About The Author

About

Richard Trotter

I am Richard Trotter; I was a college professor at the Merrick School of Business of the University of Baltimore for most of my academic career. While I enjoyed teaching the real passion in my life was travel. At age 50 I embarked on a “Thirty Year Gap Year-the Love of Life through Travel “I had a bucket list of adventures I wanted to do and famous places I wanted to see. For the past thirty years I have been going down that list, and I am happy to see I have done virtually everything I put on the list. At age fifty I stayed for the first time at a hostel in Paris as part of a group bike trip. Though much older than my roommates I enjoyed the youthful energy of the place and have continued to stay at hostels all over the world for the past thirty years. Despite the big age difference between me and my dorm mates there has been a wonderful connection despite the age difference based on our mutual love of travel and adventure. Read this book and you will travel with me around the world from the Himalayas to the Andes, Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, Southeast Asia, China Japan Europe, Australia, South America, the USA and Canada.

I was fortunate that though much older than a normal backpacker I was very fit and had youthful energy, so I was able not only to see but to experience adventure. You will also meet all the wonderful people I met on my journey.

As you can see from my brief biography I have led an ordinary life. Travel is a way us ordinary people to be masters of the world. What is even better is you do not have to be rich to do this. Go on hostelworld.com and the world is yours and be the master of the world. I have had my adventures now it is time for me to share my adventures with others and to guide you to your own adventures.

St. Augustine himself an avid traveler wrote 1500 years ago that “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page “As Agetha Christie has said:

“Life is like the interior of a ship, that is it has watertight compartments You emerge from one, seal the bolt of the doors … I have felt this about travel. You step from one life into another. You are yourself but a different self. The new self is untrammeled by the hundreds of spider webs and filaments that enclose you in a day-to-day cocoon of day-to-day domestic life. Your travel life has the essence of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability, you will never see again”

For me travel, especially in the free vagabond way I have done much of my travel has been my liberation from being ordinary. When I travel, I leave my ordinary compartment of life and become as it were master of the world, my eyes and soul have traveled from the Himalayas to the Andes, the outback of Australia, to have cast my eyes on the great wonders of the world natural and manmade, the Taj mahal in India, the forbidden City in China, Petra ,Angor Wat, but beyond merely seeing a bucket list of sights I have my own memories not cited in any guide book. Yes, the Taj Mahal was as splendid to behold as I had hoped but just beyond its magnificence, I remember a tree maybe thirty feet high which was the home to ten large vultures. When on a cold winter’s day my screen saver displays a picture of Mt. Kilimanjaro what comes to mind is my struggling with every breath to reach the crater where that night I will sleep in a sleeping bag given to me by a woman who loved me so I would not be cold on my adventures, because that night it was 10 below zero .I will never forget my guide while I am focused on taking my text step patting me on the shoulder and pointing to a high very large  glacier on Kilimanjaro or if the screen saver  displays a picture of the  Cinque Terre town  of Manarola in Italy and before me is very place where I swam  and luxuriated in being alive  in crystal clear waters    or a picture of the  Wadi Rum desert  where Lawrence of Arabia made legends and I slept on the desert sand  looking at the stars with a grandeur of the sky you can see nowhere else.

How can I forget the Xanadu adventures told to me by young people at a hostel in Oaxaca Mexico of their other world experiences taking mushrooms in the magic mushroom paradise of San Jose del Pacifico

I would like to share with you me over thirty years and more around this planet and hope that you will have adventures of your own as you liberate yourself from the ordinary in life to the extraordinary.

Travel can take you to a time machine where you metaphorically meet historical figures. While in Aleppo I went to the Barren Hotel where Agatha Chritie stayed as well as Lawrence of Arabia. In Rome I sat in Emperor Augustus and Livia’s dining room. My time machine was 2000 years with one of the most influential men and women in world history Another time traveler like me described her experience in the dining room as follows:

“Livia’s dining room at the Palazzo Massimo may be my favorite my favorite museum in the world, which given how many museums I love is no faint praise. I could spend hours looking at these walls and it seems incredible to me to me that I’m looking at something built for the wife of the Emperor Augustus.”

Sadly, some of the places I saw are no more the great 1000-year-old marketplace in Aleppo is gone destroyed by war and much of Dubar Square in Kathmandu Nepal was destroyed by earthquake. Go feast on the wonders of this world. Find your own special places and adventures that will be in your life’s DNA.