Life Hacks from a Travel-Hacking Doctor, Part 2

This post is continued from Part 1 of my interview with Calvin Sun.

What happened after your epic trip to Egypt? After you thought you were going to die for the entire month?

When I came back I really wanted to keep traveling and see if I could fit it in with med school. I spent 3 months coming up for the idea for Monsoon Diaries and planning trips. But no one wanted to come with me. People just said my itineraries were too crazy, too fast, and no one had the money. 

The first step is always the hardest when it comes to planning anything. What were the actual steps you took?

I literally just opened up an Excel sheet, Google maps, Wiki Travel, and started mapping all the capitals of the cities that sounded interesting. Then I tried to see where I could do detours to whatever looked cool on Wiki Travel. If someone said you needed four days to tour a certain city, I would cut it down to two because I didn’t have time.

This was another down-to-the-wire panic attack we had on a Monsoon Diaries trip. We’d just caught the bus last minute to Lviv in Western Ukraine.

What was your first big trip as the Monsoon Diaries?

It was still just a blog at this point. But After the first year of med school, we had two months off. Most people used this time to beef up their applications for residency. I decided to forgo that and travel, even though everyone said it was a bad idea. I started out in the Middle East, in Turkey. Then we made our way to Asia, through India, and finally ended in North Korea. Only one friend went with me. 

How’d you end up in North Korea?

At that point, I had already traveled a bit, and my friends would joke and ask how I could top the previous country. So I took it as a challenge. I said: I won’t add North Korea as an item on my bucket list, as something to do before I die. I’ll plan that trip and go before the month is up.

So there I met Gareth, who was the owner of Young Pioneer Tours, the travel group that got me into North Korea. He and I bonded out of all his customers, and afterwards he asked if I wanted to work on something with him because of my blog.

The Monsoon Diaries trip to North Korea was the one that got us on the map. There, I met Gareth who I ended up partnering with to plan trips to all of  the countries in the Axis of Evil.

An eerily abandoned building in North Korea.

Awesome. So what did you guys endup doing?

His specialty is getting access to hard-to-access places. So I looked at the Axis of Evil and the top ten most dangerous countries to travel to. He did all the set-up work of getting us there. I was in charge of getting people to go. The challenge was to try to sell a country like Iran to college kids from squeaky clean backgrounds.

Bringing the Monsoon Diaries to the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, Ukraine.

The Pripyat Ferris Wheel in Chernobyl

Were you making money at this point?

No, I just wanted to show people cool things, even if I had to pay for stuff out of my own pocket. It’s the ENFJ in me. This was before I had a doctor’s salary so I didn’t know why I was being so generous. But I guess it was but these people were wiling to trust me. So I saw this as an investment. It was an honor to take on that responsibility. 

Alcohol is banned in Iran. So we went ahead (thanks to friends and connections some people in our group made) and tried to see how far we could go.

They didn’t want Americans wandering around alone in their country. So we tried to see what would happen in Shiraz, Iran. It didn’t last very long: we got taken in “for our own safety” and were escorted back to our hotel.

What did you do on these trips?

I travelled as if I was on my own. I did all the work other people didn’t want to do. I love booking flights, planning itineraries, all the stuff that people hate. But up until that point, I’d never handled a group before. It was like someone throwing his first party. There was lots of drama, and I thought everyone was going kill me. But after it ended, I realized I had a lot of fun and it was something I wanted to keep doing. 

Tune in tomorrow for the last and final installment of my interview with Calvin Sun, Part 3. 

// <![CDATA[ (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-57358702-1', 'auto'); ga('send', 'pageview'); // ]]>