• AdventureView with Joel Graham: A Human Oxymoron
• From Mark’s Personal Journal, dreaming in Argentina
• NEW gallery: Argentina – with text! Stories and links!
  

AdventureView with Joel Graham: A Human Oxymoron

We have military intelligence, jumbo shrimp, and my pal Joel, an adventurous accountant. You may remember him from my visits to Buenos Aires, ( Living Large, Nov. 4, 2003 ). Joel is a C.P.A. from California, who took his job with him 3,000 miles south to Argentina. Having traveled to 87 countries, he has never let his desk job prevent him from indulging in his passion. In this interview Joel talks about how, and why, he made his dream a reality.

LiveYourAdventure: You once told me, “I want the rest of my life to be an adventure.” You got me traveling around in a way… tell me how you got started traveling.
Joel Graham: My friendship with you has been an adventure! Seriously though, when I was at the University of Portland they had a student exchange program with Salzburg, Austria. So I decided to go study a year in Europe. We went to school four days a week, then we had long weekends free where we could do anything we wanted. Most of the governments were good about giving visas to American students... So I’d go out traveling. You could grab a train anywhere – I went to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia… The only place I didn’t go where I really wanted to go was East Germany, but they wouldn’t give us a ticket, they wouldn’t give us a visa. This was still when the Iron Curtain was in place. I did go to East Berlin. That’s really how I got the traveling bug in me. Since then, I’ve been a traveling maniac. I’ve been to 87 countries.

LYA: Before you moved to Argentina two years ago, you were traveling and working as a CPA. How did you manage that?
JG: I was a C.P.A. in San Francisco and I had a lot of clients there. Basically they didn’t care where I was working, as long as the work got done. I didn’t have to go sit in their offices or anything. So I would pretty much travel half the year and work half the year. The big problem, believe it or not, was my dog. I didn’t like to leave him in a kennel for too long, so I would travel for a month or three weeks at a time. And I’d do that three or four times a year.

LYA: And now you live in Buenos Aires full time. What made you move there?
JG: Well, it’s a first-world country at third-world prices. You can have all the luxuries you find in New York or California, like well-built apartments, maid service, and air conditioning, but at Peruvian prices. The have great food, and some of the most beautiful women in the world… The other thing is that there’s a lot going on in South America, a lot I still want to see. So I wanted to make Buenos Aires a home base for later travels. And I want to learn Spanish.

LYA: How do you service your clients now?
JG: Thanks to the internet, I can do my work anywhere as long as I have access to high-speed internet. Thanks to you, I also have this device called an analog telephone adapter. It’s internet telephone service, VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol). It converts my voice into internet data, and sends my voice just like an email. I can use this to call my clients from anywhere in the world. [Editor’s note: two of these service providers are Vonage.com and Lingo.com]

LYA: What were some of your most adventurous trips?
JG: Well… what does adventure mean? The most beautiful, the most…

LYA: That’s a good question, one I should be asking you!
JG: No, I asked you first!

LYA: Well, to me adventure, travel adventure, is where you have a point A and point B, but in between you don’t know everything that’s going to happen… there may be some risk, there may not be risk, but it’s not knowing what’s going to happen, just enjoying the ride, enjoying the thrill.
JG: Right. Adventure is anything you don’t have at home. Where I lived in San Francisco, there was a Starbuck’s right downstairs. I like my coffee in the morning, so to me, an adventure would be, how can I get my coffee when I don’t speak the language! To answer the original question though, the coolest countries I’ve ever traveled to are in South America. I really dig South America. I went to Peru for the first time in 1997. I remember landing at the airport and looking outside of customs and seeing thousands of people. People selling taxis, rooms, people waiting for relatives, police officers with machine guns… It’s a beautiful place, but it’s always a little out of control.

LYA: What about “out of control” do you like?
JG: I like out of control as long as my personal safety isn’t out of line. In Peru I never felt I was in a situation that was life-threatening. In Columbia though, I have been in situations where I thought I was going to die.

LYA: I know we’ve been in a lot of situations, like in Rio where the night before I got there you got hit in the head with a rock and the night after I got there, you witnessed a murder on the street. Do you consider that part of adventure, or is that just crazy dangerous?
JG: That’s just crazy danger. It’s funny, when I think of Rio I don’t think of it as being dangerous. At certain times, I guess, like during Carnival, but the crimes then weren’t against me. The rock wasn’t thrown at me, I was an innocent bystander. The shooting, as the police explained to me in Portuguese, was a drug hit. I don’t go to countries where there are kidnappings, like Iraq or North Korea. But there are not a whole lot of other places I wouldn’t go. And I don’t like going to places where I have to take malaria medication. It makes me a little bit crazy.

