How to travel without even leaving home (w/ Saleem Reshamwala) (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy:
You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel like time is just moving so quickly. Days blur into weeks, blur into months, and all of a sudden I'm like, “It’s summer again. How could it be summer again? We skipped a season, didn't we? Something has gone wrong.”

One of the only surefire ways I know to slow down time, to make it not just all blur together, is to travel. And I know that travel isn't something that we can all do, but I will say that for me, the ability to experience a perspective shift, to see things through someone else's eyes, to walk in someone else's shoes, that has been life-changing.

Sometimes that could be a perfect moment, like hearing a brass band play inside of a bowling alley in New Orleans. A memory that comes up every time I see someone do a little victory dance after bowling a strike and every single time I've seen a tuba. Or it can also be when things go horribly awry. Like when I got food poisoning right before a transcontinental flight, and I was pouring cold sweat in the check-in line, just murmuring to myself over and over, “You can do this. You will survive. You can do this. You will survive.” That is a flight that I will never forget for the rest of my life.

Other times, it doesn't even have to involve leaving the city that I live in. Like when I was walking around downtown Los Angeles and stumbled across a street where every single store sold hundreds of different piñatas, every size, shape, and design you can imagine. I love the adventure of discovering an unexpected piñata district that forever changes my mental conception of the city that I call home.

Today's guest, Saleem Reshamwala, is an expert on how to make your life memorable by filling it with journeys both short and long. He's a filmmaker who's made award-winning music videos. He's a journalist, and he's a frequent world traveler. Here's a clip from his podcast, Far Flung with Saleem Reshamwala.

[00:01:54] Saleem Reshamwala:
Right now you're hearing the streets of Caracas, Venezuela, specifically inside a bus. And like a lot of buses around the world, you’re gonna hear everything on this bus: street vendors, poets, comedians, rappers. There's definitely commuters, but on this bus, you can also watch the news.

There's no actual television though. At the front of the bus, there's just two people holding up a giant square of cardboard that's decorated to look like a TV. It’s just cardboard. They cut out a square in the frame, and they're sticking their heads through the opening while they're narrating the news as if it was a broadcast.

The folks doing this, they call themselves El Bus TV: bus television, and they're doing this because in Venezuela right now, undeniably things are really rough, and one of the things that people say is not helping is that they don't have access to the news. What they have in a lot of cases is government propaganda.

[00:03:09] Chris Duffy:
In today's episode, we are gonna take you on a journey with Saleem, but first, we're gonna take a quick detour into some ads. Don't go anywhere.

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[00:03:25] Chris Duffy:
We’re talking about travel, culture, and how to bring a sense of adventure into your everyday life with Saleem Reshamwala.

[00:03:31] Saleem Reshamwala:
Hey, I am Saleem Reshamwala. I'm a journalist and filmmaker. I've been to over 50 countries for a variety of reasons, and I am super happy to be here.

[00:03:43] Chris Duffy:
Saleem, early in your career when you were first starting out, you spent a lot of time traveling around the world on a boat. That's a very unique experience. And now, can you tell us about that?

[00:03:52] Saleem Reshamwala:
You know, I was living in Japan, had been living in Japan for, at that point, probably five years, and a friend reached out, and he was like, “They’re looking for people who can teach English and some Spanish and who are game for being involved in shipboard entertainment, and I think you should apply.”

I was like, “Okay, that sounds super unusual.” And so I essentially, you know, worked for room and board. Which, which sounds so, like, Moby Dick, but got around the world twice on that ship while teaching English, teaching occasional Spanish classes, and then eventually as the shipboard reporter.

[00:04:31] Chris Duffy:
So you’ve been to a bunch of different countries for your work as a filmmaker, especially making music videos and working as a journalist. But you also travel for fun and for pleasure. So what types of trips are most rewarding to you?

