About

Aloha!

My name is Earl.

Actually, my full name is Derek Earl Baron, but people call me Earl more often than not.

My Life of Wandering

On December 25th, 1999, I left the USA for a three-month, post-graduation trip to Southeast Asia. It’s now been over ten years and that trip has yet to finish.

The adventure has involved 67 countries on 6 continents, work as a Tour Manager on board cruise ships, two years in India, experiments with meditation, muse-creation, mountain-climbing and movie acting, volunteer work, an inappropriate amount of time on tropical islands and eating inappropriate amounts of street food, a two-day kidnapping, being placed on the US ‘terror watch list’, teaching English in Asia and a fruitless search for a pair of sandals with sufficient arch-support for my flat feet, among others.

It was exactly three days into my first trip, as I celebrated the millennium at Angkor Wat, when I became inflicted with an untreatable addiction to world exploration. So addicted in fact, that the thought of returning home literally made me sick to my stomach. So, without any other option, I embarked on a mission to transform myself into a global nomad, a superhero-type creature able to bounce around from country to country, earn a living through unconventional means and wear a sarong as often as possible.

The only problem was that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

Therefore, as any good problem-solver would have done, I ignored this one fact and worked on creating a solution anyway. Miraculously, and perhaps with the help of some determination and refusal to accept anything less than the achievement of my goals, I became the superhero I envisioned. (To myself only, but, hey, isn’t that all that matters?)

What Keeps Me Going?

In a word – FREEDOM. Knowing that I could pack all of my possessions into my one backpack and hop on a flight to anywhere in the world on any given day is a freedom that I don’t want to give up. It is the most exhilarating feeling known to man, at least to this man.

Join Me On My Global Adventures!

• Stay updated by subscribing to the RSS Feed or by receiving updates via email.

• Follow @wanderingearl on Twitter.

• Join the Wandering Earl Fan Page on Facebook.

• Email me at EARL @ WANDERINGEARL . COM – I would honestly love to hear from you and I respond personally to every email, every time. Connecting with readers and other bloggers is first and foremost what this website is all about.

• Comment on the posts you read – Help foster a more rewarding experience by sharing whatever is on your mind with the Wandering Earl community.

Why You Should Follow WanderingEarl.com

WanderingEarl.com came into existence in late 2009 as I started to organize my nomadic life (yes, I see the irony in that!) in pursuit of more structured streams of income, a determined effort to achieve some new goals and a mission to transform myself into a new breed of global explorer. Not only did I want to share my progress, observations and lessons learned, but I also wanted to connect with other like-minded folks.

I’m as addicted to travel as one can be because I feel that open-minded global exploration is a catalyst for improving lives, not only my life, but the lives of our the entire world community. If my travels can help make this world a little more livable, then I’m all up for continuing my wanderings!

I don’t claim to have any answers. To be honest, most of the time I don’t even know what the questions are, and truthfully, I don’t worry too much about that. What I’m able to do is tell you where to find a heavenly mango lassi (topped with raisins and cherries!) in Calcutta and perhaps, inspire you to take action and create a life of travel that makes your heart sing, every single day and at a volume you never imagined possible.

Towards the beginning of my journey, people were quick to tell me that I was wasting my life by refusing to ‘settle down’. Yet over the years, all of those dissenting voices have become silent. I now receive a good chunk of my motivation from the fact that many of these original naysayers have broken free from the conventional life themselves and joined me as fellow global citizens.

Will you join us as well? The world would certainly be a much better place if you did.