Calvin D. Sun Interview • ER Doctor from USA 🇺🇸

Winter 2010. It’s 3am. My eyes open to an unfamiliar ceiling, and in the darkness I salvage the little of what’s left of my short term memory. I glance around: I think I’m in Cairo? Familiar memories slowly return proving that I’m not dreaming. The echoes of last evening’s call to prayer still remain fresh in my mind — What am I doing here?

For the first 23 years of my life I never traveled. Except for an occasional trip with my father, I otherwise never desired or thought I would ever make efforts to leave home. Even worse, being a born and bred New York City native I had figured that the world would come to me anyway — what’s the point of spending all that money if I’m not going to live anywhere else but NYC?

In 2006 my father died of a sudden heart attack and my mom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. I was 19. And mired in hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt and with no job or any foreseeable sustainable source of income, I felt even less inclined to travel. It seemed I was destined to be confined to the shackles of my birthplace and again being that it was NYC, I reasoned I would be OK with that.

For the next few years I was getting by with a few odd jobs and a handful of bartending gigs. Then in the winter of 2010, I jokingly made a bet with 2 friends that I would join them on their last minute trip to Egypt on the condition that roundtrip tickets would be less than $700. I was not serious at all: Flight prices were nearly triple that amount!

But then I checked the prices on a whim a few hours later: $650. Roundtrip.

Within less than 48 hours I woke up at 3am in an uncomfortable bed to an unfamiliar ceiling in Cairo.

What soon ensued afterwards was a series of unforeseen circumstances and comedy of errors that compelled the very same friends who I made the bet with to leave Egypt earlier than expected. So I ended up traveling solo the next 20 days without having planned to be alone. Although rough in the beginning, by the end of the 3rd week I couldn’t imagine having traveled any other way. I soon quit all my jobs and left for another 3 months, beginning the The Philippines and snaking my way to end in southern India.

In other words: I was the last person you would have expected to travel. I was dragged kicking and screaming into this world and there’s a laughable sense of irony that I would be traveling as much as I am today.

And what am I searching for? The most honest answer is I don’t know. I have no plan. The tourist goes with an expectation in mind, and the traveler has none.

How can you ask me to choose favorites among children? Family members? Loved ones? Here’s a list in no particular order:

Egypt – Riding on horseback by the Great Pyramids at sunrise, 36 hours after losing a bet to a girl I met at a bar in NYC (and as I ironically told her at the time would never see myself traveling)

Bonus Egypt – Just went back 2 months ago taking 20 other people to do this very same thing (to celebrate 10 years of traveling!)

Bonus #2 – And then there’s the White Desert

Mauritania – Hitchhiking for a free ride on top of the “most extreme railway in the world,” aka the Iron Ore Train, across the Sahara underneath a sky full of stars (this was 3 weeks ago!)

North Korea – Sneaking onto the hidden 5th Floor and then my story exploding internationally

Nauru – Celebrating New Year’s in the #1 least visited country in the world

Madagascar – Walking the Avenue of the Baobabs before sunrise

Myanmar – Hiking through the monsoon fog to see The Golden Rock at Kyaiktiyo

Namibia – Waking up at 4am in the morning to be the first one to catch the morning light at Dead Vlei

Greenland – Dancing the night away outside, underneath hours and hours of the Northern Lights

The Philippines – Hiking up and down valleys with a girl I had just met just to see the legendary rice terraces of Batad

Antarctica – Streaking in Antarctica aka THE POLAR PLUNGE

Jordan – Petra At Night

India – Witnessing the evening puri at Varanasi

India – Walking into the Golden Temple at Amritsar and being the only foreigner standing among a sea of worshippers

Lithuania – Shisha at night with a local girl I had met at brunch in NYC 4 months prior who never could believe someone would travel to her home country

New Zealand – Skydiving in the “adventure capital of the world” in Queenstown

Slovenia – A roadtrip through the entire country after kidnapping a random girl we met at our hostel (ok she insisted)

Nicaragua – Sneaking up to the rooftop of our dingy hotel

Ukraine – Gallivanting Kiev’s Nightlife to celebrate a random girl’s birthday

East Timor – Swimming among bioluminescence without expecting it (completely unregulated)

Socotra Island – Camping underneath dragon blood trees.