[00:04:44] Saleem Reshamwala:
Yeah. You know, it's so hard to predict before a trip what kind of trip is gonna give you what kind of feeling, could leave you with what kind of memories. I love stuff where I have something to do on the ground, and so whether that's work, where it's super clear—sometimes I'm working on a film crew or reporting in a port—but if I'm not, if I’m just on a trip for fun, I also like to make little missions for myself.

[00:05:16] Chris Duffy:
Give me an example of what's a, what's an example of a mission?

[00:05:18] Saleem Reshamwala:
I really like getting a haircut when I'm on the road. I don't know the real origin story of this. It's like hard to figure out one's own psychology, but when I was a little kid, I did get a haircut where the barber nicked my ear.

[00:05:32] Chris Duffy:
Oh, that’s a great fear for me.

[00:05:34] Saleem Reshamwala:
Yeah. Oh yeah, drew blood. Also, my dad used to tell me this story about an Indian barber who, like, murdered the emperor with a razor while he was giving him a haircut. Don't count that as history. That's like some fairytale my dad used to tell me when I was little. I dunno if it's true.

[00:05:51] Chris Duffy:
Sweeney Todd exists across cultures.

[00:05:52] Saleem Reshamwala:
Yeah. Yes, it's an intercultural meme. So really anytime I have more than a few days someplace, I try to get a haircut in that place. And it's kind of a, almost like a micro version of everything I love about travel. So one of the, the things I love is just getting in a different head space, you know, and sitting in a barber chair, you’re, like, super vulnerable. Sometimes, you know, people have sharp objects, they're doing like odd things to your beard, you know?

And then the other is just seeing the wild range of variables, even in kind of mundane experiences depending on where you are in the world. So, my dad's from India. I most recently got a haircut internationally on the block that he grew up in. When you get a haircut there, on that street, there's a barber who when you finish with the haircut, he gives you a head massage.

And one of the things he does is he puts these like steampunk-looking, vibrating metal devices on his hands and rubs your head, and then at the end, he cleans your ear, and it is like the most inside of your skull feeling I've ever experienced in my life.

[00:07:02] Chris Duffy:
One of the things that people really want out of travel, I think often, is to get an experience that's more than superficial.

[00:07:09] Saleem Reshamwala:
Yeah.

[00:07:10] Chris Duffy:
To not just see, you know, check off the things, but to have, like, quote-unquote “a real experience”. And it seems like for you getting a haircut there is one of the ways in. So can you talk about how to get more than superficial, both abroad and actually at home as well?

[00:07:24] Saleem Reshamwala:
For me, the coolest thing about traveling is, like I said, just opening up all those variables, all those little ways that a thing can be distinct. And one of the ways that things get, for me, deeply surprising is when I don't have clear expectations of them. So if you go to the Taj Mahal—you’ve seen photos of the Taj Mahal from every angle before you go. You should definitely go. It's beautiful building. If you haven't been, totally check it out. But to some degree, you know what that experience is gonna be like before you go. Right?

With something that you normally do at home, like supermarkets are another one where you go to the grocery store, and the way the machine distributes peanuts or the packaging or the flavor of Kit Kat in Japan is a super famous one, is just a normal everyday thing for you, but tweaked in a way that's super interesting.

So much of, you know, for me, happiness is related towards expectation. So if I go into a spot where I've got minimal expectation, the chances of being pleasantly surprised or having my mind changed or entering into a conversation that I completely was never expecting just feels higher.

[00:08:47] Chris Duffy:
It's interesting ‘cause you know, sometimes travel can feel like it's only for people who have a lot of money and can buy a really expensive plane ticket to go halfway around the world. And I think that the way you're framing it, a really interesting part is you can have a travel experience without even leaving the place that you live.

[00:09:05] Saleem Reshamwala:
Totally. During the pandemic especially, I started taking these super long walks, like three hours and, you know, you don't have to get too far in most places to get to someplace that you have never seen.

Also, in those places, you can kind of test out things that people think of doing while they travel. A thing that you associate with a trip. So if you're down the street from your house and you see some, someone opening their store in the morning. You might feel, like, kind of awkward taking a picture of them, or you might not. It's totally up to the individual, but I think it's really interesting to recognize even with hyper-local travel, what our codes of ethics are when we're near our house and what our codes of ethics are when we're far away from our house and how they're different and why.

