Taking a Gap Year: Don't Pack Expectations

Step 1- Book your flight.
Step 2- Pack your bags.
Step 3- Leave behind your expectations!

I've mentioned in previous posts that travelling brings forth many unknowns and uncertainties and I think in an attempt to have control I've always tried to mitigate these by imagining what could happen and packing accordingly. But how are you to know until your in that moment?

Before I left to Vietnam I packed what could be considered a miniature pharmacy that took up the entire brain of my rucksack. I had everything from pills for raging diarrhea to four packs of allergy medication and I don't even have allergies. The travel clinic that I visited before I left Vancouver had given me a run down of all the potential dangers, illnesses, and basically scared me to a point where I thought "how the heck can people live there!!" Now I now Vietnam isn't the most prosperous of countries when it comes to what we know to be western medicine, but in fact they do have pharmacies. Shock (insert eye roll here). My expectations based on now what I know to be over exaggerated scare tactics came from the media, the Internet, and friends and family that had only ever heard the horror through the grape vine. But the reality is, unless you plan on going straight from the airport to the jungle you'll be able to get what you need in the cities, in fact I was able to get any medicine I needed cheaper there than what I was paying back home. Now don't get me wrong I don't want to confuse expectations for being prepared, but my point is you don't ever really know what its going to be like until your there in that moment.

The weeks leading up to my departure I had a rough itinerary in my head of what I wanted to do. I hadn't booked any flights but I thought: three weeks in Vietnam with my brother, a month in Bali, and then arrive in Queenstrown, New Zealand just in time for the ski season. Little did I know at the time my itinerary turned out like this- a month in Vietnam, three weeks in Cambodia, two months living and working at a hostel in Thailand (this opportunity was a definite life saver), two weeks in Laos, three weeks in Bali, three days in Singapore, three weeks in Australia, before finally arriving in New Zealand (now at this point completely broke) and living in a hostel in Auckland while working at Greenpeace.

Letting go of expectations and going with the flow was the reason I was able to have those experiences. There were definitely moments of money derived freak-outs and times where I questioned what the heck I was doing, but I suppose having blind faith and trust in the universe gave me peace of mind.

So my amateur peace of advice is this: don't pack expectations. Book your flight, get on it. Only pack the essentials physically and metaphorically. Everything will work out the way its suppose to.