My Opioid Addiction

https://www.flickr.com/photos/yaroslawd/

Sorry. Don’t know why. But on another device I just googled "Flickr yaroslawd" and my pics popped up

Link to the photos is corrected. @rwinney and @jdiakiw it should work now.

I am very familiar with Stephen. he and his many colleagues were all agreed with the same theory re language learning skills of reading and writing in my schools.

Despite my chronic pain conditions, there is one period of 2weeks to 6 weeks of each year when my pain abates to a minor ailment. Ever since I was a young man when I backpacked from Singapore to Israel overland living in temples and monasteries all the way and my total cost of transportation and accommodation in 9 months of travel was $3.41 . The desert parts through Baluchistan Iran Syria Jordan Lebanon and Israel were remarkable sanctuaries of historic dimensions. I understood why Moses, Mohamed, and Jesus found wisdom there. I vowed then to make solo crossings of all the tropical deserts of the world. Every year in the last 30 years I have made a solo crossing of all the deserts of the world. . . Pain free! The Sahara 3x, the Atacama, the Gobi, the kalahari, Thar, and all the central Asian deserts . My travel motto is eat with locals, sleep with locals( mostly worker lodges or hostels) and travel with locals. However they travel I travel with them. I live daily by my wits only with no reservations, no defined route, usually no fixed destination . I come how when I feel like it were ever I am.
But the curiosity is my pain abates. Certainly my survivor skills are at a peak. The adrenaline is in a permanent high dosage and the sheer joy and pleasure of my experiences releases high levels of oxytocin and I don’t need oxycontin. After I ran out of deserts I began remote continent crossings, just a few years ago from capetown to Cairo overland which I wrote about here:
https://www.thestar.com/life/travel/2011/07/15/im_74_and_i_backpacked_across_africa_alone.html
While I didn’t mention it I was kidnapped and felt NO PAIN. I knew my life was about to end. (If interested google ‘kidnapped by Somali gang diakiw’) Most recently at 83, last fall I went to Kenya to go to the remote Lake Turkana , Chalbi Desert area where life exists with 6 different tribes facing extinction and live dramatic communal lives of intense family relations and community cohesiveness. But for me, No pain. Go figure

@jdiakiw Hi Jerry, I was poking around connect and just found your post here about you travels every year. I am wondering, how did you ever get started doing this? Also, when you first started doing it on such a shoestring and with taking along so few resources , did you have any fears of doing it and how did you manage to overcome them. I am pretty fascinated with this tale of yours. Best to you, Hank

I was going to say that my first backpacking trip from Singapore to beirut in 1962 was my start. (Getting to Singapore from Japan to Vietnam is another great story) But I realize it started long before that. I was always persistent in finding ways to see the world free. I joined the Canadian navy at university, not for patriotic reasons but to ‘ see the world’. For stretches of 4-5 months between school years, I worked on a Norwegian freighter to Africa and worked as an apprentice in the gold mines outside johannesburg at the height of Apartheid managing a crew of 12 zulus a mile deep underground. I worked on another freighter in the South Pacific -Tahiti, Samoa etc before airports there. All for free. My dad called me ‘the Gypsy’ (with apologies to Roma ) as a teen I somehow knew this would all happen. I wrote a story about when I was in grade one my mom packed a lunch for me . I took the street car at the end of my street to the far end of the city and come back the same way. It was the Queen Street car that went from the east end of the city to the far west end through all the ethnic neighbourhoods, one after another -chinatown Italian, Greek/Macedonian Polish ukrainian, Jewish, Roma . When I got to the west end I was too scared to wander off so I sat on a bench at the terminal, ate my lunch. got back on the next streetcar home. I ran down my street, exhilarated. A friend yelled, "hey jer? Where have you been? "
"around the world" I shouted back.