One of the things I've been doing for the past few months—a friend of mine gave me this weird challenge. I mentioned to her that I wanted to learn how to draw. And she was like, “Oh, I had a professor who said, draw your left hand every day for a hundred days. No matter what else you do, you will get better at drawing.” So I started doing that, and I do that in a hotel lobby most days near my house. Even just posting the occasional photo of that, I'd get messages from friends that are like, “Are you on the road?”

And it made me realize that I do feel a little bit like I'm on the road just being in a hotel lobby down the way and seeing who comes in, chatting with them. You know, I think a lot about the openness to experience that happens when you travel and how some of that is due to the inputs of being in a new place.

And some of that is actually just because you're in a travel mindset, right? Like you're on the road, you, you know, have kind of like a playfulness around identity. Sometimes people don't know who you are. You have a certain anonymity. You can actually get that pretty close to your own house if you go someplace where you don't usually hang out.

[00:11:01] Chris Duffy:
You, as a person, in the times that I've interacted with you and in even just talking to you now, you have, you know, a real like openness. You are, you have, there's a real sense of fun around you. It's easy to see how you’re, like, up for adventures and missions, and you wanna explore. Do you think that travel has built those things in you, or have you liked to travel because you already have those things?

[00:11:27] Saleem Reshamwala:
It's always hard to know where our personalities come, but for me, I definitely had a lot of experience as a kid where I was uncomfortable at first. I just kind of had to deal with it. You know, I mentioned my dad's from India, my mom's from Japan, so there were a lot of kind of cultural things growing up.

Like I spent a lot of time at parties where I didn't understand the language. I didn't grow up speaking Hindi or Urdu, and I spent a lot of time in those kind of spaces. My dad's a chemist. When I was a teenager, he sent me to work in a chemical factory in Toluca, in Mexico, for summer. And at first, I was super mad. I was like, “You know, other kids are like, ‘It's the last summer, we're gonna do nothing.’” Or you know, soccer camp or whatever. And yeah, he sent me to work in a factory just because he had a friend who worked in that factory, and the guy was really nice and was like, “Yeah, your son can stay with us.” And it turned into an experience where I'd spend like half a day in the factory, really like the factory pet because I wasn't very useful in a Mexican chemical factory.

And then the second half of the day, I'd hang out with the señora of the house watching telenovelas until the kids came home. I quickly realized that, you know, I didn't speak any Spanish or not much Spanish, based on high school Spanish, and was forced to kind of learn that way.

So I do think those kind of experiences of being in situations where I didn't really know what was going on a lot made me more comfortable in those situations. You know, I think we all have a kind of, there might be some, some general tendencies in our personalities, but I do think experiences that, that force us out of our comfort zone, it’s like exposure therapy. You just get used to more kinds of situations.

[00:13:13] Chris Duffy:
I think that a lot of the things that you talk about and that I know you care about are just as applicable for someone who's been to two countries or, or never traveled to another country. What are the three most important things you would recommend to a person to have better travel experiences?

[00:13:30] Saleem Reshamwala:
One, try the things that sound like they're gonna be boring back home while you're in other places. This is like the haircut thing I mentioned. Take public transport rather than the Uber. A lot of things that are like chores back home get really interesting when you do them in other spots. My number two would be practice everything that you're gonna do on your international trip locally.

Try all these, you know, check out your local hotel lobby. Do, like, experiment locally with going to, like drive along the road, pull over to a restaurant that you're not gonna Yelp before you go in. Just do all these kind of things that you wanna do on the road. Try them all locally and just get your mind in that mindset.

