With nothing but a backpack, Samuel Theobald changes his tedious office routine for a five-year-long adventure
He is working behind the bar at the Welldiggers Arms, a pub in Petworth, what seems like the middle of nowhere in West Sussex. He is wearing a shirt and the sleeves are rolled up, revealing a red ink globe tattoo on his left arm. The tattoo is one of the 20 he has, some of them as the result of his adventurous travelling. He walks to work every day from the house that he rents with other staff from the pub, and takes one week to reply to his emails. Never due to internet problems, he just doesn’t do social media.
Samuel Theobald is a 30 something-year-old from the Isle of Man who after qualifying as a financial advisor and three further years of hard work, handed in his notice and booked a flight to Mexico City and three nights in a hostel. Everything after that was “just as it came”. Since then, he has travelled to over 80 countries in America, Europe and Asia; from Nicaragua, Kyrgyzstan, Philippines or Guatemala, in a five-year long trip.
“I got knocked off my paddle board by a seal in the bay at home and after a beer I wanted more memories like that."
The idea of taking the risk and leaving everything behind surprisingly did not come up to his mind over breakfast or watching a documentary. Nothing he does seems to follow the ordinary. “I got knocked off my paddle board by a seal in the bay at home and after a beer I wanted more memories like that. Next day, I handed in my notice and went on an adventure to find them. That is a true story and the seal was bloody massive!”
It was in the desire to go out and test himself where Samuel found the motivation to travel the world. Evading the banal day-to-day routine and a thirsty search for adrenaline were the spurs that impelled him to travel the world. “Getting jumped out on by fully grown puma, four days into the Guatemalan jungle was a test,” he chuckles. Pure adventure.
Samuel started this intrepid journey on his own, although friends joined him for months at a time. Travelling solo has provided him the opportunity to know himself better and explore his own limits. Not depending on a partner, choosing his own destinations and not having someone stopping his insatiable hunt for memories were significant aspects of his boundless trip. Having to discover things yourself forces you to go out and talk to strangers, either local or fellow travellers. Although Samuel agrees on the benefits of relying on the native residents when finding information about the different places he has visited; as a consequence of his experience he feels it is naïve to trust everyone: “It is lovely to travel to all these places and trust the locals, but 80% of the time they are being nice because of the money.”
Having spent a night in jail in El Salvador, it seems like Samuel knows first-hand the importance of maintaining a cautious approach towards the locals. He and his friend entered a bar in the Central American country for a couple of beers and ended up playing pool with a group of residents. The tension of the atmosphere increased when money got introduced and Samuel and his friend won the last round. Samuel insisted not to accept their money but both left the bar thinking “it was fine”. Minutes later the locals were following them and the police had to be called. Samuel and his friend had to spend a night in jail in El Salvador, by far the most dangerous country according to his experience. “It was cold. We were kept separately but they love foreigners so we just spent the night talking to the guards. It was a “‘give us $20 and you’ll get out here’ kind of thing.”
His open-minded attitude and his ambition to learn the unknown have helped him understand the different cultures he’s discovered when travelling to so many peculiar countries. After spending such a long time travelling across the Southern American continent he has learnt Spanish, but he always tries to learn the basics like ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ in every language of every country he goes to; which reveals his driving passion to explore not only the tangible features of each country but the intellectual side of their cultures.
"Samuel had time to fall in love every 12 seconds with Argentinian women, meet the President of Panama, eat dog in Vietnam or be arrested by the army in Venezuela."
During this five-year long trip Samuel had time to fall in love every 12 seconds with Argentinian women, meet the President of Panama, eat dog in Vietnam or be arrested by the army in Venezuela when exiting the country. The experiences and hazardous undertakings he lived, and the different choices he made during his travelling have made Samuel the person he is today; feeling less mature and “not taking myself as serious as I did when I started”, he explains.
Although it could be argued that his story could serve as inspiration for others, that was never the reason why he decided to embark on this adventure. He encourages people to follow his steps after asking themselves some crucial questions: “Why do you want to travel? Is it to make your Instagram look good, to make other people jealous? Or is it because you want to go? Do you want to go on an adventure?” This also explains why he did a ‘digital detox’ during his travelling and he never shared a picture on social media. “I can’t wait to every 5 or 10 years, get them printed into a nice book, and look through them and get the memories back again. That’s what the pictures are for. It’s my memory, I’ll see it and I’ll remember certain things; it wouldn’t mean the same for anyone else.”
For Samuel, there is always something left to do or a country left to visit. He is currently looking to buy a yacht to sail along the Mediterranean Sea, but that is only one of the many more adventures left on his bucket list. It might be his fearless, womanising and reckless personality makes me wonder if I just met the Ulysses of the modern times.
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