Around the World in 80 Days: Part 1

Travelling

Preface to the Series

It has been more than a decade since I first read Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. Since then, I have made steady progress toward realizing the goal of traveling around the world — perhaps not in 80 days, and across multiple segments rather than a single journey. Travel is a celebration of humanity’s achievements in global exploration, much as Verne’s novel highlighted how 19th-century technological innovations marked the dawn of global tourism, transforming journeys once reserved for the most heroic adventurers into experiences accessible to all.

Thanks in part to my family’s love of travel and my own curiosity to explore the new and unfamiliar, traveling has long been a deep passion of mine. Here, I want to take a moment to reflect on a few ideas surrounding travel.

I plan to break this reflection into three or four parts, published at intervals of at least one year and drawing inspiration from the places I visit along the way. This series is not intended as a travel journal; rather, it explores the idea of travel, grounded in its events. This first part begins with a foundational question: Why do I travel?

To accompany this series, I have compiled an interactive map of the places I have visited at maps.jetchiang.com, which is now live and will be continuously updated in the coming weeks.

Experiences

Camus wrote in the Myth of Sisyphus that:

[…] if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.

Camus argues that maximizing experiences means living with the greatest possible consciousness, freedom, and passion rather than seeking a higher purpose or a longer life. Because he believes life has no transcendent meaning, the goal is to pack life with as much intense, awake experience as humanly possible. His absurd hero is one who lives as vividly and passionate as possible in the present moment, without hiding behind false hopes, comfort, or religious promises, as an active rebel against the silence of a meaningless universe.

This is the first major benefit of travel: it enriches your life with a wide array of experiences, often those you cannot try at home or might otherwise hesitate to pursue. Travel provides not only the opportunity but also the motivation to step beyond routine existence and pursue extraordinary moments, from flying a glider in the mountains of New Zealand and skiing for the first time in Japan, to scuba diving in the beautiful reefs of the Maldives, and most recently, completing my first multi-day hike along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain (which deserves a blog on its own!). Some of these have even evolved into everyday passions, like skiing after my move to Canada.

Growing up with wide-ranging academic and intellectual interests, I spent years exploring fields from the humanities to engineering, earning notable recognitions along the way. Travel, however, expanded my pursuits into a new dimension, from backpacking and water sports to discovering ancient cultures and history, pulling me away from pages and screens into a dynamic, interconnected world.

Beyond specific activities, the act of travel itself — venturing into a country where you may not speak the language, understand the local customs, or know a single person—presents a profound challenge. Even in an era of democratized information and seamless convenience, navigating a foreign country for more than a few days is rarely effortless. Much like Fogg and his companions in Around the World in 80 Days, every traveler encounters unexpected detours and disruptions, even if mine were far less dramatic (I was spared from ambushes from the native people!). Ultimately, travel is about following where life leads, embracing uncertainty, and staying present. To travel is to expect the unexpected and to face it with audacity. What one experiences along the way is not merely a series of events, but a deeper understanding of how different cultures and societies function.

By taking on this challenge, one accomplishes precisely what Camus advocated: maximizing experience. It is also a personal inquiry, a test of how you respond to unfamiliar circumstances far outside the structured routine of a 9-to-5 life.

The Human Heritage

Travel has been a true blessing for me, offering opportunities to engage directly with literature, philosophy, art, and above all, history. There is immense value in connecting with these pillars of our shared human heritage, for they define much of what makes us human. Individuals, cultures, societies, and nations are all shaped by this legacy. To address the fundamental question of who we are, we must return to our roots and confront what came before us: temporally through history, intellectually through literature and philosophy, and aesthetically through art.

This past summer, I visited historical sites where the stories I once studied in European history courses came vividly to life. Having spent most of my life in metropolises like Hong Kong, exploring Europe allowed me to appreciate what it means for a city to endure thousands of years and evolve alongside its inhabitants. We study history not only to remember and learn from the past, but also to be inspired by human achievement—to witness how we grew from scattered tribes into creators of monumental civilizations. Standing before artifacts in the British Museum that spanned thousands of years, from ancient Greece and Egypt to China and India, I realized that seeing historical treasures in person does more than impart knowledge: it allows us to feel the weight and grandeur of time.