Oh, here's a weird third. If you have an office job, change your out-of-office auto-reply so it looks like you're coming back at least a day or two after you actually get back, and that sounds like such a small thing, but if I were to turn it into a kind of a bigger thing, it's to try and make that travel experience as separate from your daily worries as possible, and the end of a trip where you know you're gonna be in the office the day after you get back gets a little messed up by the idea that you're gonna be at the office the day after you get back. And I also find that the day after a trip, if you have the privilege and the ability of spending an extra day of vacation or of having your arrival on a Friday so you have the weekend to decompress a bit, it just gives me time to let the head headspace of that trip seep into my daily life.

[00:15:11] Chris Duffy:
Okay, we're gonna give the podcast a little bit of space right now to let some ads seep in. We'll be right back after these messages.

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[00:15:26] Chris Duffy:
We're talking with Saleem Reshamwala about travel and adventure. Saleem, let’s talk about those initial moments when you arrive in a new place. Once you get past the stress and anticipation of traveling to somewhere you've never been, how do you settle into your surroundings and, and start to get a feel for where you are?

[00:15:42] Saleem Reshamwala:
So this is gonna be different for every person. For me, some of the things I'm trying to do are slow down my processing of the place. I'm not an artist, but I really like to carry a sketchpad and just try drawing things as I travel. I find I remember those things really differently. Other stuff is the, one of the first things I do is exercise as soon as I get somewhere, whether that's like hotel gym, if I need, if it needs to be. Even better, much, much better is like going on a really long walk or a run. Part of that is to get myself outta my head and just into my body, but then also just to start exploring on foot.

And you know, I like to hand draw maps of the places I go. Super crappy maps, but just ways to slow down my processing of what's happening. And then I'm always looking to try and talk to folks who live in the area as soon as possible. So often before I go, I'll try and find a friend of a friend who I can meet up with.

If I don't have any contact like that, I'll often, you know, try and find a cafe that I'm, and I'll make the decision, “I'm gonna go to this cafe every day of this trip.” I know that sounds weird because you're at a, on a trip to like get new experiences, new places. But something about being a regular away from home really changes the trip for me.

Like if you go to a small town anywhere and you go to the same cafe three days, they're gonna kind of recognize you when you get in, and they'll be much more likely to chat with you. Those are folks who now, you know, they know you're not just in and out, so you can kind of ask 'em some questions about the spot.

I often think about how there's only two stories in the world. A person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

[00:17:29] Chris Duffy:
Huh.

[00:17:30] Saleem Reshamwala:
Right? And so I often think, “Oh, how could I be a reasonably good stranger?” You're in a different spot. You’re in their world, you're undeniably, no matter how well prepared you are, if you go someplace you don't usually go, you're probably violating some small cultural rule. Right?

[00:17:47] Chris Duffy:
Can you tell us about a time that you have had something uncomfortable happen that has then been an okay situation? Like a mistake that's okay? Versus like, what are the mistakes that really make you cringe?

[00:18:00] Saleem Reshamwala:
One thing is kind of like learning to eat your losses. When you've made a mistake and gracefully move on to the next thing as as well as possible. Here's a kind of silly thing that happened to my brother and I. We were traveling, my brother was studying in Guangzhou, and we were traveling in a Cantonese-speaking region of China, and neither of us could understand anything spoken to us.

[00:18:22] Chris Duffy:
Okay.

[00:18:22] Saleem Reshamwala:
We were at a temple. Next to it were these boats, these restaurant boats, tons of families are eating on the boats. We'd been living without spending much money on food because my brother was a student. I was moving around a lot at that point. We talked to a woman who's running one of these restaurant boats and we're like, you know, we, we think that we're successfully being like, “Hey, let's get a meal on this boat, just like all these other people are.”

