Kevin McNally

I am a world traveler.
For the past 24 years, I have traveled to and camped in 124 countries
on all seven continents and have been around the world seven times.
My name is Kevin McNally and just inside my left armpit is a tattoo.

It reads: Kevin M. McNally 3.6.60 USA

I got it after experiencing an earthquake in Peru in 2008 and watching people
rummaging around the debris and the dead bodies. Some were looking for loved ones,
others were looking for loot. Watching the tragic circus, I came to a conclusion:
coming home in a body bag would be hell for my family, but not coming home at all
would be even worse. I have a big, loving family, and they would spend the rest of
their lives looking for me. So the week after the quake, I got that tattoo in the
mountain town of Cusco.

In 1969, when I was 9 years old, it was all about the bicycle.
I had not a clue about LSD, birth control, or the free-love explosion
in San Francisco or how they were to shape our world, but I did know about
movement. The fifth of seven children, I was turned on to the British invasion
by my older brothers and sisters, and the music made a tremendous impact on me.
What an awesome time to be young! I was heading down to the golf course
with a friend on my homemade Easy Rider chopper bicycle. We were going to look for
balls to sell back to golfers. It was then that I met my first hitchhiking hippies:
a scruffy guy and a beautiful girl with flowers in her hair on the side of the road,
waiting for their next ride to who knows where, maybe Woodstock.

At age 10, I hitched for the first time with my 14-year-old cousin John.
My taste for the international came when I went to a bohemian boarding school in
New Hampshire's White Mountains. This is where I learned to rock climb.
I was 16 and in awe of the landscape and the international students I met there.
Rob was my best friend, and we decided to bike tour through Europe after graduation...

One time I was trying to get drunk in a fly-infested market town in
southern Ethiopia. The Hamar people were amazing, and if dressed at all,
were wearing shorts or loincloths. Very few had money. I was sitting in the
shade drinking a young corn beer in a dried-gourd cup when a big warrior came up and
demanded that I buy him a beer. He was 6'3" with rippling muscles, car tire sandals,
and no clothing. I stood up to change my view and told him, with help from a translator,
that I would buy him all the beer he wanted if he gave me his spear.

To my amazement, he agreed, and so did six of his friends. By sunset, my new friends
and I had drunk a bathtub worth of weak beer and I had an authentic Ethiopian Hamar
spear collection.

At first they were offended when I snapped the shaft to slide their metal spearhead
into my pack, but after the third or fourth time, they began to cheer.
To this day, I proudly display this drunken spear collection.

My best story about chiefs, as featured in a BBC interview:
There is no road, only a path, between Panama and Colombia - the Darien Gap.
I walked the 180 miles of the Darien Gap in 18 days.
Starting at the Balsas River, I chartered a ride in a massive,
old-growth dugout canoe. The captain and I collected plantains and
dropped off basic supplies. It was here that I met my first Choco Indians.
They were very welcoming and thankful for the salt, sugar, and oil that we provided.

I walked another 15 miles to the next unspoiled Choco village, deeper into
the Darien Gap. The people I encountered there were tiny. The men had bowl cuts
and wore loincloths. The women were bare breasted. The children seemed to have
a lot of time to swim and play and wore jaguar and panther teeth around their necks
for protection as they gathered firewood.

The Choco were cautious yet friendly toward me. This tribe had seen its share
of refugees, drug smugglers, and outlaws, but few adventure travelers had made it
this deep into the Darien.
I slept with the chief's clan in a round house that was 16 feet off the ground.
The 10 people in his clan cooked and prepared food as we pulled up the ladder for
the night's protection from big cats. I'm not sure what they loved more,
the hummus I shared or the Velcro on my Tevas. The Choco did not speak any Spanish,
so our communication was nonverbal.

The next day, at the crack of dawn, I went hunting with the chief's nephew.
He had a very old, rusty .22 rifle. I was dressed like him in my new loincloth,
which I had bartered for two PowerBars the night before. I was a sight - a white guy
wearing a loincloth and sandals and nothing else. I was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes,
and all I could think of was malaria.

We were hunting for howler monkeys. It is not difficult to find them because
they howl and don't move. A 40-pound male dropped like a stone out of a tree
upon being shot. The nephew gutted it right there in the jungle and
cut the tail off - putting it around his neck and laughing. We built a bonfire
and threw the monkey on it - head, hair, and all. The smell of burning hair was disgusting.

We walked a little farther and found wild plantains. A few hours later,
with the cooked monkey and plantains on a pole, we shouldered the heavy load
and made the two-hour trek back to the village. My friend was small, but he was strong.

The tribe gathered in excitement. They laughed at my hairy legs, which were covered with
mosquito bites, and the women were concerned about the welt that the pole had left
on my shoulder. Mothers will always be mothers. They cooked the plantains in oil.
As the honored guest, I was the first to eat: I shook the monkey's hand and
twisted the forearm off at the elbow and started gnawing on it. It was disgusting
in a crazy, cannibalistic way, but I murmured approval with a big smile on my face.
The the men selected their pieces, and then the women and children tore into it.
The feast was on. The burnt skin stuck in everyone's teeth and was a sight
that I will never forget. It was an incredible meal in the best setting,
with fried plantains and a swim with the kids for dessert.

The next day, the chief's nephew walked south with me for about an hour.
With a touch on each other's shoulders, we left the best of friends.
I never dreamed that anyone could live as simply as the Choco in the Darien.

Ten minutes into my first bus ride from the airport to Bombay,
I saw my first plastic slum. This city was constructed entirely of sticks,
bricks, plastic, and tin. In one of the doorways, I saw a beautiful woman,
dressed in a red sari and adorned in massive quantities of gold.
She was a princess in an unlikely setting. Afterward, I learned that she was
wearing her dowry to keep it safe in such slum neighborhoods where doors don't lock.

Further into this smoky, black slum was an old man dressed in brilliant white.
He was wearing traditional pajama pants and a massive turban with big gold earrings,
squatting down for his morning dump. Next to him, on a smaller pile, was a young boy
dressed exactly the same. The older man looked up at the passing airport shuttle,
and with a big wave and an even bigger smile, he shouted,

“Welcome to India!”

It was in India where I realized there was so much more to the world
outside the safety zone I knew.