On The Road (with Eric Czuleger)
A brief conversation about why we go where we go.
Here’s a recent conversation I had with this week’s guest, Eric Czuleger, about living a life that’s largely defined by travel. Hope you enjoy it.
CPR: Travel has been central to both our lives. I wonder why it's important to you, and whether your relationship with it has changed over the years. Do you travel with purpose? Are you looking for something specific when you hit the road?
EC: It really is central. In fact, whether you know it or not, travel brought us together. I first reached out to you after listening to Civilized to Death on a brutal train ride through Romania.
I think travel is self-expression—actively wrestling with big questions and sharing what you find. I try to organize my travel around these big questions.
I wanted to understand sectarian violence, and that sent me to Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and Lebanon in one trip. The places talk to each other through your experience.
You moved to places for long periods. How does that compare to a whirlwind tour?
CPR: Yeah, very different to live in a place versus just visit. Complicated relationship versus simple one-night stand. But the only place I'd say I "moved to" outside the US would be Barcelona. I hung around other places for a few months—Bangkok, southern Mexico, Alaska—but that was more slow travel than any kind of semi-permanent life.
But I'm interested in your idea of travel as self-expression. What do you mean by that? Is sharing your experience essential to travel for you?
I've often been surprised and frustrated by the lack of interest many people had in hearing about my adventures. I remember coming back from my first real trip to Mexico and being met with indifference verging on hostility when I tried to tell my friends about some of the crazy shit I'd experienced. It was my first insight into how travel can bring you closer to people you meet on the road, but it can also create distance from people back home.
EC: I think sharing is part of my practice as a writer and a traveler. I've been blessed to go to a lot of cool places and quite a few dangerous ones. I've had kidnapping attempts in Somalia and notably got slashed across the head in South Africa.
A lot of people will never have those experiences. Some might not want them. That doesn't mean they can't take something from what I saw and felt.
I also feel some responsibility to the countries themselves. I want people to know that I'd go back to South Africa in a second despite being attacked. People should know about how generous Iraqis are and that Albanians aren't mad—they just talk like that.
If I can be an honest broker of experience, maybe someone else will poke a toe outside their comfort zone.
Do you think the hostility you've experienced might be partly jealousy? I've certainly run into people who roll their eyes and say, "Must be nice to travel all the time!"
CPR: I'm sure it was partly that, but I think travel is one of those things that people are told they should like, along with sushi, musicals, and ugly dogs owned by pretty women. But I think a lot of people just don't find travel interesting enough to put up with the instability, exhaustion, and digestive issues that are part of any good travel adventure—not to mention kidnapping attempts and head-slashings!
So, if you weren't writing about your experiences or sharing them in other ways, would you still want to travel?
EC: Man, that's a good question. I think regardless I'd be novelty-seeking in that way. I define travel as any step outside of your comfort zone. When I was in Los Angeles after the Peace Corps, I was so bored that I went to an alien abductee support group that I saw on Meetup.com. Listening to strangers talk about their abduction experiences turned into an invitation to a UFO summoning and then landed me and my buddies in Rachel, Nevada (population 47). It's a town on the border of Area 51.
I wasn't going terribly far from my home in LA, but it certainly felt like a trek into the unknown. Do you think your journey to cultivate a life in Crestone scratches that itch for you? Seems like a whole other adventure that happens in your developing backyard.
CPR: As Thoreau said, "I have traveled widely in Concord." It's true that there are many ways to travel—some of which don't require leaving home. Living in this tiny mountain town is a kind of travel for me. Strangely, after having moved all over for most of my life, stability is novel to me, you know? Not being a foreigner is kind of a foreign experience.
I think there’s also an element of self-selection in travel that can apply to some places. One of the things I loved the most about my travel days was that I consistently met fascinating, unusual people. Of course, the local people were fascinating to me because they were so different from anyone I’d known before, in my suburban American upbringing – but the other travelers I met were special, too, in that they were the ones who walked away from safety, comfort, home. I don’t know if this still applies, in these days of easily texting one’s mom from Tashkent, but in the 80s, you didn’t go to Sumatra or Chiapas if you didn’t have at least some sense of adventure.
Which brings me to the question of what, if anything, we stand to lose in all this freedom and mobility. I'm older than you, so maybe it's an age thing, but I sometimes feel significant grief over the fact that my closest friends are spread all over the world—and it's highly likely I'll never see some of them again. There's no "home" I can go to in order to be close to even a small fraction of the people I love. They're in Spain, Holland, South Africa, France, Australia, Los Angeles, Spokane... It can get lonely, right? Do you ever think about the kind of life you're building, and whether you might come to regret some aspects of it?
EC: Most certainly. I've been really considering that a lot lately. Part of the reason I came back to the States this time was to try and find some solid ground to build instead of a better way of packing the few things I own. I met my girlfriend here in Los Angeles and I'm taking her to Albania for the summer. She has a lot to pack and take care of, I've got the same bags I've always had. She's got deep roots. I've been able to grow lots of places.
Trying to thread the needle now. It's tough. This is why I am moving towards writing my newsletter and constraining my journeys to research trips. I think that I've collected a lot of experience and I think that is best shared before I go grab some more.
CPR: I hear that. Looking back at my life, it feels like the first part (half?) of my life was a long inhalation (of energy, support, luck, experience). Somewhere around my mid-30s, when I started writing Sex at Dawn, I started exhaling. Taking it in felt great, until I started to feel saturated, like I couldn’t absorb any more, at least for a while. I felt a strong need to give, after I’d been taking for so long. I’m not trying to sound noble, cause it wasn’t that. It just felt like I’d eaten enough, and now it was time to digest.
I think writing is a great way for you to metabolize all this experience, as you’re a really gifted writer and thinker. I love what you’re doing with “The Under Report,” and your book, You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist is great. I hope everyone reading this will check out your work and benefit from your insights.
EC: Thanks man, seems like we've got some similar trajectories. Glad to have your wisdom along for the ride.
In addition to the links above, you can find Eric at @eczuleger on X and Instagram, and @The_under_report on TikTok.