My little brother and I have never been close. While I wanted to learn languages, get out in nature and travel the world to see the way people from different cultures live, he wanted to hang around with his white Australia mates at home and smoke pot.
He’s had a pretty tough life – always in debt, losing most of those old friends to drugs or car accidents and never really finding his calling – but he’d probably tell you it was his own fault.
Then last year, he began travelling. He landed in Bangkok, went to Vietnam and Cambodia and by the time he arrived in China, the Brady I knew seemed to have disappeared. He’d developed a huge respect for the people in every country he visited and saw how the culture defines people – that one way isn’t better than another. If anything, he now believes that westerners are a bunch of whingers.
He came to Bhutan after a month in Mongolia and we travelled together through India for a week or so. At that time, he told me that he’d found his life’s goal. He wanted to break down cultural barriers between the people of the world. Our methods are different – he plans to use comedy – but our goals are the same.
I teased him about now being in MY world, but it’s his world now – probably more than mine. I’ve always had a safety net, arriving in each place I live with a ready income and network of potential friends. He arrives with nothing. And after he left me, he went to Pakistan and then onto Afghanistan. He didn’t like everything he experienced (something of an understatement) but that’s normal when you travel and he always had respect for the people he met and the situation they were in.
He risked all and came out with an even stronger respect for nature, life and the people who make this world. I would love to have gone with him, but the timing was wrong and reading his blog, I’m not sure I would have handled it so well. So I missed the experience, but I didn’t lose entirely for now I have a new hero.