Russia, Mongolia, China – The Trans-Siberian Railway with a group of strangers.

“Momentum comes from pushing, not from planning. Confidence comes from scars and risk, not from indecision.” – Life Doesn’t Start Tomorrow. 

It starts with *you*. None of the following will ever matter unless you commit to your decision. Yes, dropping everything for something totally new and unknown can be scary! But nobody ever learned how to ride a bike by reading about it; you have to get on the damn thing! So get on and go! 

You might respond with “Yeah, but…” “’Yeah, but…’ is pernicious. Because it makes it sound like we have the best of intentions when really we are just too scared to do what we should. It allows us to be cowards, while sounding noble.” – 3 Reasons to Travel While You’re Young. 

Let’s entertain the possibility that you’ll skip out. Then watch us as we come back safe and sound, share our stories, show you our photos, and talk about how our lives have changed. Whether or not you will realize it then, when you have your first child, when in your midlife crisis, or on your deathbed, you’re inevitably going to regret that you missed out on an epic once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This could set the tone for the rest of your life. Don’t let this happen. Starting slowly never ever works in travel and habits become harder to break once you’ve accustomed yourself to a way of approaching new experiences. 

Do you think that to skydive you first have to look it up on Wikipedia, or learn to fall off a table? No. You simply jump. So those of you who want to travel, travel. And imagine how easy traveling will seem to you afterwards. Imagine how much confidence you’ll gain in yourself. Imagine the bragging rights and stories you’ll have when you come home. 

Not many people realize that the opportunity for a tremendously positive life change is right in front of their faces: This could be the very moment where you turn your life around and finally do something *epic*. 

The world won’t wait for you.

No, I have not lived in a different country for more than six months; NYC is a hard place to leave! The most was 3 months in Shanghai.

The White Desert of Egypt: a moonscape formed by centuries of erosion and sandstorms and a last minute yet unanimously decided excursion for our last hurrah of the trip. 

And I am alone. The desert gales wash my naked chest, and my bare feet burrow into the heat of the earth. I bathe in breathing moonlight. For a moment I can see God moving over the face of the sands.
 
And I see only the desert.
 
I feel a slight night shiver.
 
In the bareness of the desert I detach my consciousness and appreciate a reality in which I no longer exist; to forget that there is me. I consider the folly of qualifying the ego with an significance in this widespread sea of nothingness. It is a futile effort. 
 
I thus let go of ego, and instead perceive a world unadulterated by human consciousness. Unless an omnipotent deus ex machina arbitrarily dictates what is beautiful, the concept of objective beauty can be so ephemeral it might not even exist at all.
 
After all, the world doesn’t care what you or I think is beautiful; we’re mere grains of sand in the desert. The world will keep turning, the desert winds will keep blowing, and time will go on all the same.
 
What’s the point? 

And yet the mere miracle of human existence offers us a simple gift to imagine the what is beautiful to each and every one of us. In the vast diversity of human consciousness, beauty will emerge out of relevance. Although we must share ideas that create an interdependent and collective consciousness of perceiving the world, the core rests in each of our individual experiences that engender infinite possibilities of what is beautiful. Like grains of sand in the desert.
 
And in this beauty of relevance, we also learn that in the ultimate of the infinite there is no ultimate binary: No ultimate right and wrong, no ultimate black and white. The world never operated on a binary code of 0s and 1s, and neither must we. Some of us may choose to do so in order to devise convenient moral compasses, but the folly is when we impose that binary code — or even our standards of beauty — on others, or worse, the world. It is a futile effort.
 
Especially when in the end, the ego that imposes its values on others must one day confront the truth that its own existence is as fleeting as a single grain of sand in the desert. And the world will keep turning, the desert winds will keep blowing, and time will go on all the same.