The price seems higher, significantly than we expected, but we're like, “Okay, cool. We'll roll with it.” She takes us around the market. We choose the ingredients for the meal they're gonna cook. We're super excited. We get on the boat. As we're getting on the boat that is full half full of families at this point, right? They're all sitting down. All of the families get off the boat. They're not angry. They're incredibly amused, and they're getting off the boat. Then they set out a table and me and my brother sit down at the table. We're trying to figure out if we did something offensive or, and we realize we accidentally rented an entire boat, and we then had this, like, romantic dinner for two on a lake that was completely not what we intended to order, right? We felt incredibly silly. Pretty embarrassing. Pretty goofy. But at that point, you know, it's, I think it would've been wrong in that situation to be like, “Hey, this isn't what we wanted. Let's renegotiate. Let's get the cheaper thing.” Like it, you gotta just be like, at that point you just gotta be like, okay, we screwed up.

[00:20:00] Chris Duffy:
That’s incredible. Okay, so that's like kind of a fun mistake or misunderstanding. I think a thing that people have a lot of concerns about, especially if they haven't traveled very much, is what to do when you're in a situation that might be unsafe. Can you give an example of a time that you've felt unsafe or general, how you handle situations to avoid feeling unsafe when you're traveling?

[00:20:22] Saleem Reshamwala:
There's some things that are, you know, outside of one's control: your gender, your physical strength, like all these kinds of things like play into how one feels safe and in, in what situations one feels safe. So I certainly would never pretend to speak for how everyone should handle different kinds of unsafeness. Well, here's something that's actually changed in how I've traveled. So two things that have changed.

[00:20:40] Chris Duffy:
Sure.

[00:20:41] Saleem Reshamwala:
So, my dad's block in India where he grew up, my cousins are constantly negotiating prices while they're there. And you know, I learned to negotiate prices while I was there. And I think when I was first traveling around India, outside of, of my cousins’ block, you know, I was in that constant negotiation mindset.

And now I look back on some of those times and I feel pretty embarrassed. ‘Cause I think it wasn’t… bordered on unethical, some of the things that I would negotiate for price on kind of regardless whether that was the right or wrong cultural thing to do. Like, you know, if we traveled around in kinda the foothills of the Himalayas, and I remember negotiating the price of, like, a knitted cap, and it was already quite cheap.

And in retrospect, like, that's pretty silly. At that particular point in time, the dollar was very strong. I was in a better economic position, almost definitely, than the person selling me this object. I had fun and felt like a little sense of victory at, like, having successfully negotiated another culture.

But in that particular instance, that's something that, like, I wouldn't do now. Um, it kind of doesn't really matter whether I'm paying a quote-unquote “fair price” for the thing. What matters is that this is, like, not anything significant financially for a traveler most likely in this situation and might be something significant for the other person.

To jump to your question about safety, I will say one thing that's changed, I used to, you know, almost take a kind of silly pride in not hiring tour guides ever. But now for a couple reasons, I'll often hire a tour guide on day one, even if it's just a tour of a museum or whatever, because, you know, people often when they're traveling, they're afraid of asking stupid questions or looking dumb.

A tour guide is basically paid to field all your dumb questions, right? Like so often now, I'll hire a tour guide on day one and ask a lot of dumb questions and ask about, you know, different regions and safety. And that's one way to kind of learn about what might be good travel practices from someone who's, you know, not gonna be annoyed by your questions.

And it's kinda related to like one of my favorite questions to ask, which is just straight-up asking people, “So, what annoys you about travelers here? What do people who travel here do that kind of ticks people off locally?” And so often you'll get answers that are, that are pretty simple things to avoid, but that you might not have foreseen before asking the question.

[00:23:24] Chris Duffy:
I love that. I think that's a really smart way to, to both make sure that you're safe and also to make sure that you are being respectful of the place that you're in. So you are an award-winning music video director. You're someone who is documented hip hop all over the world, and I know that you personally, like, love music. What role does getting into the music from the place that you're traveling to play in your preparation or your appreciation of travel once you're there?

[00:23:54] Saleem Reshamwala:
Yeah. You know, it's great to have some reason to be the fly on the wall, right? I consider myself a guest in hip-hop culture in the US. I didn't grow up deeply embedded in a culture that was, you know, full of hip-hop. Right?

