Ambition

It took me a long time to come up with a title for my new story, but I think that the worth ambition covers for most of this story. Although this worth often seems unknown in big parts of Latin America and some things never seem to change. For example, people hike up the Mandango mountain again and I am still tour guiding and arguing with the local agencies.

As a little boy I wanted to build my own sailing boat and sail around the world.
When I went to high school I thought of having my own company, but when I started to work in two different companies, building boats and sailing yachts, I learned that having your own company means less free time to do the other things I like. During college and further on I also learned that having your own company comes with a lot of responsibility, responsibility that can take the fun away of what you are doing. I am very dedicated towards what I am doing and sometimes have to be careful that it doesn’t consume all of my time/ energy. I am also not always secure enough to make important decision and for these things together I decided that I wanted to become a manager. I enjoy planning and arranging things and I’m not afraid to tell ‘the boss’ how things could be improved. I believe in my ideas and suggestions, but in the end the decision and responsibility is with ‘my boss’. I close the door and go home, he can’t always do that.

Now, after 8 years of travelling, volunteering and tour guiding my opinion about being a ‘boss’ still hasn’t changed much. So why did I decide to start my own travel agency? Good question and believe it or not, but even 15 min. ago when I started writing this story I didn’t plan to use this word to answer my own question, ambition. Up till now I said that I needed a new challenge, but maybe ambition is a better word? I never really thought of myself as an ambitious person. I like challenges, but also enjoy the small things like a good coffee, a campfire, a sunset and/or good company. But maybe it is my ambition that often gets me in trouble with my ‘bosses’?

Al right, what has my ambition brought me the last weeks. I sadly had to leave my job as bartender, where I learned new skills and met many nice and interesting people.
I still like being around people, but I have to admit that I sometimes lose my interest in getting to know many people, because I will probably never see them again. I find this a bit sad :-( In a contradiction, some people I thought I really liked, I wanted to get to know quicker, before having to say goodbye again. This with the risk of getting hurt even more, not very logic…

About my agency: In the last weeks we had to change the bookings system of my website www.fairtravel4u.org again, because the previous one couldn’t sell tours by date. The new one is still not perfect, but better for selling tours and also works with dates. However this program now ONLY works with set departure dates, so theoretically for each tour with a flexible departure date, I have to fill-in 365 departure dates for each year… I have some kind of workable solution for that, but it is still a lot of work and I can’t even do most of it, because I am waiting for the prices corresponding with the tour dates… It is a bit frustrating. I know most prices of this year now, but for my website I already need the prices for next year and the predictions are that they will rise, so I can’t really gamble with using the prices from this year. Without the prices I can’t publish the tour and without most of my tours ready for sale, I don’t want to fully start promoting my website. I believe that if I can convince people to look at least ones at my site, there must be something worth to see for them, so they would come back. Without promoting, Fairtravel4u will stay unknown, for now…

Other scary moments and challenges from the last weeks were:

I got an annoying virus on my laptop, one which didn’t allow me to make any back-ups and made my computer slow. This is a little bit scary when I use my computer almost every day to work on my website and travel agency. The virus is blocked now, but I can’t get it out of the system unless I format the hard disk, something I don’t dare yet until someone can help me with this and I find ‘new’ copies of the programs that I have on my laptop (I don’t have the DVD’s). At least everything works now, so for the moment I don’t have to worry.
Something I do worry a bit about is the health of one of my fist two customers. A few weeks ago I received news that one of them had to go to hospital and maybe wouldn’t be able to do her tour to Ecuador and the Galapagos. She and her husband would then cancel the tour because of health conditions and I would feel obligated to try to get some of the money back by cancelling hotel nights and flights. The Galapagos tour is non-refundable.
Some say that her insurance should pay for everything, but if they don’t I see it as part of the service of a travel agency, my travel agency, to pay her back everything that is not spend yet and that is refundable. We still have more than a week to go before she actually leaves, so let’s hope, for everybody, that she stays healthy.

