of non-stop adventure, islands, beaches, boats, bikes, girls and reading all the books I’d never gotten to.
Lots of it happened on sailing yachts.
I spent the bulk of those years in SE Asia and did several blue-water yacht-hitching passages — around the Fiji Isles, Fiji-NZ, Singapore-Heart of Borneo-Manila, Manila-Okinawa, down the Pacific from Barra de Navidad (Mexico)-Puntarenas (Costa Rica), and many lesser passages mainly out of Singapore, delivering yachts to Malaysia and Thailand. There were also several cargo ship passages in Indonesia and other lands.
Once I found my feet, I traveled with increasing roughness and gnarliness, in order to make my money (C$100,000) last. And to toughen up.
I’d made the money as a sales exec, a seller of office furniture systems — Steelcase mainly — as well as other commercial-grade furniture, interior design, space planning, and floor, wall, and window treatments. It was a high-stress job, with lots of cold-callings, in-person sales call, long meetings, writing up endless orders by hand, sitting in traffic, sweating delivery dates to demanding clients, dealing with a boss who thought I was a slacker even though I netted the biggest single order in his company’s history and sold the most of anyone in a year, also in that company’s history.
What made it so bad was that I worked intensively with some of the most miserable human beings in all creation. Suffice to say, I fucking hated it, viewed it as a tragic waste of my best years, even though I was initially very grateful for the opportunity, given that I was a high-school dropout with no training in anything and no discernible skills other than bullshit. So when I closed that second record-breaking multi-million-dollar piece of biz — furnishing DuPont Canada’s new HQ — I waited till the commissions had reached my bank account, then walked in and gave a month’s notice on April Fool’s Day, 1988.
Fooling I was not. I left Canada June 4th that year, on a one-way ticket to Western Samoa.
And so it began — a five-year vacation, with no money worries, all the outdoor activities I craved and lots of great luck with women, events, and health; I never got robbed, scammed, contracted malaria, dengue fever or even so much as a bad stomach for more than a couple of days the whole time. Honestly, I never had anything worse than heartbreak happen to me.
Life was a never-ending dream of What’s next? Who’ll it be with? Where shall I/we go? Shall I just stick my thumb out on this jungle road and see where I end up? Why don’t I head down the harbor and see if any boats are going anywhere interesting? These girls seem fun. I’ll buy this dirtbike and do Australia. How about mountain biking around NZ? Let’s go spearfishing/surfing/hiking/scuba diving/rock climbing/jungle trekking/urban exploring, etc. Care to have sex on this beach?... and so it went for five years.
I even came back to Toronto for six months in the middle of it, whence I had an affair with a beautiful flight attendant met in a pub — and then straight back to Singapore when the first snow hit in December. Through it all, I focused on learning new languages, cultures and mastering new modes of travel, rather than sitting around resorts getting drunk or high — though I did a few months of the Thai island stoner life, til I grew bored and hit the road again. My theme song, always running in the back of my mind, was “On The Road Again”. I was keen on anything, and I stayed fit and strong enough to do whatever came my way, with energy, both physical and mental. It all served me very well.
It was the sweetest of lives — one I’ve seldom heard of being equaled by anyone other than a few of the great travelers and adventurers.
And then the money ended.
It wasn’t that I didn’t see it coming. It was just that the new career I was trying to launch before that could happen took its damn time taking shape — too long to stave off complete penury, with a side of emotional ruin, dread, misery, self-loathing, jealousy, envy, hatred of those more fortunate and every other toxic instinct you’d never have guessed you had in you, until pushed to the edge of sanity and self-respect.
I was down to my last $2,000, in Thailand in late 1993, trying to finish a novel I’d begun while living in San Francisco for the previous six months, where I’d also tried to kick-start a career as a travel writer. I was pitching articles left and right to high-end publications like Outside, Islands, Men’s Journal, For Him in the UK, etc., and getting nowhere. I couldn’t face or believe the fact that I was not a good enough writer to make the grade.
And so I found myself looking for crew work at a yacht regatta in Phuket, surrounded by millionaires and fun-loving ex-pats, wondering what the hell was going to become of me. I had no ideas. I was paralyzed with shock over my great adventure ending so bluntly. I couldn’t go home, for I didn’t want my family and friends to see this, my lowest-ebb yet. I had to make it alone in Asia.
I phoned a mate in Singapore. He said I could stay with him a few days and that things were booming there — surely I could score a good, high-paying gig. I flew down and sat in his beautiful garden day after day, while he worked, wondering what had become of me, unable to even pick up the phone to call the few leads I had. I had no balls, no gumption left. I just wanted to die, but some tiny shred of optimism, a weak voice shreaking “You’re Paul Fucking Fenn!” kept me going.
I heard about some work on a sailboat, took a local bus to Keppel Marina, near downtown Singapore, to check it out. I’d thought it was for a full-time crew position, a job I could easily do, and I knew these gigs paid well. But how sad was I when the skipper, a cheerful Kiwi, told me the job was to sand off then re-varnish all the exterior woodwork on this classic 75ft yacht, sitting on blocks on the concrete. I took the gig, at $S10 an hour, about US$6.80 at the time. It was hard work, too. Grinding away under the hot sun, dust, and fumes all up to your nose and going home after 8 hours knowing you cleared a scant 80 bucks — in a town where a pitcher of beer cost $35. I rented a bedroom in a house occupied by mostly absentee professional divers, at $600/mo.