It's something that I, I came to through friends and, you know, so I bring some of that sensibility to covering hip hop internationally as well, you know? And some of the same things that are valuable in documenting a scene that you're not, that’s not a scene that you were, like, culturally raised in are some of the same skills that I think are really useful in travel.

An obvious one is humility: recognizing that the folks around you have deep cultural knowledge of something that you don't inherently have. Coming at things through the music is great though because lots of times you're filming people who are able to connect across cultures. So there might be a hip-hop culture that transcends location, where there are certain ways that rappers might enter a cipher or that B-Boys might step into a battle that are actually culturally common among two totally different groups.

So it's things like music are coming in through an angle like art are really fun ways to be able to get to see a country.

[00:25:10] Chris Duffy:
You’ve also hosted the podcast More Than a Feeling, which is about dealing with emotions. So, I wonder what are some of the main emotions that you associate with traveling? Both positive and negative?

[00:25:21] Saleem Reshamwala:
Yeah. I mean, it's funny now I have kids, so the first word that honestly came to mind was exhaustion.

[00:25:28] Chris Duffy:
Okay. Yeah.

[00:25:30] Saleem Reshamwala:
Because traveling with kids is very different than traveling solo, even though I love traveling with my kids.

[00:25:35] Chris Duffy:
What was your favorite thing about traveling solo, and what's now your favorite thing about traveling with kids?

[00:25:39] Saleem Reshamwala:
My favorite thing about traveling solo is wandering a city at sunset and not knowing what your next two hours are gonna be like. Not knowing who you're gonna see. Just that complete freedom. That's something that's very, I think, tricky to get when you have responsibilities in a place, right? So if you work a gig, it ends at 5:00 PM, you can just wander safely in the streets for two hours, your head goes into another space. It feels amazing.

Traveling with kids, my favorite thing actually has been seeing how different kids are integrated into lives of people around the world compared to the US. At least in the US there's often, like, age segregation, like kids of a certain age hang out with only kids of that certain age. And in other countries, there's just way more ways often to have those kids hanging out with adults. They're not seen necessarily as like separate from adult activity all the time.

[00:26:36] Chris Duffy:
Obviously the identity of father, of a parent is gonna stay the same—

[00:26:41] Saleem Reshamwala:
Uh-huh.

[00:26:41] Chris Duffy:
—when you're traveling with your kids, but are there other ways in which your identity shifts when you travel?

[00:26:46] Saleem Reshamwala:
Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people experience speaking another language and saying things with a kind of freedom that they wouldn't normally have. So like, I feel like when I'm traveling a lot, I'm more likely to, like, strike up conversations with strangers and all those kinds of things. When I'm on the road I'm just especially conversational with folks. It's interesting that there's that kind of tension of travel having that freedom associated with your identity and that's like one of the, one of the coolest things is you could go someplace and be a slightly different person, and then the tension of, like, trying to retain some form of your ethics and your who you are when you're at another place. ‘Cause that could certainly, that could certainly go in another direction that's not great.

You know, one of the things I ask the question in of folks in Easter Island, Rapanui as they call it there: what kind of tourist do you want here? And a few people said something similar to the, to like, “We don't want people who are here just to party. We want people here who respect us and are interested in our culture.”

And so there can be a thing that happens when you get maybe a lack of accountability as you're traveling, and that kind of gets back to being a regular someplace. It's a way to just remind yourself that I'm here in this place. These people are people who will continue to exist after I've gone and will remember things I've done. I think that tension is really interesting when thinking about travel.

[00:28:12] Chris Duffy:
On the show, Far Flung, you are seeking out, quote, “the world's most surprising and imaginative ideas”. Whether on that show or just in other travel experiences you've had, what's one thing that you've discovered that they do differently in another country that you've then adopted in your own life?

[00:28:30] Saleem Reshamwala:
We spent a lot of time talking to producers and reporters at Caracas about a program they have there called El Bus TV, which is just bus television.

[00:28:40] Chris Duffy:
Okay.