Beyond history, unique cultures are defined by literature and philosophy, which tell stories and debate ideas. Travel allows us to walk the very places where philosophers, authors, poets, and artists once lived and created. In Edinburgh, I trod the same paths David Hume walked nearly three centuries ago during the Enlightenment as he drafted A Treatise of Human Nature. Wandering the old streets of Toledo, I saw firsthand the landscape that shaped the world of Don Quixote, one of the most celebrated works in European literature. It is difficult to fully grasp a literary world without experiencing the atmosphere, architecture, and physical heritage of the era. I felt a similar resonance watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, knowing that on those same grounds in the 17th century, groundlings like me watched these plays make their debut before becoming cornerstone elements of English heritage.

One might ask: what is the point of traveling halfway across the world to see things that can easily be viewed online or summarized in depth by AI? Here, a vital distinction must be made between learning and experiencing. Beyond formal experiential learning, transforming abstract, static knowledge into a living reality before your eyes is what truly inspires and elevates understanding. Exploration reflects the fundamental way humans learn — through direct experience and trial and error — offering a depth of insight that text on a page cannot capture and an AI summary can never replace.

Travel has taught me to respect the passage of time, admire human intellectual achievements, and appreciate the aesthetic heritage passed down to us. Ultimately, travel is one of the most powerful ways to reflect on what it means to be human: by connecting with the external expressions of our shared identity, we are inspired to examine the internal life within ourselves.

Perspectives

While walking the Camino with a friend, we met people from all walks of life — professors, teachers, freelancers, and many others. In the towns along our route, we connected with warm, welcoming locals. One evening in Melide, where the Camino Primitivo joins the Camino Francés, we joined townspeople celebrating a local saint’s feast day. As I watched them sing and dance to traditional Celtic music, it struck me that while “tech bros” in SF and beyond spend their days posting on X about Claude Mythos, promoting their vibe-coded app, or how they automated XYZ with OpenClaw, millions of people live rich, joyful lives completely unbothered by the anxieties that dominate our industry’s mindshare.

Socrates once warned us to “beware of the barrenness of a busy life.” When people remain trapped in repetitive daily routines for too long, their minds stagnate within narrow boundaries, gradually losing the passion we ought to nurture. In doing so, one risks losing the capacity for curiosity, creativity, and deep emotion, the very qualities that define our “humanity”.

Travel offers space and perspective away from daily concerns, transporting you, physically, to environments where habitual worries dissolve. It reveals that many of our daily stressors are insignificant and that the world is far larger than our narrow fixations. In the sectors like tech and AI, it is easy to become hyper-focused on immediate work — to the point where people risk behaving like machines consumed entirely by AI B2B SaaS metrics and LLMs. Stepping away restores creativity and provides clarity on whether our current path aligns with our deeper aspirations.

I am often drawn to Spinoza’s concept of sub specie aeternitatis, which translates to “under the aspect of eternity.” Spinoza introduced this phrase in Ethics to describe a viewpoint that evaluates truth universally, free from temporal and transient circumstances. Expanding on his idea, I view it as a symbol of humanity’s capacity for expansive thought, the ability to look beyond individual or collective boundaries. It means transcending trivial daily concerns and recognizing their smallness when viewed from afar, much like observing Earth through a telescope from the moon.

Standing at Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point of continental Europe, I stared west across endless ocean waters, the same waters where explorers in the Age of Discovery set sail into the unknown toward the land I inhabit today. In that moment, travel granted me a tangible taste of Spinoza’s eternal perspective.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche proposes this intriguing thought experiment:

“What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh… must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would gain possession of you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

When I first encountered Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence in Beyond Good and Evil and later in greater depth when reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it struck me with profound force: How can I live so vehemently that I would welcome repeating this life infinitely? (Spoiler: this will be the central theme of a coming essay!)

I travel to enrich my life with episodes so vivid and meaningful that I can answer Nietzsche’s demon with passion, so that I may wholeheartedly say “Yes” to life.

(To be continued in Part 2…)