Week after week, I sanded and varnished. Month after month I toiled on that boat, listening to Malay pop on radio some local guys redoing the interior blasted all day. I learned the words to several big Malay hits of 1993. That job is done, I got more work at Natsteel Marine’s yard, near the airport, where I did maintenance stuff on a selection of yachts, some owned by men younger than me. They’d look at me, surely wondering, “What in god’s name happened to create this wreck of a man?”
About six months into it I met a girl from Sheffield England, named Paula, in the Changi Sailing Club Bar one Saturday afternoon. She was also a desperate mess, and we fell into each other's arms that very night, then drank and fucked and laughed away at our shared ongoing ruin and misery for months. She took the edge off my bleakness though, as she was very funny, with a crazy accent and slang I could barely translate into English in my head. Thank fate she came along, or I doubt I’d have come out the other side intact.
After several weeks of us dating, she landed a proper job as a graphic designer with a big British firm with a regional office in Singapore.
One night, perhaps a year after I’d washed up there broke, she and I went to a party of mostly designers she’d met through work. I was in great form and clicked with a British pair, the male half of whom owned a small design firm there. He said I was a funny bastard, that I should easily find work as a copywriter in advertising. I asked how. He gave me a number, which I called that Monday morning first thing. The man who answered, Danny, was a Cockney lad around my age from London, a former bricklayer with a wit — enough wit it had passed to get him a writer’s job at an ad agency in London, then a transfer to Singapore.
He would give me my first break. After we met, he asked me to write him a series of dummy ad campaigns for brands his agency managed. After several rounds of those, satisfied that I had enough of what it took, he hired me at $275/day, initially for a week. This stretched into three. Nights, he took me out for beers and intro’d me to a bunch of the creative directors in town, such that a few of them hired me for little projects I could do at home on my ancient laptop. I was soon pulling up to S$900 for a day’s toil.
It seemed I was up and running, after a full year of non-stop bleak. But there was a problem: I was not legal in Singapore. I’d been crossing the border up in Johor, Malaysia every two weeks to renew my tourist visa. In the midst of this fledgling success, I did one such border run in a taxi full of fellow illegals, and was told on return to Singapore that I should “go to Immigration, tell them where you’re working and get a proper Employment Pass.” He gave me a three-day stamp and said I’d be deported if I wasn’t either legal or gone by then.
I panicked… for the good long taxi ride back downtown.
Once I got home, I called around a few ex-pat friends asking what I should do. The consensus was to declare my passport stolen to stave off deportation and buy time. This might give me a few weeks to get myself sorted while I waited for a new passport from the Canadian High Comm. So I did it.
Meanwhile, on the advice of a few more savvy types, I set up a sole proprietorship (cost $70) with the help of a friend’s accountant, who was kind enough to let me use his business address as my corporate one. Then I solicited letters of recommendation from various ad agency CDs, asking them to declare that I had skills they needed but couldn’t find locally, which turned out to be very true. And I applied for an Employment Pass ($250) offering up those endorsement letters as my reason Singapore should let me in. In lieu of all that, Immigration gave me a month’s stamp in my temporary passport, extending it another month while I awaited the yes/no on my EP application.
The General Post Office had a vending machine that spat out 10 business cards for $10, and I made a bunch for my company, which I’d stupidly named Words3, pronounced “Words Cubed”. I think I reckoned it made me sound like some multi-dimensional scribe, or some such swill.
No matter, for the work was coming in near daily by then. I was making it… in a creatively challenging job I loved… with brilliant people… from Singapore and all over the planet. I had a girlfriend who was an utter riot and very much a believer in me. She and I would eventually go our separate ways as lovers, but we still keep in touch some 27 years later, and I will never forget her for her spirit-elevating and fun-making ways. Eternal blessings be upon thee, sweet Paula.
After nearly two months of waiting, a letter from Singapore Immigration. I tore it open, zoomed to the words “your application for an Employment Pass has been approved.” I was in! I took my brand-new passport downtown, showed them my business permit, got my Employment Pass in my passport — four years, and renewable, to run my own shop in Singapore. Made $80k in the remaining six months of that year, noting with delight that my income tax was an astonishing 1.5% net, vs my old job in Canada at 49%.
I have never stopped thinking about that awful year. I have never nearly been as miserable. I have come to appreciate the things a little money can do, to never take it for granted, to be careful with my earnings, and to be generous too, when I can be. And to offer a big leg up to anyone who asks.
This is the character-building stuff. It’s agony at the time, but it works. To anyone going through such a moment, don’t give up. Engage your darkness. Be reckless, be shameless, be hungry, build your network, remain humble, gracious, and polite. Never forget the ones who helped you back to your feet, and pay it forward as often and willingly as you’re able.
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