A few days ago my laptop suddenly stopped working and I couldn’t get it to work anymore. It luckily turned out that it was only the electricity cable and adapter. But again it is a scary thought that if my laptop stops I will have a difficult time to continue working on Fairtravel4u…

Just before my laptop stopped I also got a warning mail from a Peruvian bank, that there might have been some suspicious transactions so they closed my access to their TAM’s. Unfortunately I can’t check this for the next two weeks, because we travel in Chile and Bolivia… I send an e-mail to my own bank, but while typing this I’m in the beautiful Bolivian desert. We are at 4200m altitude, the group went to sleep early, it is cold and there are countless bright stars in the sky, but of course, luckily, no internet, so I will send this e-mail from the next city.

The good thing about all these delays and set-backs in starting up my travel agency is that I’m kind of forced to come up with new and more original plans. One of them was to make publicity posters and hang them around in the countries I visit now with tour guiding. I first asked a printing/ design company, but can’t afford their price. Now my mother helps me with the design and I print them for 1 US$ each. I figure that if these posters help me to sell just one tour, then it was already worth it.

The second idea I got was a double one and kind of born from a necessity. I start to realize more and more that it is very difficult for an un-known travel agency, especially with the competition in Holland, to find enough customers and fill a group. So with the new booking system I also changed the focus of my agency towards selling tours for two. Simultaneously with this idea I thought of trying to sell more original tours. The problem with this is usually that most people (not all) still want to see all the highlights of a country for an economical price. This makes it very difficult to be original and competitive, unless… Unless I try to sell a type of tours were quality is for sure more important than costs. Honeymoons are tours like that and even if the economical situation isn’t very strong, people still get married and want to go on a honeymoon. Even better, the honeymoons I sell are adventures, very original and very competitive in price   I have two ready for sale at the moment, but am working on others and of course people can also ask me to design one for them.

With all these ups and downs and delays, I do have to admit there are moments/ days that I feel mentally tired and lazy from spending too much time behind my laptop and not really getting anywhere, yet. At Izhcayluma I spend most of this time hanging out with good company  and/or go hiking/ running. Now with the tour guiding I hang out with the group, which are nice people (luckily I was wrong with my prediction!) or watch a movie. After I sometimes feel guilty that I didn’t use this time to work on my agency, but I guess we all need to charge our batteries ones in a while.
The most important thing is that I now slowly start to believe that I might actually be able to make this thing work. I still miss some ambition, compare to friends of my and am not sure if I’m capable of being and staying ‘a boss’, but at least I’m stubborn and time will learn.

It is strange, in my last weeks at Hostel Izhcayluma and during my first weeks of guiding this new group I came across several people to whom ambition mend different things. Some people left job and country to travel and think and find new goals in life.

Some people had great ideas to try to improve the world: http://www.ae911truth.org They want to improve the world by connecting as many smart people as possible and have them together thinking about real (and not economical) solutions to improve the world. Something I find worth to mention, because there are so many people who complain about how thing are going, but only few who actually want to do something.

I also heard from a friend who had planned his dream for seven years and then felt he had to stop before he could actually start living it. Was this a smart, grown up and responsible decision, or fear for the unknown? I’m almost sure he is asking himself the same question, I’m sure I would and it would be killing me.
Another friend of my decided to give up a very good function in a job he liked, to live at the other side of the world. All for a new challenge and to allow his girlfriend a new opportunity in her career. I find this very brave, but do have to say that it would have been more difficult if they would have had a child, like my first friend…

Two other ambitious people had managed to build up their dream, but while living it, it sometimes felt like a nightmare to them. Waking up and having to force yourself to put a smile on your face before you see anyone else is not a healthy situation.
I find this strange and sad and wonder how this could happen? Why are they not happy in their own created ‘paradise’? Is it ‘the boss thing’, the responsibility? That’s a scary thought… But maybe it is also ambition, or a combination. Maybe they are not always able to see and enjoy what they have actually accompliced. Maybe they should be able to let go of the parts that work well and they don’t like doing? Find some people they trust and delegate those parts of the job, so they can focus on new things that they are good at and enjoy doing?
I don’t know, but while trying to start my own travel agency, it is good to know also some people who did this before and still continue enjoying their challenge.

For now I’m in no position to judge anyone, only to watch, suggest and learn and wonder what I’m going to do after the 12th of November…

Saludos from Bolivia, where roadblocks from angry mineworkers might be a problem to pass…

Martijn