LYA: Crazier, you mean! So what do you see for the future?
JG: Well, I’m moving! Because there’s been a big influx of foreigners, the real estate prices have drastically increased. So I’m moving to a smaller place in a nice area near a dog park. It’s kind of weird… I’m working on getting my residency, but right now I’m still on a tourist visa and foreigners aren’t allowed to sign a contract that’s for more than six months. So I have to pay the contract in advance. I want to stay here another two years at least, but if it gets too expensive I’ll move to another country.

And there are five things I want to do while I’m still able. Go to Rwanda – there’s an environmental group there where you can hang out with the gorillas. I want to do that. I also want to visit India, Cambodia, the Kruger National Park in South Africa, and Egypt. Maybe I’ll do Egypt this Christmas. And of course checking out more of South America.

LYA: Thanks, Joel.
JG: Your welcome. Are you still recording? I want to talk about these women….*CLICK*

Joel Graham can be reached at Joelacpa@aol.com

From Mark’s Personal Journal

I’m in Buenos Aires. It’s still dark out. I’m in a strange bed. I have to get up and write this down…

It's probably about four in the morning. I've just been having this wacky dream about living a dream life, doing fascinating and fun stuff and sharing it with people in a blog. I was sailing out beyond the edges of ordinary reality, sharing my wacky dream of a life with anyone who wanted to join me online. Whenever I chose, I could sort of drag my life onto the internet and live inside of it.

Upon waking I realized that my real life isn't very far from my crazy dream. The only thing that separates my dream life as I slept from the one I am “really” living is the notion of effort; that the waking dream I'm in requires some struggle on my part to keep it all going. If I stopped putting in the effort, it might all collapse. In other words, my real life is a dream, half of the time or so, when I'm not struggling at it. The half of my life that isn't a dream, the “effort” part, is just a point of view, a notion or attitude that that makes it so. A teensy tiny shift on my part (and it seems to be happening now as I write this) and the effort part could just go away. If I just let go of the struggle, it could ALL be an effortless dream.
I think I'll go back to sleep now. Back to my other dream.

NEW Photo Gallery: Argentina

The Argentine culture has a fascinating take on the afterlife. The address of your home for the afterlife is more important than your address in life. This is from the most prestigious Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires, not far from the crypt of Evita “Don’t cry for me, Argentina” Peron. It is a necropolis where streets are lined with ornate miniature cathedrals and massive sculptures that rival any museum in the world. Like the Argentines, I have my own personal fascination with cemeteries. Click here see my gallery of photos of cemeteries throughout Latin America.

Orcas? Killer whales? No. These are dolphins! Not much more than four feet long. Commerson’s dolphins found off the coast of Patagonia, specifically, Puerto San Julian. I got to hang out with several pods over the course of a 3 hour excursion. They were incredibly swift and playful, swimming from side to side under our boat, blowing air and water into the faces of the delighted tourists peering down at them. Read more here.

This photo was taken at about 5 am – but the sun had already been up for several hours! It was quite a challenge – and a triumph – to get into position to take this shot. Get the details here. It was part of my “died and gone to photographers’ heaven” day. Read more about it here.

Glaciers in Argentina? Yes. Many North Americans don’t realize how close Argentina and Chile are to the South Pole. I can’t actually take credit for this photo. My girlfriend took this shot with my little point and shoot digital camera while I was wasting my time with my defunct pro-model camera. Click here to read about my frustrations in Perito Moreno National Park.

Guanaco are llama-type animals that roam the plains in parts of Argentina. They are a frequent sight along the highway. I stopped to get a shot of a group of three of them. Unlike others I had focused on, these three seemed very interested in me. They scampered to the top of small hill nearby and waited. They looked at me and whistled. Something between a whistle and a screech. I whistled back. Read more here.

The end of the world! This is from the waterfront in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world. The eerie blue-grey light was from the sun, which was low on the horizon but still not set at 9 pm. It was only dark from midnight to 3 am that time of year. This was taken the actual day I reached my goal of driving to the end of the world. To read about how I felt, click here.