[00:28:41] Saleem Reshamwala:
And it is experienced reporters who when their TV channel got shut down, they started carrying a cardboard cutout of a television and going on the bus and just putting their head in the cardboard TV cutout and delivering the news.

So, you know, people would ask questions about the news, which absolutely doesn't happen when you're a TV announcer. People would ask for hyper-local news. So they’d, like, start giving, like, movie listings of places they're driving by. And it got me thinking so much about like, how can we make information presentation more interesting here where I am in Durham, North Carolina?

I actually talked to some folks at the bus stop and was like, how would you feel if we did this? You know, if I like came, and you know, people were like, oh, like I think if you were talking about good things in the community rather than just negative things, like they'd be receptive to it. So I haven't quite figured out how, but I want to figure out how to transport that idea of bus TV into whatever the locally appropriate version of that is for, for North Carolina.

[00:29:44] Chris Duffy:
When people visit North Carolina and your home, what behaviors do you find disruptive and which do you appreciate? Like, what makes someone a good visitor to your home?

[00:29:55] Saleem Reshamwala:
Yeah, I mean, I think just being open-minded about what the South is makes a huge difference. What I love is when folks come through and they're like, “Let's do some southern stuff.”

[00:30:09] Chris Duffy:
Uh-huh.

[00:30:10] Saleem Reshamwala:
Like, that's actually super fun for me. Like, we go to the state fair, we catch a demolition derby, we, you know, eat deep-fried Oreos. We go see some, there actually is, like, banjo music that I can take folks to. There's gonna be some amazing southern gospel happening somewhere near me. But I also like surprising folks and being like, “Cool, we're gonna go to what might be the first Indian Chinese suburb in the south that you've ever been to, and the food's gonna be amazing. Let's drive 30 minutes over there.” You know?

[00:30:43] Chris Duffy:
We've talked a lot about travel, like once you get to a place or even when you're at home. But we haven't really talked that much about selecting a place. One of the big issues that can come is with places that are over touristed and where there's too many visitors and they're over—their popularity is part of their burden, but there's also a reason why they're so popular.

[00:31:04] Saleem Reshamwala:
Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:03] Chris Duffy:
So I know that's a big question, but how can we choose destinations without contributing to ruining them or overrunning them?

[00:31:12] Saleem Reshamwala:
The thing that's gonna trump everything is finding ways to get information about what people from the area want folks to do. If you can find that information firsthand, that's huge. The things I've heard from folks are paying attention to seasonality and noting when the heaviest seasons are, and that you can decrease your impact a bit by not coming during the heaviest seasons to someplace if you really wanna see a place that is heavily traveled.

Others are finding out about some of the specific issues. So in Rapanui, for example, which Easter Island, which is a heavily touristed area, and there's a lot of people trying to figure out, you know, what best to do about the tourism and its effect on that island. One thing that we saw was that they were at, when I first visited, garbage was a huge problem and, and continues to be a huge challenge there, and so just realizing that things that are made on that island, of materials from that island, are not a problem in the garbage dump there.

It's completely things that are brought in for the entertainment of foreigners or for the comfort of foreigners, or often for that are brought in by folks, you know? So just being aware of things like, “Oh, how much trash am I bringing into a place?” All those kind of things are stuff that I think with some research you can find out.

You can also, you can also ask directly. So many, there's so many points of ways that you can ask. If you don't see the information, you can just write a tourist board and ask like, “What can I do to be a better traveler here? What's the best way to have a low impact here?” You know, those are really complex questions. A lot of them are like so many things in life, they're a scale, and you just try to figure out how to do better than you were originally going to do. You know?

[00:33:06] Chris Duffy:
Well, thank you so much for being here. It has been a true pleasure talking to you. It's always so great getting to hear your thoughts. Saleem, thanks for being here.

[00:33:12] Saleem Reshamwala:
Thank you so much for having me.

[00:33:17] Chris Duffy:
That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Saleem Reshamwala. You can find out more about his work online at kidethnic.com. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more for me, including my weekly newsletter and information about my live comedy shows at chrisduffycomedy.com.

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