Look how cool we are

Initially, we just wanted to give our families and friends a way to keep up-to-date with our trip. This basically means:

1. Confirming that we’re alive;
2. Confirming that we’re still married and haven’t thrown each other off a cliff (see #1);
3. Pretending that we’re having an amazing time–even if we’re sick, tired, grumpy, and lost–just to falsely incite jealousy.

Trying to be useful

As we started developing this blog, we identified a secondary purpose. Since we started traveling independently as adults, we’ve noticed that our trusty guidebooks have grown to provide specific advice to the following population groups:

• Women travelers;
• LGBT travelers;
• Travelers with disabilities;
• Elderly travelers;
• Travelers with families;
• Travelers with pets;
• Travelers with particular allergies;
• Hairy travelers (might have made this up).

You get the idea. We’re not dismissing the challenges encountered by poodle owners or the pollen averse, but there’s a population group larger than every one on the above list that is conspicuously missing from the list–travelers who are not white. The reason, we think, is pretty simple; traveling requires resources, like time, money, and favorable passports. People with these types of resources tend to be from wealthier countries, and those countries tend to have a deficit of melanin. I mean, just look at this Google image search for “lonely planet authors.”

These authors can tell us how to take a taxi from point A to point B, but we bet they’ve never worried about where to buy lactase while traveling. Richard needs to know this because he’s deathly afraid of gassing up an entire bus after not being able to refuse some village’s famous goat cheese. Or, as Richard calls it, fart cake. After all, “I am not a jerk, just a lactose intolerant weakling” is not a staple in phrasebooks.

With the number of wealthy countries increasing, and the number of brown people in already-wealthy countries also increasing, more and more travelers need to know where to buy lactase, damnit!  Hopefully, our experiences can help contribute to the overall conversation about how brown people can travel safely and have a good time. Just remember that these are our experiences. This blog is not intended to be a comprehensive travel guide, and we’re certainly not representative of all brown travelers (in fact, we aren’t even that brown–Cindy is somewhere between beige and khaki, and Richard has a delicious butterscotch skin tone)

Posting

Cindy is responsible for translating this entire blog into Spanish. Richard will be responsible for most of the original English content so time-staring-at-screen is divided evenly. If Richard is working, or Cindy has something to say that Richard isn’t saying (doubtful, since Richard is awesome and is currently writing this section), she’ll write something of her own. This means that, when English content becomes available, it will not be immediately available in Spanish until Cindy finishes the translation.

Speaking of content, Cindy and Richard will be blogging every day but not posting every day. Depending upon their activities, schedules, and internet availability, they will post in batches, uploading several days of content at once. These will be labeled (day 1, day 2, etc.) and also identified by the date when their events occurred, even though they will be posted to the blog all at once.